Well....interesting start to our stay in Hanoi, Vietnam. We arrived into the Old Quarter and were met by a man outside the hotel we had booked that said our air conditioning had broken so they would move us to another hotel free of charge, looking back we should have questioned it but he seemed to have all of the right paper work (plus we had been travelling since 3am so all we could think was "please just let us sleep!") Any who, checked into the hotel (£3 each a night which we paid with Agoda - good times) and walked into the dirtiest room with bugs and big scary dark furniture (bad times). Consequently me and Jenni spent the whole night sharing a single bed, cocooned in the duvet to avoid being eaten by cockroaches. In the morning we checked out and were told we had to pay $18 as we asked to move hotels!! Basically we had been massively scammed! Well, we weren't paying that so after a bit of shouting and him swearing in Vietnamese we just ran! Massive shame as we feel like we can't trust anyone now but at least we didn't lose any money.
The rest of our day was great, found a new hotel and booked our tour to Halong Bay through Eva Travel. Also booked out coach from north to south vietnam :)
We then went to the Vietnamese prison (after holding hands, closing our eyes and basically screaming when we had to cross any road - crossings don't exist here, you just dodge the motorbikes, literally DO or DIE!) the prison was fascinating but quite harrowing, the guillotine and all the "death row" cells were still there and apparently the French army would be-head the Vietnamese activists and stick their heads on the wall for anyone to take if they wanted (seriously, why would you want that?!)
After a few drinks at our hotel we met two guys from Australia and England (both in their 60s) they were fab and had very interesting stories as had spent a lot of time living in Vietnam. The English guy had just got married to a Vietnamese lady who we met as well and they were having loads of problems getting visas - they can't live together in England or Vietnam and she is pregnant so they don't know what country / how they will pay for her to have the baby. Really sad :((
More adventures tomorrow.....