so we've been in hanoi for too long....halong bay was amazing and we got some sun for the first time in over a month, needless to say we roasted ourselves crispier then deep fried fish balls. here is the story of why we didn't make it up to sapa artfully retold bt maddy......... Anyways, over here, not much is happening except that there was definitely some drama last night. I'm sure Sophie'll ham it up and write a long mass email about it, but basically we tried to take a really ghetto overnight train to a town up north, here in Vietnam. And i mean really ghetto, like with no toilets and no power while we were boarding, and little minuscule sized births with wooden planks to sleep on. And when we got into our little 4 by 5 foot birth with six little "beds" stacked up on top of eachother, the 3 guys came in that were meant to share the birth with us. They were hell creepy, like sizing us up and trying to intimidate us by lightly touching our beds and our things and staring and talking in vietnamese with each other. Then the one main guy pulled out a gun and pointed it at Sophie's head and shot twice as a joke but it wasn't >loaded. Then he just started laughing and made a real show of tying it carefully to his belt and then just kept standing there and looking us up and down. It was so dodgy cause we'd be spending the night with these guys, enclosed and locked in this space with them, completely vulnerable with all our belongings. I think at first we thought the gun was fake, but soon enough we realized it was definitely real. So we were like kind of freaking out, obviously, and the train was about to start going, so we were just like, " I will not regret getting off this train right now." So we muttered to eachother in french that we need to run, and we all booked it with all our big bags and unrolled sleeping bags just hanging out. Then we had to dodge all these security people trying to stop us from getting off cause i guess they thought we were going to scalp our >tickets or something. So we had to run over all the train tracks, and get out of the train station. Then we find ourselves in the Vietnamese ghetto, like you wouldn't believe. This one taxi driver was so intent on taking us somewhere, he started following us down the roads, and got his friends to try and grab our bags and stuff. then the driver got out, and grabbed my bag and when i wouldn't cooperate ( i actually yelled and tried to hit him..) he then HIT sophie!! So we just screamed at all of them, finally enough for them to f*** off, and found another cab and just told the guy to get us out of here! So we made it to a hotel, but it was quite the adventure... > >Not to worry or anything... It's actually funny now, but we were pretty shaken up about it last night. and I think Tehya's assertiveness has really rubbed off on us. We only just said bye to her that day, and right away we had to adopt her assertive role she took on for the last month. We used to call her Slehya, rather than Tehya, cause she'd get up in anyone's face, just to not be ripped off. But now that she's gone, we're all like that. It's definitely a good thing though. So, anyways, we're still in Vietnam and never did end up going north to the little town but i don't regret getting off the train. even if nothing were to happen there's no way i would have wanted us to be the kind of girls to just lie there afraid all night letting them intimidate us like that. So we're safe and really that was kind of a one off, and it's not like a regular occurrence for people to pull out guns around here. so yeah drama plus we almost died on motorccycles but thats a story for another day.