It was only a short stay for us in Da Nang. We managed to confused ourselves and thought that the imperial city was here but it's in fact in Hue. With that in mind, we were keen to move on. We booked the train to Hue around midday and off we went. It was our first train experience in Vietnam, and I'm so glad we did it as the views along the Jurassic looking coastline were incredible.

On arriving in Hue at 16.00, we realised we didn't have an awful lot of time to see the Imperial City which closed at 17.00! We were only really keen to see that so we booked the next train onto to Phong Nha later that afternoon.

We caught a taxi from the station and asked the driver to wait with our bags while we had a little look around the Imperial city. It was really interesting to see and learnt that the imperial enclosure is a citadel within a citadel divided into several walled sections, that housed the emperor's residence. It was badly bombed in the American war and is still being restored, but amazing all the same.

After we had finished, we walked back to where we had left the taxi to find that the taxi wasn't there! I didn't panic at first because I knew Matt had the number plate of the taxi and the driver knew it, but after waiting 20 minutes and still no sign of the taxi... I started to panic slightly! I massively started to regret trusting the taxi driver with our bags, how could we have been so stupid?! I had my valuables on me, but my clothes were still valuable! Matt decided to go for a wander in case the taxi was waiting in another spot. With still no sign, he called the taxi company ranting and raving that some Vietnamese taxi driver was driving around Hue with hundreds of pounds of our stuff! I genuinely thought we had just made the biggest mistake of our entire trip when I saw a green taxi flashing its lights at me with our driver smiling away and waving frantically! My first words..."Where the Hell have you been?!"

Thankfully, we made it to the train in time and with all of our belongings. The train journey to Dong Hoi (near Phong Nha) was long but I had just got my teeth into the series Narcos so I had plenty of entertainment to keep me going. Eventually we arrived! It was late and we were so tired so caught a taxi to our accommodation for the night, Buffalo Hostel. Our room was ok, but the drains in the toilet next door absolutely reeked so we were moved to another room which was much better. The hostel offered lots of different tours of the three Phong Nha caves but these were fairly pricey so after a long consideration, we decided to try and organise the tours ourselves the next day. In our room with us was an interesting guy called Matt (also) who had pretty much travelled everywhere and was now living in Chile. We chatted to him for a good few hours before calling it a night, ready for a day of cave exploration tomorrow!