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Day Forty
Returning for Hanoi from Ha Long Bay
After the fun & games last night we were tired to say the least. We managed to pack our little bags & get ready fairly quickly. We had to rush downstairs to get breakfast as we had been told that we needed to be on the bus by 8am. Early start & sat eating breakfast at 7.45am. You will never guess what the breakfast consisted of today! Oh yeah it was eggs again! To be honest the breakfast in the hotel wasnt that bad but I did have to try & get the replay from last night of the big massive rat running from the hotel kitchen out of my head before touching the food. We were then hurried along by the other nice tour guide so we could check out of the hotel & get on the bus.
Everything at the hotel like checking out & our passport checks where done really quickly. With our passports back we got on to the bus & looking around I think there were a few sleepy heads & a few people (the two lads we met) still very drunk. The bus took off & we got told that it would be an hours drive to the harbour where we would be catching the boat back to Ha Long Bay - not on that dreaded boat please. Has anyone seen the tour guide Tom Bruise this morning... I will take that as a bloody no! Once again no sight but I suppose it was better off that way as his ugly mug was starting to make my stomach turn.
The bus journey went fairly quickly but I think that's because I was drifting in & out of conciousness from last nights antics. We arrived at the harbour point only to be greeted by the annoying selling women. This time though &y was on form & was playing them at their own game. When one of the women approached us he would pulling things out the bags & try to sell our things to them. They were quite shocked at us asking them to buy things from us & I don't think they fully understood the humour but we sure did as we sat howling on the wall.
Oh my gosh, look what the cat dragged in.... It was our tour guide. I said to him that I thought he had drowned in all this surrounding water or that I rather hoped he had drowned. Everyone on our tour apart from the Vietnamese people who were still getting prefencial treating over us started to click on to what we meant by shouting Top Bum & Tom Bruise instead of Top Gun & Tom Cruise because he had the stupid jacket on again with them terrible looking sunglasses. Everyone in our group was laughing at him, it was great & it felt like a small piece of justice had been served because he knew we were all laughing at him.
The boat arrived & we were allowed to board. Hang on, wait a minute - what this? That't not our boat, surely not? The boat we had boarded was clean, tidy, had a proper bar, nice people & you should see the cabins. I get it where we are now, were are on the boat we should have been on in the first place - scadalise! You should have seen the faces & the dropping jaws even on the Vietnamese people when we boarded this boat - 100% shocking but there was nothing we could do as the tour was nearly bloody over. We all sat relatively quite on the boat as we just wanted to get back on dry l& & wanting the tour to be over.
We sat talking to a lovely Isralin couple & they had told us that they had be travelling for a week or so & that they were planning to take the open tour bus down to the south of Vietnam. We had told them that we had been planning to do the same & Ana mentioned that she was planning to go to Sapa but didn't want to go on her own. That's when the decision for her to travel south with us came about. We sat on the boat labelling the main places in Vietnam that we all wanted to travel to. With the plans set all we had to do was get back to Hanoi & book everything.
Before the boat was due to dock we were ironically h&ed comment forms for us to fill in about the tour & how satisified we all were. Oh the delight in filling in these forms. We wrote everything about what had happened over the past two days & the lack of respect we all recieved from the tour guide. We descriped how horrible the boat was how dirty everything incuding the sheets was. Ana piped up to mention that these forms where pointless because they will somehow get lost in transit on our return. Lets hope she's not right.
Back on dry land & glad we headed to a restaurant which was over the road from the port. We had been told that we where going there for lunch. Maybe this food might be better than what we was given on the boat. As we all sat down in a big group we all began to talk about how horribel our tour has been and how dissatisfied we all were. The food finally arrived on the table and it wasnt bad. Most miof the stuff was edible so everyone started to tuck in. After the meal we had been told that the mini bus had arrived and was ready to take us back to Hanoi.
On the minibus we sat at the back and there were other people that had been on tours on the water that were also heading to Hanoi so there was a big mix of people. In front of us there was a man called JD who we got chatting to and he asked us where we me and Andy where travelling to next and when we said Cambodia and Laos he said he was so jealous as he had just come from that way and it was fabulous. He began to tell us things we must do and places we must visit so we wrote these down in our travel plan book so we could look a plan our Cambodia journey over the next few weeks.
When we had finished talking to him we introduced Ana to the Ipod games. She was watching Andy play this silly motorbike game and then we let her play the atheletics game that we have were you have to tap the screen execptionally fast in order to make the man on the screen run. We were in totally hysterics at the back of the bus as everyone else tried to relax and get some sleep. The next game we showed Ana was called Shake the Monkey. The aim of the game is to see how many times you can shake the monkey (the monkey being the ipod) in 10 seconds and it calculates it at the end. We sat there taking turns of shaking this Ipod only for it to look like we were masterbating super quickly. It was hilarious as we played over and over to try and beat the previous scores.
We had finally made it back to Hanoi and the bus refused to drop us off out our hostel so we had to walk to it from where he dropped us off, luckily we were now familiar with Hanoi and knew where to walk to. Glad to be back in the hostel so we could rest the manager Chien who had booked the Ha Long Bay tour for us asked us how it was.... he was met with angry sad faces of disappoinment. He was also shocked about the way we had been treated. We sat at the tables by reception and had some nice cups of tea. We had been due to leave Hanoi that night but we had to stay an extra night as we had to look around Hanoi so we could buy a new camera first thing in the morning. We had arranged for Chien to sort out the open tour bus ticket as we wanted to leave tommorrow and head to our next destination of Hue.
Chien explained to us to me and Andy that there was no dorm rooms available but he was willing to give us a private room for the night at the same cost of the dorm which was good of him. Back in the room we chilled out and relaxed after the hectic past couple of days before we went out for tea. Andy had already pre-warned me that the Everton game was on later that night and that we had to be back so he could watch it (typical man!).
We grabbed Ana and headed out on to the streets of Hanoi once more in search for a nice cheap place to eat. We had decided to walk in the opposite direction to which we usually walk to find food and we were met with a pleasant surprise. We walked along this road which took us to a lovely street which was lined with bars, cafes and restaurants. We found this one restaurant which looked like it catered for everything so we went inside and sat down. Me and Andy ended getting good old beef burgers and chips as we were well and truly fed up of rice or noodles. The food was really delcious and just what was needed, the price wasn't bad either.
We slowly walked back to the hostel as we were totally drained and in need of a good nights sleep. Back at the hostel we parted ways from Ana and we headed to our private room which was lovely. I had ran a really hot bath so I could soak my bones whilst Andy watched the football on our laptop. I am not sure whether I should mention that they got beat?!
All clean and fresh I climbed in to bed to read about Hue where we will be heading tomorrow night. Sleep soon took grasp and I was out for the count...............
- comments
jacks and badge hilarious readin again becks, u tell it so well, luv u both xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx