The theme letter for our travel pics this week is V, for Vietnam. Day two takes us to Hoi An, in the centre of the country. In Vietnam, there is a specific artform known as water-puppets. These Múa rối nước, or “puppets that dance on water” date back to the 11th century as bored farmers, unable…
The theme letter for our travel pics this week is V, for Vietnam. Our first in this series comes from Halong Bay – and it’s a flotilla of kayaks, just waiting for tourists to go paddling. The karsts (or limestone outcrops) of Halong Bay are fascinating – and for many, the best way to explore…
The theme for our travel pics this week is N for Night Scenes. Vietnam’s Halong Bay is, as we’ve mentioned before, a truly magical spot. And that magic doesn’t disappear as the sun goes down. We, as you can see, were anchored fairly close to a number of other boats in the bay – but…
The theme for our travel pics this week is N for Night Scenes. This is from Sapa, in Northern Vietnam, on a cool, foggy night. The cloud cover in Sapa for most of the two days we were there was incredibly thick – so thick, in fact, that we couldn’t see the nearby mountain or the…
Here’s the Tenth episode of Rear View Microphone – the weekly podcast covering Travel, and Tourism, and Cruising, and Communications, and Arts and Entertainment, and Politics and more … This week – lots of cruise news – including a look at why gastro outbreaks occur – and why they are so newsworthy; in table-top games news,…
Here’s the ninth episode of Rear View Microphone – the weekly podcast covering Travel, and Tourism, and Cruising, and Communications, and Arts and Entertainment, and Politics and more … This week – in cruise news Bali terror threats stop ships from sailing to the Indonesian holiday hotspot; in arts news, we look at recycling ideas; in…
We are currently planning significant trip to United States later this year – and it’s interesting to note the differences as well as the similarities. On this trip, we are going to travel nearly 4500km by land – that’s the equivalent of a loop from my home city of Brisbane, via Sydney, down to Melbourne,…
Here’s the eighth episode of Rear View Microphone – the weekly podcast covering Travel, and Tourism, and Cruising, and Communications, and Arts and Entertainment, and Politics and more … This week – lots of cruise news – including saying farewell to some Aussie and Kiwi favourites; in table-top games news, we look at lying with a…
Here’s the seventh episode of Rear View Microphone – the weekly podcast covering Travel, and Tourism, and Cruising, and Communications, and Arts and Entertainment, and Politics and more … This week – lots of cruise news – including passengers having rocks thrown at them in Port Vila, but also lots of ‘good news’ stories about cruising; in…
Vietnam is an interesting place, to a visitor from a ‘liberal democracy’ like Australia. It is, strictly speaking, a communist country and yet many of the social welfare things that we have come to expect – like free schooling – don’t appear to be a part of the Vietnamese psyche. As Al Jazeera pointed out in…
Cairns Communications 