Our traveling companions

Some people have asked, so who are you traveling with?  It turns out when we planned this trip so many years ago we looked for a tour and couldn't find one from an American company that was what we were looking for. We could find backpacking trips with public transportation geared for people earlier in their lives than us and we did that type of traveling for years or we could find high end tours that also didn't seem like what we were looking for.  Finally we remembered when we went to the Soviet Union years ago we found a Canadian group and it turned out to be a good trip.  So searching the Canadian options were discovered Adventures Abroad out of Vancouver that specializes in small group tours for people over 50 with exercise adventure and a local feel.  We chose the Vietnam to Cambodia leg of the Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia and Mymamar trip.

We started as 20 people in Hanoi with our leader Peter a mid-thirties Canadian of Sri Lankan parents currently living in South Africa who has been doing these tours for 7 years. Unfortunately on the first night of the trip one of the people missed a step and broke her leg. There was great support for her by Adventure Abroad and she had a operation in Hanoi and has traveled back to Las Vegas, proving there is a reason for travel insurance.

So the group is evenly divided between Americans and Canadians, those traveling as a couple and singles, men and women.  It is a very good group where everyone gets along.  Most of the people were well traveled, the exception being one couple on their first trip outside of the US. We had one Vietnam vet that went back to where he was stationed in DeNanag.

When you travel with people you get to know lots about them.  Peter our guide is great at providing the group things with options and alone time.  He has an easy style giving you information but not being dictorial.  He chooses the local guide and we had a variety of styles and ages in these guides. In Cambodia our guide lived through the killing fields experiences and was very candid about what it was like and how the country has recovered since it ended. Our guides in Vietnam were able to explain what it was like to live through the Vietnam war and the communist period that followed.

At this point in our lives, it was the perfect option for us.  It would have taken months to put together what we saw in three weeks.