Four weeks were not enough time to see all of Vietnam. We did not see Hanoi properly, we did not travel anywhere north of Hanoi. I really would've liked to have travelled to Sapa, Lào Cai and Hà Giang areas. Maybe next time.

At the same time, four weeks was more than enough time spent on one trip. In fact, some times I felt three weeks would've been better. I was ready to come home by the fourth week if you know what I mean?

Vietnam was everything it promised to be and it's easy to see why it is so popular with travellers. It was hot, it was beautiful, it was friendly, it was cheap, it was clean, it had fantastic roads - you get the picture.

At times, it was funny too. You often saw things written in English with spelling mistakes or transliterated from Vietnamese which amused us a lot. Like these examples:

Sell Chicken Running (live chickens for sale)

Funny Meat (name of restaurant, honest)

Crap spring roll (crab...)

Sleeping bus (overnight/sleeper bus)

We often saw people wearing t-shirts with random things written on them. Again the spelling got us every time - 'Don't waste your salent' (talent?), 'Cat like fist' (There was a picture of fish bones) and so on. One time when someone was giving us directions Google translate told us to go to 'Red light green' (traffic lights). The one thing got to us almost every day was at the time of checking into a hotel and the receptionist would ask for our 'pa po' or 'ba bo' (passport). 

Equally our pronunciation of Vietnamese words caused them to laugh a lot too. The only things I learnt to pronounce properly in a month were hello and cheers. I learnt quite a few other words but it came out different each time, or so I felt because the last time I had used a word or phrase ina restaurant people had understood me and the next time they either didn't or they brought us something totally different. Hot water was one of those. Depending on my pronunciation that day I'd either get hot water, cold water, bottled water or iced coffee!!

I took less luggage than I did on previous trips and still found I had too much sometimes. We would've needed more gear if it were possible to camp but accommodation was so cheap I'm not sure if it would be worth camping. Money wise, aside from the flight tickets and the bike hire, we spent less than $800 (£650) for everything else - food, drink, accommodation, entrance fees, petrol, bike repair & maintenance. Not bad at all for a month. Total trip cost including bike hire and airfare was about £1500. It is possible to cut cost down by quite a bit if you stayed in dorms and Nha Nghis rather than in rooms, hired a cheaper bike and used inferior quality petrol but we didn't. We just asked for discounts at every opportunity and got it most times too. All in all a trip definitely worth doing.

Everyone keeps asking me so where next? I don't know. South America sounds attractive as do Zimbabwe and or Zambia. Want to ride in the Himalayas too. Let's see what happens. I still have some more work to do - I took a GoPro with me this time and need to edit all the clips and put a compilation together and upload better quality pictures somewhere and share them. I hope to get that done soon. Thanks for your time reading all of this. I have enjoyed writing it and re-living the experience and would really welcome any comments and suggestions you may have - good or bad.