Jon | HandelBlog

We arrived in back in Melbourne on Tuesday August 22nd. My brother Jeff was arriving into Brisbane on the 24th. For some reason this all made sense when we were planning it – we needed to get the car and our stuff up to Brisbane, but why pad the schedule with extra days? So there we were, “fresh” off our 24 hours of plane travel and we need to drive 18 hours in 2 days to meet Jeff.

So, we got a taxi from the airport to Tiff and Andy’s place (thanks again!) to brush our teeth, pick up our car and all of our stuff, load up the Yaris and set off to the north. Only 9 hours until our first stop in Dubbo, NSW.

The drive was generally uneventful. We swapped driving every 150km or so. We didn’t have any trouble re-adjusting to right-hand drive after 6 weeks in the US, but, despite our best efforts, we still had one nerve wracking “almost run out of gas” situation. On a side note, we found out Google maps will route you on some ridiculous back country roads if it thinks it’ll be like 1 minute faster. We should probably stop navigating with Google maps in Australia.

We arrived into Brisbane on Wednesday night and went about trying to re-organize all of our clothes to figure out what we’d need for a combination of mild and proper winter, confounding our “packing light” attempts. We had to get all our stuff into 1 suitcase to simplify the travel to NZ and minimize baggage fees. It was stressful after 72 hours of travel from Washington DC to Brisbane. Some poor decisions were made, but we did remember all of our skiing clothes.

The next morning it was off to the airport to meet Jeff at the international arrivals. He was as chipper as one could be after navigating his heavy backpack, huge suitcase and ski case through the immigration and customs maze.

For the first part of his visit we headed up to Coolum Beach on the Sunshine Coast, the beach area about an hour and a half north of Brisbane. We had tried to rent a 2 bedroom apartment, but they were sold out, so they offered us a 3 bedroom apartment at a slightly discounted rate and we booked it. When we arrived they upgraded us to a 4 bedroom villa with a hot tub on the roof deck. Woo! Starting off in style.

We spent our first day still trying to shake off our jet lag, exploring the town we were staying in and checking out the beach.

We’d heard great things about the town of Noosa, so the next day we headed up there to check it out. We walked around a bit and enjoyed the winter warmth.

Not having had enough of Noosa, we headed back there the next day to do a nice long hike and then spend more time on the beach. The hike was gorgeous.

I wonder where Jeff gets the nickname “Hands on hips Handel” from?

After our hike we decided to get some beach time in – tossing the frisbee and generally enjoying a very warm winter day. Jeff then decided he wanted to try renting a stand up paddle board. It was very windy and also *the ocean*, so it proved very challenging. I did manage to stand up once and and despite of my best efforts, I was still moving backwards, being pulled out with the tide. I quickly gave up.

Next on our list was a day tour of Fraser Island – which started with a bus picking us up at our hotel at 545am. This bus took us to meet our “monster bus” – a 4 wheel drive behemoth:

The behemoth left from Noosa with us on board and drove up the beach to catch a ferry to Fraser Island. Interesting note – the beach is considered a road, and you can do up to 80kph (50mph) on it. The ride was quite smooth. The highlight of the trip was stopping off for lunch and a swim at Lake McKenzie. The lake was beautiful, crystal clear and very refreshing!

On our way back, we even managed an elusive dingo sighting.

Our final day of R&R before heading off to the South Island of New Zealand we opted for a hike up Mt. Coolum to take in the views of the area. The trail was steep and the views were great.

Time to head to NZ, and time for Jeff to try his hand at our second ever “guest blog” post.

Now that we’ve finished our tour of Laos, returned to Australia via Thailand, and flown to America, perhaps it is now time for me to write my post about our time in Vietnam? Seems reasonable.

Vietnam was the most complicated “visa” we had to get. Even with paying for a “visa approval letter” (which was the preferred route compared to mailing our passports to the Vietnam embassy in Australia before our trip) – on arrival in Ho Chi Minh City we presented our letter, photos and application and then waited patiently for 45 minutes or so to pay $25 for our visa and get our passports back. Then we walked over to the domestic terminal for our connecting flight.

One thing we quickly noticed about plane travel in Vietnam is that their airports do not have enough gates, which leads to taking a bus to the plane from the terminal. This is very annoying. Especially when the bus goes this far:

Our bus: far left, Our plane: right. Distance: not far

Our first stop in Vietnam was Danang. We chose this location to have some nice relaxing beach time between our temple and city touring. It did not disappoint. We had sunny hot days and miles of empty beaches.

Well, the beaches were empty during what I’d call regular beach times. Before 8am and after 4pm, it was an entirely different story, as seen below:

It took a while to get used to the constant honking of horns while walking around and also to figure out how to cross streets. The solution was to just start crossing when vaguely clear and the motorbikes and cars will sort of veer around you. Very terrifying.

Sara mentioned our food challenges when traveling and this was a bit amplified in Danang. It is not a major international tourist location as far as we could tell. Plenty of Vietnamese tourists though. They sold a lot of seafood that was presented in buckets still alive and given our lack of language skills we were not entirely certain what we’d get if we attempted to order. Also, nearly every restaurant on our beach front street was exactly the same. Additionally, google maps and the internet in general were not a great help. But hey, walking around looking for food, sometimes you find a dragon bridge.

We did a day trip to Hoi An, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It’s an old timey city that was not bombed during the war, so a lot of buildings remain from when it was a major trading port for all manors of countries.

Next stop was Cat Ba island. This was our most challenging transfer. From Danang it involved: Taxi, Plane, Uber, Bus, Bus, Boat, Bus and about 7 hours. And yes, we took an Uber in Vietnam – we were very excited it was available since we’d read a lot about dodgy taxis and various scams in Vietnam. With traffic, we were in the Uber for over an hour and the total came to about $17 for the 20 or so miles. Woo.

Once we arrived we were treated to a beautiful view from our hotel room.

Our main reason for going to Cat Ba was to do a tour of Halong / Lan Ha bay. It did not disappoint. The boat was quite dodgy, but the views were incredible (well, it could have been sunnier).

After Cat Ba, we were off to Hanoi for two nights. We did our trip back to the city in the reverse of the first one – Bus, Boat, Bus, Bus, Uber. Our time in Hanoi was spent eating good food and walking all over the city.

Vietnam was great. Upon reflection, it was surprisingly the cheapest place we were as well. Beers were only 12,000 dongs. While that may sound *really* expensive, the exchange rate was about 22,000:1.

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