Xangsane typhoon and other event updates

Well we're not outta here yet. We are going to see if we can go out on the boats today or at least down a river to see if we can get to some islands. Then we'll see if we can fly to Hue, our next city, which was where the storm was pretty strong. We hear that there is waist-high water in some areas. We will have to go back to Hanoi either way and all the hotels there are booked.

We heard that the skybox level of our hotel in Hoi An, the top floor, was blown clean off the building. Da Nang is devastated and our guide said that the one of the cities in the storm's path looked as if it was just totally bombed by B-52s.

All travel to the central region is stopped. Trains are told to stop on the tracks because they don't want people to go through the flooded areas. Planes are landing everywhere and waiting. Our hotel is full of tourists, we've maxed out the capacity of the hotel. They couldn't even serve food properly since there were so many guests.

This is the worst storm this year... 6 named storms. We've had some deaths but we're not sure yet. Power is being restored everywhere.

Here's an article from CBSNews.

We picked up Vonage service and made some calls home. So we've checked in a little bit. Sound quality is pretty good even though we're going over hotel wireless and I can only get about 5k/s downloads. I made the front desk move their wireless antenna closer to our room because we didn't get a signal. I needed to upload photos and blog. Oh dog photos in Hanoi folder. we put everything in folders, makes for easier viewing for everyone. Halong bay is the newest folder and I'll put more in later after today.

Time to do some repacking, distributing the weight between suitcases.