Adventures

Burg Rodenstein in Reichelsheim

A few weeks back we took long hike in the Odenwald Region, around the town of Reichelsheim. We've been using "Komoot", an app with maps for hikers and bikers, for a while now, and this was one of the tours the app suggested to us, when we plugged in that we'd like to see some stuff and walk at least two hours.

Reichelsheim is about 40 minutes by car from where we live, but if we could go straight there, it would probably take more like 20. Driving into the Odenwald Regions requires some time though, because the roads are fairly narrow, with lots of curves and just not made to speed.

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Day 16 - Wat Pho

We started our second day in Bangkok with a bath in the hotel pool - our last chance before having to go back to Germany. Then we went shopping for some souvenir foodstuff, and packed up our backpacks one last time.

Afterwards we had still half a day to see more of Bangkok. We decided to give the Great Palace another try. This time we got to the entrance, but there was already a large queue in front of it. That and the high entrance fee of 500 Baht for foreign visitors (Thai people can visit for free) made us decide to skip this attraction.

Instead we visited the Temple of the reclining Buddha. That one is really famous. And of course there were many tourists. We took a lot at the buddha and we also took some pictures, but the figure was a bit too big to actually fit well. But we also enjoyed the rest of the temple complex. It had several other temples with golden buddhas in them. In one of the porticos there was information about the reglious culture of Thai people, how the golden buddha figurines are made, historical aspects and much more, which was all very interesting.

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Day 15 - First impressions of Bangkok

We had arrived in Bangkok in the evening, and by the time we had managed to get from the airport to the hotel* with the Airport Rail Link it was already pretty late. So when we got up early the next day to explore the city, we didn't really know what to expect. Many people we know had been to Bangkok, and many of them liked the city very much. We on the other hand somehow got off on the wrong foot. Maybe it's because we didn't read up enough before coming here. We got tricked and cheated almost everywhere we went, and there just weren't enough good things about Bangkok to really make up for it. But let's start at the beginning.

One thing we had read, was that taxi scams where as common here as in Vietnam, so we tried to avoid Taxis and TukTuks as much as possible. Instead we took the metro to the old town part of the city. But the metro doesn't really go anywhere near the old town, so we walked through most of chinatown. On the way we got stopped once by a guy, offering us advice on the sights and trying to hail us a TukTuk. We declined, explaining that we wanted to walk to take in as much of the city as possible, and quickly walked away.

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Day 13/14 - Hanoi

Our last two days in Hanoi, and also in Vietnam, we spent roaming around the city and meeting up with locals. We took long walks through the French Quarter, the Old Town Quarter and we visited the Cathedral. We watched people go about their daily lives, and we had a lot of delicious vietnamese foods and other treats.

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Day 12 - First impressions of Hanoi

Hanoi is our last stop in Vietnam and because of that we came there with a bit mixed feelings. During the last two weeks we experience so many things, and we weren't yet really ready to leave.

We had tried to set up meetings with Couchsurfers beforehand, but due to us only staying in Halong Bay for one day, and therefore being ahead of our schedule, we went out to experience the city on our own.

Our hotel was located close to Hoan Kiem Lake, so we headed out and started walking first around the lake, and then towards the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum and Presidents Palace. We knew that most things wouldn't open later in the day, but we ended up being really really slow anyways, just taking in the city and all the people living in it. We probably spent an hour at the train tracks running through the city, because that is just one of the craziest places we've seen - it is so fundamentally different to Germany.

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Day 10/11 - Halong Bay & Bai Tu Long Bay

Like many other people, we were unsure what would be the best way for us to actually explore Halong Bay. The absolute standard thing to do is to book a "Junk Tour" on a boat, either one, two or three days on the water and overnight stays in a cabin on the boat overnight. We had read good and bad things about those tours and even about Halong Bay itself. Supposedly the Bay was overcrowded with tourists and partly very dirty and full of trash, so at some point we even wondered if we should go at all. In the end we decided to book a junk tour anyways, because we wanted to do some special things while on holiday. To get around the overcrowded and trashy parts, we booked a tour that went to Bai Tu Long Bay, a part of Halong Bay that is further out and less crowded than the main regions.

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Day 9 - Trang An & Hang Mua

First of all: We have a LOT more pictures of the fantastic landscape we saw that day than I could possibly fit into this post, so go check out the corresponding photo set "Trang An & Hang Mua"!

In the Ninh Binh Region the main attractions are boat rides on rivers than run through the rice fields, along the limestone mountains, and sometimes even below through the many, many grottos in the limestone. We didn't have time to go and do all of them, even though they are supposed to be very different. We had read that the Trang An Area was usually a bit less crowded than the Tam Coc Boat ride, and that it led through more and smaller grottos. The main difference is, that in Trang An, the river is wedged in between limestone mountains, while for Tam Coc, the river runs through wider valleys and rice fields.

By the way, the whole Trang An - Tam Coc - Bich Dong Region is actually a UNESCO World Nature Heritage Site and a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage Site - the only place in Vietnam that got both of these titles.

So we once again rented a motorbike, got on it and drove to Trang An. At the tour complex we paid our fare of 200.000 Dong each and were directed to a boat together with two young vietnamese women. Our rower was a middle-aged woman with a very friendly smile, but no knowledge of english. The two vietnamese girls in our boat translated for us whenever necessary. There are two routes through you can take though the grottos, a shorter and a longer one. We had asked to be taken on the longer one, but I am not entirely convinced that it was what we got in the end.

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