The following morning Andy woke up starving We found somewhere for breakfast and Andy sat excitedly waiting for his fry up to arrive. His excited face soon turned to a frown when his breakfast arrived and looked nothing like he expected. The baked beans that he had so been looking forward to turned up in a dish the size of a thimble. When he tried one - they had to be eaten one by one so that they didn’t disappear in one mouthful - they were served cold! His eggs and bacon were pretty standard, but as he bit into his toast a look of total shock appeared on his face. As he tried to chew it the crumbs fell from the side of his mouth. He couldn’t bring himself to swallow it and was forced ... read more

We chose somewhere different for breakfast, purely based on the fact that they had poached eggs on the menu. This was the first place we had come across them in Asia and we were looking forward to a change from the normal scrambled eggs. Pete opted for the hamburger and fries, which did seem a strange addition to a breakfast menu - but it wasn’t as strange as the burger its self. When it arrived it was a strange sort of onion fritter, but when Pete cut it open it had a layer of raw meat inside! He ate the bun and the fries but left the burger. Although he did take a bite before cutting into it so we could only hope that it wouldn’t make him ill. Our taxi got us to the station ... read more

We woke up feeling surprisingly normal. We met Tom for breakfast and donated a jumper and a waterproof jacket to his crazy moped mission. We knew how cold and wet it would be up north and were always looking to lighten our backpacks. We were leaving Hue for Hoi An, but rather that catch a bus which would drive us there without seeing anything, we booked a car with Ms Thu. It only cost us an extra couple of pounds each but we would stop at some of the sights along the way. Our first stop was at a beach surrounded by mountains. It would have been really stunning if there wasn’t so much rubbish everywhere. Our driver told us this would be our lunch stop so we had a look at the menu and took ... read more

We went to the hotel to book a car for our sightseeing trip, but Mr Xuan kept trying to convince us to go on mopeds instead. One look at the weather was all it took to make up our minds. A day on the back of a moped in the pouring rain was not our idea of fun. Anyway with three of us it worked out cheaper to hire a car. After a traditional breakfast of noodle soup for me and fried noodles with chicken for Andy we set off on our trip in our comfy dry car. I was especially pleased to have the car when I saw the two French ladies disappear on the back of mopeds looking like they had been wrapped in bin bags. We made our first stop in Hoa Lu ... read more

We needn’t have worried about sleeping in. We didn’t notice when we checked into our hotel that there were loud speakers right outside. At just after 6am we were woken by shouting, music and communist propaganda blaring from the speakers - so much for moving to a quiet hotel. The boat was ready to go at 8am. Unfortunately we were not. Pete had misplaced our booking ticket so we had a frantic 5 minutes searching through bags and pockets before finding it in his room on the seventh floor. We dashed across the road but we had taken so long that the only seats left were on the roof of the boat. We had been told that should the boat sink, the roof was the safest place to be - we hoped we wouldn’t find this ... read more