First things first, GO WALES! Even without Shane they can beat the old
enemy, marvellous! (that’s from Jen btw)

We spent today seeing Hanoi’s sights by first visiting the Catholic
cathederal which was very odd to see in the East. Then it was off to
the history museums which had exceptional detail and artifacts from
thousands of years ago but got a little biased (& selectively vague)
in the more recent history!

Below is a photo of the superior Museum of History that covered
pre-1945 events.

Tomorrow is the Ha Long Bay which we are really excited about. We have
also now booked flights to Krabi via Bangkok on the 20th so we should
have loads of time in the south for beaches and diving. Yippee!

We made it to Ha Noi at 4.30am today after a 12 hour train journey!
It’s 6pm now & we’re still awake! Nothing was open at 4.30am so we sat
by the lake watching the joggers, power walkers & tai chi until 7am
when things started to open.

Hanoi seems really nice plus we have booked a 3 day boat trip around
Ha Long Bay from Monday. We have tomorrow to explore the city & then
when we return from Ha Long Bah we have slightly changed our plan
because Laos is just too difficult, slow & expensive to do so we will
fly directly to the SW coast of Thailand at the end of next week (not
that we have booked it yet…prob do that tomorrow so we will let you
know the plan once organised).

Now off for food and an early night.

We found a great hotel on TripAdvisor in Hué called Amigo who are so
good they picked us up from the train station for free! We booked a
city tour for the next day and were set to picked up at 8am.

Our tour was really good fun and we saw all the major sights we wanted
to with a very informative guide. The only downside was the other
tourists on the trip who were, to be frank, arses!

But we had a great time so who cares! The photo below is the Thien Mu
pagoda with 7 levels representing the 7 steps of Buddha. If we don’t
have that quite right you can blame a long day and local Huda beer.

Tomorrow we catch our last Vietnamese train to Hanoi which is an
overnighter and will get us in at around 4.30am on Saturday – eek!

Only a few minutes after our last post saying we had no plan for
today, we sat down in a restaurant for dinner and the man serving us
started up a conversation. He told us that he did tours out to his
village 15km inland from Hoi An and showed us book after book of
people’s thanks to him for his tours. With that many recommends and at
just $10 each for a whole day it was hard to pass up his offer so we
arranged to meet him back at the restaurant the next morning.

We showed up at 9.30am and were met by Mr Phong and another driver
(both shown in the photo – Mr Phong in the middle). We donned our
helmets and took a bike each out to the edge of Hoi An. There we met
up with 2 Dutch girls who had cycled ahead and we then rode in convoy
to the village.

As it got more rural the tall, blonde Dutch girls got more and more
people shouting ‘hello’ and waving which was hilarious. We arrived at
at Mr Phong’s house and his wife greeted us with tea and a big smile.
Mr Phong then talked us through Vietnam’s politics, war and religion
which was very informative and filled in many gaps. He then gave us a
tour of his village (most of which were part of Mr Phong’s family) and
everyone was so welcoming and friendly we felt part of the family
straight away!

At the end of our tour we returned to his house where his wife had
prepared a wonderful lunch for us all that was delicious. They drove
us back to our hotel around 4pm.

We can see why Mr Phong had so many nice comments in his books and we
made sure to add one ourselves.

P.S. As you can see, it was our 1st rainy day today in nearly 4 weeks!