We got up fairly early and decided to go and explore the capital. Callum and Dan joined us and we went to the market (which turned out to be not a very good one), looked at caged tortoises and a lot of tack which included piles of football tops, jumpers, leather jackets, and even childrens shoes with Psy who released the song 'Gangnam style' on - bizarre things that we are sure people wouldn't need in this 30 degree heat. Lauren was really desperate for more pairs of pants but the bartering wasn't going her way, and I for the life of me couldn't find a plain black strappy top. The four of us shuffled through the mass of tack and joked about how fun it would be to play hide and seek or rally 123 in there and be able to buy disguise outfits as you go along (we thought the hostel should put this on as a new day trip activity).

We walked around the city centre lake, repeatedly avoided getting ran over and made our way to an old prison museum which the French had built to imprison Vietnamese in favor of communism. It was interesting and sad for them, but we couldn't help notice the language used to translate and the whole way the thing was portrayed was extremely biased and bitter, which was understandable but I hadn't noticed this anywhere else where we've seen tragic events being revisited.

We went for some lunch with a view, but it was really hot and I'd started to feel run down with a fuzzy head and sore throat from the air con and fan combination the night before. Next up we went to watch Asia's longest water puppet show. We thought this would be a good thing that it was long, but it turned out after 10 minutes of watching it, you've seen everything you need to see for a water puppet show, so the 50 minute duration was quite painful. Lauren and I struggled to keep our eyes open, Callum was counting down the acts to the end and Dan we surprisingly found out after enjoyed it all. I don't think it helped that I had some tall woman sat in front of me blocking the centre view so I watched a lot of it through her mate's iphone videos recording it.

After enough cultural activities, we left the guys to go on a further search for pants for Lauren and eventually found some as well as stumbling across a cool Vietnamese designer shop where I bought two tops for only 10 GBP. I had a nap and drank lots of water, we got our washing back by laundry service and despite feeling poorly still headed out with Dan and Callum to meet two other girls off our boat trip at the other Central backpackers hostel for dinner and a pub quiz. While we were out in the street flagging down a taxi, I saw Florian from back in Hoi An walking down the street so we shouted him over to come and join us. We arrived at the hostel and there were a few other girls who had also been on the boat trip, and we all went to a little Vietnamese place for dinner.

We split into teams for the pub quiz, which coinsidentally our pal 'Canada' was hosting, and I didn't pay great attention as I'll admit my knowledge on geography and sport isn't great! The challenges in-between were entertaining, we made the lads participate in as they mostly involved drinking, and then Dan and Callum left early to get their night bus to Sapa. Lauren was in her element answering all the questions, I had one beer and went onto water wanting an early night as I felt quite drained. We won the quiz (our team was called 'I have a really cool necklace' - name picked by Lauren to mock Canada's necklace) and we left the others to go out clubbing and went back to the hostel to get some rest.

In the morning, we packed up and went to meet Florian and Wesley (who had made it back to Hanoi the night before from his trip) for some lunch at a local Vietnamese place. I still wasn't feeling great so Lauren and I didn't eat - but were shocked to find they charged Florian more for his food today in comparison to the other day because he wasn't in the company of anybody Vietnamese. We had found this occurring more often, or better said been realizing this was happening more often that they charge westerners more, and discussed what an uproar it would be in Britain if we charged foreigners a higher price! We said goodbye to them both, bought some snacks and headed off to the airport to say goodbye to Vietnam.