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Our last stop in Vietnam was Hanoi, arrived off another awful overnight train journey at 04.30am, or still in the middle of the night according to our body clocks! Hanoi is our favourite place in Vietnam, it has a more European feel to it with a lake and loads of lovely cafes which we have spent a lot of time in! In fact most of our time in Hanoi has been spent in cafes, we were so tired from the train journeys we just didn't have the energy to do anything! We had a walk to the market which was HUGE, anything you can think of you can get from the market and the cheap cheap prices continued. I bought a new back pack! 120 litres, its great, it only cost 15 pound, I only hope it doesn't fall apart one day! Especially as I've sent my good one home now, possibly never to be seen again, it's fate lies in the hands of the Vietnamese postal service!
Oh, I have to mention, the hostel we are staying in has the best pillows, they are so soft, and soft pillows seem to be few and far between in Asia! We also found an Aussie cafe called Kangaroo Cafe and Phil had a burger which he would highly recommend to anyone visiting Hanoi. Sure beats the stuff you see on the street, the meat is actually unidentifiable which usually means it should be a pet as opposed to your dinner!
We went to a Water Puppet Theatre show which was interesting, it was pretty good but hard to follow some of the stories with it being in a different language. What was even better than the show though was the old lady I was sitting next to! She was asleep the whole time, the only thing that woke her up was when people clapped which she joined in with before promptly nodding back off for the rest of the show. We of course got the giggles though the entire show which was really funny!
From Hanoi we went on our trip to Ha Long Bay. We slept on the boat for one night and a hotel in a place called Cat Ba Island for one night. We both just loved it, Ha Long Bay is so impressive, magical. Our boat was great, we had a little double room which we coudn't believe the standard of and the meals were awesome. We were fed like royalty, so much food, you could never go hungry. The first day we sailed through the bay and visited some caves on one of the islands, they were pretty cool, they were massive inside. We then had a swim off the boat, we were both really brave and jumped in, even if I did spend the whole time wondering what lived in that particular bit of the sea! The next day we did our kayaking which was great. Me and Phil weren't too good at paddling in tune but it was fun all the same! We stopped off at a little beach in the afternoon which was lovely but covered in really sharp coral, Phil managed to cut his foot, pretty big cut too. I was worried he would attract the sharks with all the blood!! The afternoon paddling was quite hard after we'd been given another HUGE lunch, (you feel rude turning it down you know!) we paddled through a massive floating town where all the people had fish farms. We then re-joined our boat which took us to Cat Ba Island for the night. Our hotel here was so nice, we wanted to stay for a week! We went out after lunch to play pool with our guide Phu. He took us to some local pool bar where we were playing nicely until the locals noticed that Phil was pretty good so this guy came over and challenged him to a game! Apparently he is the best player on Cat Ba Island and all the locals came around the table to watch, so the pressure was on!!! Phil lost the first match but then played him again and whipped his butt!! Phil Thornton, Cat Ba Island World Pool Champion, haha!!!
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