We began our holiday in Cambodia with flights and a hotel to visit the temples near Angkor Wat. After a one-week stay in Siem Reap, Asia Pioneer’s tour guide and driver picked us up by to drive cross-country to Phnom Penh to begin a longer tour of Vietnam from Ho Chi Minh city to Hanoi with visits to many areas along the way. To assist us with our planning, Asia Pioneer proposed a detailed itinerary designed to meet our route, schedule and several requests.
The latter outstanding tour company organized all of our transport, accommodation, and tours to a wide variety of museums, artisans, artisan manufacturers, temples and pagodas, and of urban and rural life in the cities and towns. Daily each tour guide and driver met our group of four always on time with cold bottled water, a full schedule of the day’s tour and occasionally lunch on the way. During the tour, we had three air flights and guides changed when we flew to new cities. These guides easily spoke in English about the history, environment and many interesting features of their locales. At the end of our tour, we all agreed that we had learned a lot about these countries while being very conveniently transported from one site to the next.
We did think the tour could be improved by increasing the quality of our boutique hotels to four- or five-star hotels, even though this would increase the cost. They could, for example, offer three levels of accommodation possibly designated as “good, better, best” respectively. We believe a higher level of accommodation would have made our ‘full touring” schedule more relaxing and enjoyable.
Nevertheless, our superbly arranged tour of a large variety of interesting tour sites easily accessed by the assistance of able guides, and drivers always arriving on time, ready to discuss many aspects of their countries made this moderate cost visit extremely attractive to us. We felt fortunate that this company selected sites we would have selected ourselves had we knowledge of them, organized appropriate transport and accommodation near large city centers to travel conveniently from one site to the next while allowing some free time most evenings to interact with city life. We also had all the opportunities we wished to take many photographs during our trip.
