Morning. It is about 5:45 am here and i am sitting in the Hotel Lobby on the internet. The 3 porters are asleep behind me on the big squashy chairs. These guys are amazing, they work most of the night looking after us and keeping us safe. I do wonder if and when they go home, or do they live here and always sleep on the couches. Big day yesterday as you have probably already read from Shane. So i will rabbit on about other things. We tried lots of diffrent thin...

OK, so the map says (and the official Communist position is) that it's Ho Chi Minh City, but just about everyone here says its still Saigon, so when in Rome.... Todays main plan was to take part in an all-day trip by bus to the Cu Chi tunnels and the Cao Dai temple, about 2-3 hours away. The temple is a max of 105km from the city, but a maximum speed outside towns of 70 km/hr and inside of 40 km/hr makes it a bit of a trek. Actually it would be ridiculous to h...

Well we made it into Vietnam last night at about 8:40pm local time, which is of course 3 hours earlier than home. Thus by the time we got to the hotel and got everything sorted out it was 10pm local, meaning we were getting pretty tired. The three hour stopover in Brunei was less than enthralling, but flying in over the mountains made me want to go to Borneo one day for a look. Beautiful reefs just to the East disappear as you come into the mud plume that emmana...

Well we are getting pretty close to starting our overseas family holiday through parts of south-east Asia, since we fly out in just under a week. We will be gone for one month. Just about everything that we have decided to have pre-booked is finalised - we are making a few changes to our hotel bookings for southern Thailand. While not absolutely necessary these changes have come about because Georgie has to return to Australia earlier than the rest of us to take...