Adventures

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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Ireland - Day 2 - Connemara National Park

Our second day in Ireland led us to the Connemara National Park. Located near Letterfrack it was just a really short drive and promised to be a great trip. And it really was. The weather looked like it would give us the rain - sun - rain - wind - rain - treatment again, so we came fully prepared with all our raincoats, rain covers for the backpacks and waterproof hiking boots. We started our hike at the Visitor Center at about 10.30, the sun still shining brightly. After just about fifteen minutes we could see dark clouds coming up and rain poured down on us once again - but this time we were prepared. We stayed mostly dry, and everything else dried with the harsh wind following the downpour.

The ascend of the mountain proved to be really windy, and we decided the warning sign we had seen early did in fact make sense. Todays weather wasn't all that bad though, we arrived at the peak of Diamond Hill in bright sunshine, even though it was still windy. The view was fantastic from up there.

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London - Buckingham Palace -  Day 5

Naturally during out stay in London we wanted to see the infamous changing of the guards. We didn't get there quite early enough to actually get a very good view, but here are some impressions anyways.

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Day 18 - Denali National Park and the green shuttle bus

The second day of our road trip began early for us, as we had to make our way to Denali National Park until 11.30 at the latest to be on time to board our shuttle bus. Since we hadn’t seen any animals on the previous day and were almost through the scenic parts of the road, we didn’t expect too much of the last bit of road left on the Denali Highway. But just about five minutes after we had started driving again two caribou stood right in the middle of the road. We stopped. They looked at us and then started to walk towards us. They stayed in sight for quite some time, looking at us just as curious as we looked at them. Then another car drove by and they went off into the bushes.

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