So after the best nights sleep recovering from the Halong Bay cruise, me and Franks decided to stroll around the city and find stuff to occupy ourselves with until our flight on the Friday. Well half way through the day I started to feel very ill and the next few days were pretty much wasted in Hanoi being bedridden. Unless you want to hear about the countless films we watched, the stupid amounts we spend on western chocolate or the $74 doctors trip which I'm gue...

After the usual breakfast of a French baguette and egg, everyone was told to pack quickly as we were leaving the boat to go to our own private island. It was quite funny watching everyone struggle from the last night events but everyone soldiered on regardless! The first stop was cliff diving and I was so so excited for this. Out of fifteen people including five Irish men, only four guys and me and Franks were up for jumping. The guys jumped off the boat first a...

Half an hour after we were meant to be picked up, myself and Franks sat nervously anticipating the worst in the hotel lobby. Stella, our Vietnamese travel agent, wasn't the most reliable and we had managed to blag everything she had booked so far. So at 8:40 when a "party cruise" bus rocked up outside our hotel I couldn't tell you what I was feeling at that point. After we had picked everyone up, fifteen of us, we started the two hour drive to the coast. As every...

Today we woke to at 7am to get ready for our day trip to the Perfume Pagoda. Our tour guide was called Thon and he was pretty cool and on the way gave us our itinerary for the day. After a two hour drive we arrived at the harbour (from observation a set of stairs into the river) and were split into groups to go on the boats. The tiny tin boats with mini plastic chairs were paddled by local women. We drifted through the northern Vietnam mountains with water bein...

This morning our Aussie buddies Angus and Alex had bravely agreed to pick us up for a motor bike lesson. After missing another complementary breakfast due to prioritising sleep, a common occurrence, our bike tutors had arrived for the day. In hindsight we should have realised that this day wouldn't be very productive, suppose that's what you get what the alcohol is so cheap! After an hour of sunshine the black clouds flew in so we retired to a bamboo bungalow at ...