Our last day in Vietnam consisted of us packing up and sitting in airports and planes. After packing up in the morning Karina, Koskey and I took one last look through the markets in the old quarter to see what we could find.

While at the markets I demonstrated much improved abilities to bargain, especially in comparison to our efforts in Hoi An. The trick I found in haggling is to show a little bit of interest at first and then pretend that you don't want to buy the item at all. If you actually don't want it, it works even better! It is unlucky that it took two weeks to figure this out!

I was looking at some wooden carved statues of the Vietnamese Unicorn statues that often 'guard' their temples. I asked how much and the shop keeper said 160000. My offer of 100000 was laughed at. Upon starting to walk away the lady then began dropping her price starting at 140, 120 and then 110. At this stage I didn't really wan't the statues and kept saying no trying to walk away. Next thing, she agreed on my offer, It is considered very rude to not buy something after a price has been agreed on so I had to buy them. It would have been interesting to try this on some of the more expensive things we bought but we didn't really have much of a technique to haggling at the time.

Since we struggled to spend all our money at dinner last night we had another go at lunch today, this time succeeding with flying colours. We ate a fairly big meal and the few cocktails each certainly helped along with the fact that we ate at our hotels restaurant which was a fair bit more expensive than most of the other restaurants we had been to in Hanoi. Everyones wallets were empty and we even had to use Australian money to tip our waiter!

After lunch it was time to head on our way ready for the hours of sitting on planes! First flight from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City was fine, spent the hour and a bit playing cards. There was a big storm in Ho Chi Minh City when we landed and again we didn't have much of an idea where we should be going, but when in doubt we follow the crowd and we managed to find our next flight.

The flight home seemed to drag on much longer that the flight leaving Australia. Out of the 5 seats we had only two were fully functioning. One seat did not have a remote for the TV, one seat's TV didn't work and I was lucky enough to score the seat with the TV and remote, but the backrest that didn't recline!

One more flight and we were back in Brisbane. Overall we had an awesome trip!! It was really good to see the different culture and enjoy plenty of cheap food and drink!! In saying this, I think we are all looking forward to little things like drinking water out of a tap and crossing a road without several close calls with scooters!!