After Hue we made our way down to Hoi An in the soft seater carriage of the morning train. This involved being packed into a carriage with the locals all watching a Bollywood movie dubbed in Vietnamese!! The scenery as we got closer to Hoi An was beautiful with white sandy beaches and clear blue sea. To get to Hoi An we had to disembark the train at Danang and get a taxi half an hour into the town. We shared our cab with an English website designer who was doin...

The day we arrived back in Hanoi from Sapa we made our way to the Hanoi Mausoleum Complex. Unfortunately once we had grabbed a coffee and some breakfast and walked the long walk over there from the hotel it was 11am and it was closing! Oops! Anyway it seemed most of it was being refurbished and Ho Chi Minh's body had been moved to Russia for a bit so we couldn't see him anyway. A bit of a disappointment really but we got to see some super communist buildings and...

The sleeper train to Sapa was a fun experience. We were crammed into a tiny 4 bunk cabin with another couple from London. We were quite relieved that they were fun, nice people because it was an extremely cosy experience. Also no one snored which was a plus :-)!! We chatted for a couple of hours before trying to get some sleep around 11pm. The beds were comfy enough but the train was so bumpy at times that I was literally lifted off the mattress before bouncing ...