Visa Time

The passports arrived back home in Miles yestreday by registered post complete with Visas for Vietnam. I had a bit of a fright when I openned them up to notice mine was different to Carol's. A closer look revealed I had opened up at my expired/ stamped visa.

 

On the train

What a beautiful bunch.

1988

Happy birthday Abbie
 I have just sent you an E card and I tried to put the blog addrtess in the text of the card but they wouldn't let me place a blog address in my message. They said they block certain phrases and the use of URLs so I got caught. I am looking forward to our next chat. They block Twitter and facebook in Vietnam.

 

Exchange Rate

Today October 9 the rate is 20 595 VND = 1 Aus $. We are looking at the possibility of getting a Hydrofoil from HCMC to Vung Tau. It takes about one hour and they head out about every hour all day. We are trying to find out if we can get our bikes on the boat. That would be a fabulous start to our tour of VN. We are also looking at a bit of train travel to Lao Cai from Hanoi  in the North on the Chinese border. So many choices.

Singapoer Stopover

Well Carol is busy trying to do the online booking for our big trip.We have discovered that we can have a 48 hour stopover in Singapore and fly out without having to cart our boxed bikes around with us. Most airlines have a 24 hr rule for transit. What this also means is we can get a Singapore stopover package holiday .  The website lists all these different hotels and rates with one being $17 twin share and of course that is not one you can select  ????? It ended up being $68 AUD twin share. Now it has taken us about an hour to get all the bookings right with the matching accomodatioin and now it tells us we can't proceed and this is after we have put  the card details in and pressed process ,,, So Carol is going to try again tomorrow. I just hope we can get the same seats. Better luch Tuesday.

Eventually it all worked but it took another 48 hours of them ringing me on my mob at work. We got the $17 room and a day pass in Singapore. They did have a $1 room but you had to buy a round the world ticket.
 

78 Days to go

It is Sunday October 6 Bathurst Day and I have to go back to work today. We have been busy finding all those things that you collect over time that would be great to have when next you go cycle touring. Why do we hide things so well? We have almost filled out our Visa applicfation forms just not sure about flights or entry dates. The plan is pretty fluid but is it too unstructured?
Fly to HCMC then bike and train to Hanoi and then do we go to Laos or Cambodia with out our bikes or cross the border on them or do we send the bikes home unaccompanied and then there is the possible stopover in Singapore um um ????
We will know soon!