On Tuesday we had a lovely lie in and then had a late breakfast of pineapple pancakes- delicious! The guy serving us had been having English lessons, so he pulled up a chair at our table and started to practice what he'd learnt. He was very sweet; he told us that he loves music from the 1980s!!

We then went to the train station to buy our tickets for the return journey to Hanoi. However, all the staff were on their 3 hour break (!) until 1.30pm. Out train was at 1.10 so we were panicking! The staff were just sitting smoking outside, so it would have been no trouble for one of them to pop into the ticket office for a minute- very frustrating! However, they said the train had been delayed so waiting until 1.30pm would be fine. We waited over two hours, but when the ticket office opened the lady told us the train was full!! So annoying!

We got the bus instead which was an interesting experience! There doesn't seem to be many bus stops in Vietnam, instead the ticket collector would just open the door, while the bus was moving, when he saw any potential customers standing at the side of the road! On arrival at Hanoi bus station we were completely surrounded by hundreds of xe om and taxi drivers. They were even banging on the bus windows as it parked up! It was quite intimidating, and we ended up being bundled into a rickety old taxi. The driver got lost (although I've since learnt that they will often get 'lost' if you are paying by a meter), so the final bill totalled at 400000d (£12, very pricy!); we didn't even have that much money on us, so we emptied our purses and gave him 300000, which was still a high fare for the journey. He got very angry and as he couldn't speak english we couldn't reason with him. In the end we just handed him the money and got out, walking very quickly away!