Mike and Amy's Blog

It’s always a bitter sweet feeling returning from holidays, however we are back and it’s great to be home. We are really excited about this wedding season and can’t wait to share our brides special days with them. Feel free to call or email as we are certainly back 🙂

Tourism in Sapa is certainly on the increase. It is a charming highland town situated in the northwest of vietnam, not too far from the Chinese border. It is surrounded by the Fansipan mountain range. The H’mong people are one of the local hill tribes, with the boom of tourism in the area the H’mong people have been given many employment opportunities particularly as local guides.

Many of the older H’mong people have little formal education but the younger generations have the availability of schools in many of their villages. At this time of year the children are on summer holidays. At school they are taught Vietnamese and English as well as educated in the traditional ways.

We spent three days hiking to some of the local villages. The first village we visited was Cat Cat village. Like everywhere in Sapa the 3km decent into the valley is very step… we both have sore legs from our hiking LOL!!

We also visited dragon mountain which has a beautiful view of the township of Sapa.

When you roam the streets of Sapa be prepared to be escorted by groups of the H’mong people practising their english and trying to sell their goods. They are harmless and very friendly people just trying to earn a dollar. It is difficult for the H’mong people as tourism and development brings both positives and negatives, with one of the negatives being the cost of living has greatly increased for the local hill tribe people.

During our time in Sapa we only had time to explore the villages of the Black H’mong people. If we are able to return to Sapa we would love to visit Bac Ha which is home to the flower H’mong people.

Here are just a few of the images from our time in Sapa. Thanks so much to our lovely guide Co.

Amy

The last five days or so we have spent in Hanoi and Halong Bay, at the moment we are in Sapa. Halong Bay was quiet the experience. As with many places in vietnam you do need to be careful of scams- all I would say is travel with a reputable company like we did, your experience will be more pleasant! We booked our tour through the Charming II Hotel in Hanoi. The staff there are very helpful and really go out of their way to make your time in vietnam enjoyable which we really appreciated.

When traveling in Hanoi you need to be very alert of your belongings. Bag snatching and slashing is very common. One of the tourist we met along our travels had their bag slashed in the night market and all their belonging taken including their photos from their entire trip. Many taxi’s in the major cities in Vietnam have dodgy metres- if you can walk then walk, or get your hotel to call and negotiate a fee for you. Around the train stations in Hanoi there are people who pretend to be staff and aggressively demand tips for taking you to your train. They did to us and to their surprise they didn’t get any from us LOL!!

There are some great places to eat around Hanoi. We loved the french bakeries and think we have eaten a few too many, hopefully the trekking over the next few days will burn it off!

Here are just a few images from Halong Bay and Hanoi, we will post some more on facebook once we have access to it again. Looking forward to sharing our experiences from Sapa 🙂

Amy xx

We are having a great time in Vietnam. We are currently in Hanoi. Tomorrow we are heading to Halong Bay, which I am very excited about. There are so many french bakery’s close to where we are staying here… it’s awesome.

Before coming to Hanoi we spend 4 days in Mui Ne which is in the South East part of Vietnam on the coast. We just loved it. We stayed at a resort called Phu Hai. It was an awesome resort, the only down fall was it was about 4-5km from town or the main resort/restaurant strip. On our second day in Mui Ne we walked into town and found a place called Red and Blue Restaurant and Bar where they hired motos for $10 a day. The girl was very lovely and only took a $50 bond- how trusting. We felt that the best, most excited and cheapest way to see Mui Ne was by Moto. We explored around the local villages and got some awesome images of village/town life. We than road out to the sand dunes which are not to hard to find… if your heading to Mui Ne feel free to email and we can give directs to the dunes.  The sand dunes are just amazing. We were very surprised how big they were. At the red dunes there was kids everywhere ripping people off with their sand boards that really didn’t work unless you way 20kg like they do and I certainly way more than that! LOL!

There are some awesome restaurant’s in Mui Ne. Our favourite was a mexican place which is owned by a young french couple. It was called El Lationo. The food was awesome!!

We’ll you all updated and post some more images soon.

Hope everyone is well. Feel free to email us if you do have any inquiries or need to touch base about a booking!!

Amy xx

We thought that we would update everyone on how our trip is going, considering we don’t have access to Facebook in Vietnam, the government has put a block on it :-(. Last Wednesday we did a border crossing from Cambodia into Vietnam via the Mekong river. We ended our 8 hour journey in Chau Doc. In Chau Doc we stayed in a horrible little floating hotel- it was so dirty!- We were so relieved to finally leave and head to Saigon. We only spend one night in Saigon before heading to Mui Ne – which is pretty much a tourist resort place, however there are some very cool things to see here. We will be doing a whole blog post of Mui Ne as we really love it here 🙂

We have been receiving lots of emails from current brides and brides inquiring. – If you need to contact us or have an inquiry feel free to send us an email we certainly don’t mind!

Here are just a few images from the last few days!! We will be blogging lots more in the coming two weeks because as I mentioned there is no facebook 😦

Amy xx