We got free breakfast at our hotel, which was a far cry from the free mould we got with the place we'd booked in advance, and called to reception to find out what time they served it until: 10am. It was 9.55am, so we rushed downstairs to quickly order some food. Edd ordered for us and the lady said we could only get 1 breakfast; we argued that you can't supply 1 breakfast per room as all the rooms catered for at least 2 people. She continued to say 1 breakfast in her broken English and then called the lady on reception to come and translate. She explained that we could only have 1 breakfast per person, which is what we were ordering; she then explained to the lady originally serving us that men order for women in our culture and the receptionist took our food order. Crisis.

We had to get train tickets to Sa Pa and made our way to the train station. Ladies in beautiful long blue dresses with slits up to their waists and white silk pants underneath walked around assisting customers trying to book tickets - in between texting on their phones. We took a ticket and waited for 20 minutes before our number was called; the lady who served us told us about the 2 different trains we could book SP1 or SP3, but we didn't know the difference. Edd attempted to ask if it was the carriage for the locals or the tourists, but she answered 'yes' to both questions. This is the standard answer for Asian people: if all else fails, just say yes!

We left without booking anything and walked across the road to a tourist information office. The girl on the desk did not speak very good English, so I told her to open up Google translate on her computer. I then sat behind the desk with her and we had a full on conversation via Google translate about the trains. She told us to book the SP3 train as it left later and therefore got to Sa Pa later, it would also be cheaper to go back to the manic train station and book with them, so we did.

After sitting at the station with another ticket, waiting in a virtual queue, Edd noticed people walking up to 2 desks on the left, without tickets. The writing on the window read: 'Hoi An / Sa Pa' so he went to it and asked for tickets to Sa Pa; it turned out we'd waited in the virtual queue, twice, for nothing. She told us the price and we realised we did not have enough millions of Dongs to book our tickets. I stayed at the counter while Edd went in search of an ATM; he took absolute ages and I sent him a Whatsapp message, wondering if he'd abandoned me and gone to the moon. He arrived back 20 minutes later (which felt like 20 hours standing there, holding up the fireworks) dishevelled and angry. He'd been to a grand total of 8 ATM's that would either not give him any money, or would say the maximum amount you could draw was 3.5 million Dong, so he'd asked for 3.5 million Dong and then it would say you can't draw the maximum. Then he'd ask for 3.2 million Dong and it would tell him he couldn't draw that either; it was enough to make anyones blood boil. We bought our tickets and went in search of lunch.

We shared a pizza at Panarotti's as they had a special on: buy a large pizza and pay for the small one. We then went in search of boat cruises in Halong Bay as we were going there after Sa Pa and enquired at a large number of tourist information offices; the problem with Halong Bay was that it had become too touristy and the Vietnamese have not yet put laws in place to conserve their natural environments. The water had become too polluted to swim in and there would be at least 8 other boats in the vicinity of where you possibly were, some of them being party boats with their banging music being played into the early hours of the morning. For us 'oldies' wanting to experience the natural wonder that was the 'dragon egg islands' we wanted to be as far away from the party boats as possible. We needed to book a cruise that went to either Cat Ba Island or Bai Tu Long Bay, the less touristy, cleaner parts.

Everything was either fully booked for our proposed dates, or going to Halong Bay. We had an interesting conversation with a lady at one of the tourist offices who said she was part of an educated group of young Vietnemese people trying to conserve the beauty of Vietnams natural environment. She herself chose to work in a tourist information office, trying to educate tourists on conservation, while her friends chose to work in national parks. She explained the issues around Vietnams lack of governance over nature conservation and said that as much as Halong Bay was beautiful and tourists wanted to go there, it had become too overrun with tourists and polluted. They needed the tourist income, but no one had drawn a line yet as to what was positive income and what was damaging the environment in the long run. We didn't book anything, but the conversation was both stimulating and intriguing; the only experience we'd had of Vietnamese thus far had not been positive, with them all wanting us to buy things we didn't need or want and with little to no concern regarding recycling or simply putting trash in a bin. It was a relief to know that there were educated young people concerned for the future of their country.

We then went in search of a bar for a drink and a think; we did some more research and decided that the cruise liner Edd had been in contact with via email was the best option. It was much more expensive than the others, but went to Bai Tu Long Bay. Edd called them and managed to wangle more discount off them, even though the price offered via the email was significantly cheaper than on their website already. I decided his new name would be Scrooge.

We walked back to our hotel room for an hour and a half lie down. Edd decided to get his hair cut at a barber across the road and I went upstairs to blog; he sent me a message 30 minutes later asking me to come down and veto his new do, so I made my way to the barber to assess the situation. After instructing the man in question to cut the right side of his fringe to match the left (it was 2 cm's longer) I went back upstairs to get ready for the evenings entertainment: the water puppet theatre.

Edd had a shower to wash the remains of his mullet off and we left for the show, arriving with 2 minutes to spare! The show was 50 minutes long and involved a band and singers on our left, who were also the voices of some of the puppets and / or interacted with them - it was all in Vietnamese, so we had no idea what was actually going on. There were little Vietnamese puppet people dancing on the water, boats, ducks, fish and dragons 'breathing fire' (sparklers). It was an amazing 50 minutes and we could not figure out how on earth they manoeuvred the puppets under water, from behind the screens. It was a bit like watching an opera/silent movie, minus the subtitles; we were glad we'd gone as it had received mixed reviews on Tripadvisor so had not been sure what to expect.

We then went to 'Hanoi's Best, Cheap and Cheeful (Cheerful) restaurant for dinner. The problem with service staff in restaurants in these parts is that they want to take your order as soon as you sit down; actually, they'd prefer to take your order before you sit down. You get handed a menu as you pull your chair out and the waiter then stands there with his notepad in anticipation; you kind of stare at him for a second, wondering what he's doing and then realise he's standing there to take your order; if you don't order immediately, they then stand 5 feet away staring at you until you call them. Once you've ordered, they then stand 10 feet away picking their nose, staring at you until your food arrives, handing you your plate with their bogie infested hands. Needless to say, they are very friendly.

We made our way back to our hotel room and found 1 English TV station, channel 40 (yes, we started at channel 1). It was an alien movie (strike 1) staring Tom Cruise (strike 2) with huge subtitles in Vietnamese across the bottom of the screen (strike 3); Edd went to sleep and I blogged instead.