Just a brief blog for Nimh Binh. We stayed 24 hrs on the way to Hue, mainly to see Tam Coc. We hired a motorbike to get around the town. We drove out of the town a bit and saw some gorgeous sites. Eventually we arrived at Tam Coc, where you hired a rower and a boat to take you down the river, through 3 caves. We went in the afternoon on recommendation that it would be quieter and the vendors would be less 'enthusiastic'. When we got there, a bus load of tourists...

Keen to get out to Ha Long Bay, we decided to steer away from the main tourist route and took a boat out to Cat Ba Island and book a tour from there. Getting to Cat Ba was yet another difficult experience travelling independently. We took a bus to the ferry port (no problems) and literally had to argue with a woman to get a reasonable price for a boat ticket to Cat Ba. Eventually we got on the slow boat, which turned out pretty well as we met a young Vietnamese s...

Haven't blogged in a while, so this will be brief whilst we play catch up. We landed in Hanoi in the evening after a very easy 1 hr flight (the alternative would have been a36hr bus ride!). From the moment we landed, everything we wanted/needed to do seemed like such a struggle, from getting a taxi to the city to finding a hotel room. After 3 hrs, we eventually found a place to stay for the night and sorted ourselves out with a good meal.It was a veggie restaura...