vietnam - hanoi, halong bay & hue

---

welcome welcome to another blog - you lucky people two in a week! right, we are in Vietnam now, at this time i am waiting for our bus to take us from Hue to Hoi An. We flew into hanoi 6 days ago (vietnam airlines very good - more leg room than BA!). We got ourselves into quite a nice little hotel for only 7pounds a night. We spent first day walking around hanoi, visinting the markets and crazy streets of shops in he old quarter. The place is crazy, you will never see so many mopeds on the streets and how they dont crash is a complete mystery - crossing the street is an extreme sport in itself. After buying several pairs of fake ray bans we found nice little restuarant and i decided to go made and had beef cooked in coconut milk in an actaul coconut - was good. The next day we visitied the war museum - this was really interesting, good stroy of french and amercian occupations and many US army vechiles on display. We decided to book a boat tour around halong bay for the following two days. It was a four coach to the bay then 2 days and 1 nught on the boat. We were so lucky with the weather even pasty old me is tanning! the trip itslef was good but not without a few problems. The sceneary was amzing (and yes i know you all want photos but unfortunately this website is rubbish for uploading so you ill have to wait till i'm home). The only problem was this is all we did, we were supposed to do some kyacking but our boat was late into harbour place so we got 10 mins then it was dark. So we all had a good argument with thwe staff on the boat - they were so incredibly rude it was unbelievable. anyway to make it better there are people on little biats who sell you anything - they live on the sea and just have all this stuff. So we all bought lots of vodka and got drunk on the top deck in the pitch black. Sleep was fun, ben and i shared a room, but we had rats in it - they ate our biscuits! we got back to hanoi the following night and then it was straight onto a 14 hour overnight coach journey to Hue. The bus was pretty cool, sleeper bus, so the seats are all fully reclined. Got few hours sleep but we were all a little close for comfort - new bonds have been made between the 3 of us! Anyway we arrived in Hue at 9am and got into a really nice hotel (again only 10 pounds for a night)! We spent a day looking at a few pogodas (spelling is wrong here i think) and the citidel. We also checked out the market which was intense with every stall basically pulling you to look at their goods - which are identical to the next stall and the next stall etc. anyway after that we went out for meal and met a belgium couple we had met on the halong boat trip. we had a few drinks and came back to our room. Today like i said we are now off to Hoi an and the beaches - hoping the weather is ok, forecast is rain!

love paul xx

---