Goodbye Vietnam

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The last leg of our journey in Vietnam was the Capital Hanoi and Halong Bay. I'll be honest with you, Vietnam has not been my favourite country, it's so busy and noisy and it feels as if the people are constantly trying to rip you off any way they can. I'm sure it's a translation thing but they really can come across as being quite rude at times and I think I mentioned the crazy motorbikes. Sometimes you can't take 2 steps without being hassled for something or other. Anyway, Hanoi is the same. We arrived by night train (for a change) very early and with hangovers and couldn't get into our hotel rooms until 12. So we decided to go to Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum, but it was a national holiday so we queued in the scorching heat and sun for almost an hour. The guards were so anal about us queueing in formation and would push us. It really felt like we were in a state controlled country, you couldn't even sit on a wall without a guard with a gun shouting at you, crazy. Anyway we filed past Ho Chi Monh's boday (whilst being pushed and shoved by guards) and to be honest, it looks very fake! We then visited his compound where he lived before we returned to the hotel to have a desperatly needed shower and rest!

I was really looking forward to heading to Halong Bay and staying on what I thought was going to be a peaceful beatiful island. The boat we took was great with a seafood lunch and we stopped in the middle of the gorgeous deserted islands to swim for a while. Unfortunately tourism is spoiling this area. There was rubbish in the water and hundreds of boats chugging out pollution. Cat Ba Island was basically a dirty horrible sh*t hole which stank. Also with it being a holiday, the price of everything had doubled. It was a real disappointment.

We returned to Hanoi on a public ferry (quite a rough crossing too!) and had a final night out together as a group before we lose some more people. 8 of us have been together for 25 days now and 2 were leaving so it was actually very sad.

I can't wait to get to Laos now...!

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