We got off the sleeper train from Sapa and had 2 hours to repack our bags and head for Halong Bay. We naively thought the journey was about half an hour out of Hanoi (Jen being a geographer and all), but were very wrong indeed. 4 hours later we got there. Here is where the story of the special boat begins. They oversold tickets and subsequently we were stuck on a 10 man boat, whilst the remaining 50 people partied 100 metres away on the cool boat. We got on with ...

Before we were able to step out of the airport in Hanoi, Harry in toe, we encounetered our first major obasticle. Jen got stuck at the Vietnamese border. Of course she immediately panicked and declared to everyone she was going to have to live there forever, before realising that Sam simply had to flash the border control guy a smile and she was allowed to cross Border Control to collect the neccessary cash. We immediately failed in paying attention to the warnin...

We left for Heathrow at 4pm and arrived in Bangkok twenty four hours later one passport down (nearly). We hopped into a taxi to Khoasan Road and were immediately ambushed at a petrol station by seven lads jumping on the car and trying to speak English to us and our blonde hair. The taxi man was a mentalist and without seatbelts it all added to the experience of shear terror. Whilst flying down the highway, pick-up trucks sped past with fifty odd people crammed in...