Author: tonimarieford

Why You Should Go To Can Tho

Can Tho is a stop on most Mekong Delta itineraries. If you go to Can Tho expecting a rural Vietnamese town, a sort-of Hoi An Old Quarter retreat with picturesque cycle routes and souvenir-selling street vendors you’re going to be disappointed. But if you go to Can Tho expecting a thriving, modern city full of…
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It’s Too Hot in the Mekong Delta

If you’re not very organised and plan your trip around intuitive inconsistencies like ‘what feels right at the time’ or you go for practical ease like ‘where’s the nearest place to here’, eventually you’re going to end up somewhere you don’t particularly want to be. And the reason you’re not particularly going to want to…
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Cholon Vintage postcard

Cholon, Saigon: The Chinatown That’s Not For Tourists

I’ve heard it said that once you’ve seen one Chinatown you’ve seen them all. Wrong. One of my favourite things about going to a new city is finding Chinatown, if there is one, and there nearly always is. Another one of my favourite things at the minute is to find attractions I intend to visit…
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Is Dalat Worth Visiting?

I was going to type ‘is Dalat Vietnam’s biggest exporter of flowers?’, a quick, lazy search to find out whether I had any grounds to say that it was, but I didn’t get round to actually doing the research. As soon as I typed in ‘is Dalat’ Google’s auto-fill search function finished off my question,…
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Hoi An Hotel Balcony

The Hotel That Was Too Nice

When you travel, just as in everyday life, you miss what you can’t have. Reality is a bitch and no matter how exciting it feels to leave all of the comforts you’re used to behind, embracing all that is adventurous and wild and free, there may come a time when roughing it loses its appeal.…
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Hoi An Old Town

Not the Hoi An I Had Imagined

Sometimes you can go to a new place without any expectations. Nothing but a name, the place is an empty vacuum until the moment you step into it, breathe its air and look around. Hoi An was not this. Hoi An was a place I had already vividly imagined, a collage of postcards and adverts…
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Naked on a Mountain in Malaysia

So, yet another group of Western tourists have gone and got themselves naked at a sacred site in a south east Asian country. Not only that, they allowed themselves to be photographed doing so. I’m not going to jump on the bandwagon of ‘wow, you people are stupid’, here. They may have done a stupid…
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