Tuesday, August 16, 2005

Back from Vacation :(

So I'm back at work in the US again after my holidays. :( It's really tough to be back to the 'real' world and not traveling. It's also hard to collect all your thoughts after such an amazing holiday. So hard, I'm not even going to go into the stories yet ;) I'm attempting to use this blog to try and document the trip in some way for myself and Mel, in addition to photos and her journal. Someone else may also find some interesting things in it if they where planning a similar trip)


Over the next few days I'm probably going to add little sections about all the places we where. So far I posted up until Sapa. From there we went to Halong Bay, Hoi An, My Son, Mui Ni Beach, Ho Chi Min City, Cu Chi, Phnom Penh and then Samui. All of the places where amazing and a few stage 5 nights were had. (I rate nights out in crazyness from 1 to 5) Some I will talk about – others will remain secret :)



When we were in Sapa (North West Vietnam, along the Chinese/Laos border) we went trekking for 3 days. Mi (standing next to Mel) was our guide. She actually belongs to one of the Minority Hill Tribes (Red Dzao). She isn't wearing the traditional dress like everyone else in the region because "It's too warm".
There was weird sand dunes beside Mui Ni Beach. This is my current desktop background :)
This was the view from the sea of Mel in front of one of the beach huts that we were staying in on Samui. It cost 250 Baht a night (about 5e) and was simply amazing!

This is the view out from the hut. Unfortunately, I am in the way...

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

How much did your holiday cost you?

Ryan Sherlock said...

Okay,

It's sorta hard to calculate exactly. For most of the trip we did exactly what we wanted and stayed/ate in pretty nice places. We also ended up splashing out on things that wasn't really necessary. (Extra flights when we could have went by land + clothes)

Also, because of work, I had to fly out in July instead of June which cost me about 300-400 euro more :(

So, for me, the total was probably around 2500 – 3000.

This trip could be done a lot cheaper. Most of the time we stayed in good hotels (that are still cheap at $20-$25 per night) instead of places that are about $2-$5 per night. (Now that I work, I value my free time a lot more then when I was a student => I don't mind spending more on comfort) The big expenses are

flights there (1000)
vacinations + medicine + other misc stuff you need before you leave (200)
any internal flights that you end up buying to save time/stress (350).

When you are there - you can live really cheaply! (Even renting a 1000cc Jet Ski in Mui Ni beach for 1 hour was only 25 euro!)

The experience is definitely worth the price I paid (which I still have to work out). I'd even pay more - it was amazing!

If I wanted to do the trip cheaper, I'd fly out in June, not buy a ton of clothes, take more buses/trains and I'd say the cost for the 4 weeks would be around 1800 Euro.

Ryan Sherlock said...

Oh, and I was speaking in Euro all of the time unless stated otherwise :)