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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 it and made some friends, but none of us could stop staring longingly at the other boat with their beer and tour guide. After a bit of kayaking and a trek through a cave, we were still not allowed on the cool boat. Eventually we made it over, basically asking if we could play. A heavy night ensued with all 60 of us playing drinking games through the night. We played King's Cup and Sam got the Troll card about 4 times so had to spend the majority of the evening under the table sulking. We both also got the Sex Change card, meaning we had to swap clothes with boys. I think we were a bit picked on actually: they called us The Newbies. One of our fellow special friends was instructed to do an impression of Stephen Hawking all night.
The scenery was incredible, it being a World Heritage Site, but the fog inhibited our view a bit. We did manage to jump off the boat and splash around. We didn't find it as beautiful as Sapa - probs due to the weather. The waters were very calm and it was very peaceful, especially during sunset. We also spotted small floating viallages of fishermen.
Whilst in Hanoi we stayed in Hanoi Backpackers Hostel (Ma May), really recommend it. Next we travelled down to Hue on our first sleeper bus. This was fricking terrifying, it literally looked like the Night Bus from Harry Potter - actual bunkbeds in a bus. Wedge was stuck in a middle aisle bed with no seatbelts, so was thrown around all night long, terrified of falling down the side, onto a person. It's very hard to sleep with the bus driver playing kareoke Christmas music and honking his rediculously loud horn and slamming on the breaks every 5 minutes. Driving in Vietnam is like a hazard perception test ('organised chaos' as the locals call it). Apparently it's ok to overtake 5 vehicles, on a bend, and breastfeed your baby on your moped. They also transport anything they can on the back of their motorbikes - we've seen: live pigs, tree trunks, a family of 5...
On the bus we met our new best friends, who we ended up staying with the whole way down the coast, bumping into people in every town. They were English and Aussie, and fricking hilarious. Hue was really pretty, and very hot. We wondered around the remnaints of the citadel and imperial city. So strange to have so much land spare in a city centre, there were wild horses roaming around on it. Here Jen got upset by a moped taxi man who told her to f**k off when she refused his services. We wondered up to an ancient Pagoda on the riverbank and caught a boat back. The driver's wife giving us a bit of a fashion show in an attempt to shift some goods. We arrived back at the hostel in time for unlimited beer Happy Hour and had a good night out.
Next we headed for Hoi An. We were just chilling on another rediculous sleeper bus when Sam jerked up and asked if we had remembered to get our passports back during check-out. We hadn't. We all just sort of stared at eachother in bewilderment and were quite quiet for the rest of our journey, being 7 hours away from our passports. Actually this is only true of Jen and Harry, Wedge was having a nark attack the whole way there, desperately staring at her iPhone as if willing it to give us the answer. Finally we had a brain wave and instructed the lady (with her limited English) to give our passports to our friend Cassie who we knew was following us south the next day. This was all well and good except for the fact we didn't have Facebook to communicate with her (it's illegal), or a phone number. The next day we roamed around Hoi An aimlessly trying to spot her in the street, turns out Hoi An's quite a big place. Despite this we went and got some clothes tailor made, it being a speciality of Hoi An. That evening we finally found Cassie, and Wedge's heart rate went down. She was getting pretty pissed of with Jen and Harry's 'chillaxedness' by this point.
Hoi An was beautiful, lots of European looking winding streets based around a river, and the food was incredible. We all hired bikes and cycled to the beach the next day and frolicked in the GIANT waves. Then we headed for Nha Trang and the South of Vietnam on ANOTHER sleeper bus. We pissed off the other travellers with playing our 'guess the song' game for 2 hours. To be honest, they turned the lights of at 6pm, so it was a bit of a weird situation.
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