...after the most stressful journey so far from hongkong back through china to the north of vietnam, i had the most incredible couple of weeks in my favourite country to date. we drove into the capital, hanoi after being royally ripped off by the border taxi department, who instead of taking us to the local bus stop as requested drove us to the middle of nowhere and called a bus to come and pick us up, of course the taxi guys buddy charged us 6 x the price of the public bus and the taxi driver refused to take us anywhere else so we had to go with the flow. things nearly turned nasty when he refused to let us have our bags out of the boot but the fool had left his keys in the ignition so i stole them and bribed him to give us the luggage back! the nightmare unfortunately didnt end there, the bus which we were paying a ridiculous amount of money for then proceeded to fill itself up (for 3 hours) with illegal goods!!! they were being stuffed under our feet, our seats, over our heads and anywhere with a tiny bit of space, providing of course it was under the window so that when it got smuggled into the city they would not be stopped! when we finally got going we stopped every 5 minutes on the 4 hour journey to pick up local passengers at the side of the road (for FREE), im sure you can do the maths but we ended up with far more passengers than seats!!! anyway after the bad start vietnam and its people turned out to be fantastic, in comparison to the chinese and indians they were angels, always smiling, great sense of humour and just lovely. we spent a few days in the capital, drinking cocktails at the funky monkey bar (with the cousin of van nistlerooy) than headed to Halong Bay on the coast for a few days went kayaking through the islands and slept on a boat in the bay. smoked some shisha and had a chilled few days enjoying THE best seafood and the sunshine! we then hopped on our first overnight bus (14 hours) down the coast to hue, apart from the ahole israelite in front of me who insisted on putting his chair back as far as possible it wasnt too bad! we biked around the countryside (as in motorbiked) one day (as passengers obviously!) through tiny villages to private monasteries and markets and tombs, absolutely loved in, myt turn me into a biker chick yet. then spent the nyt get absolutely wasted with some other travellers on the worst vodka ever - its wheaty! we then moved on to hoi'an which is just beautiful, untouched by the war and protected by the government from modernisation its so cute, did way 2 much shoppin and drank way to many banana milkshakes. best memory of here is that me & jem thought we'd treat ourselves to a massage seein as it cost like a pound and we got carried away and had some otha stuff wen we shoulda just stopped, jemma had her eyebrows plucked using cotton which was weird enuf, but the woman then proceeded to pull out a huge razor (like barbers use) and shave her face! like in between her eyebrows and all around, we are still waiting to see if she will grow a unibrow! next stop was nhatrang - it p***ed down for 2 days solid, not much to report! so next we escaped 2 the sunshine of mui'ne - an up and coming beach resort, where we swam & sunbathed all day and occasionally cycled up the beach to a bar where i cud play pool and jem could play guitar. lush. finally our last real stop in 'nam, was saigon/ho chi minh city, it was very modernized and we had a tight schedule to get to cambodia, so we spent a interesting but horrific day going to the cu chi tunnels (where we shot AK47's) and the war museum (with stillborn 'Agent Orange' babies in jars, then headed up the mekong delta (very Apocalypse Now) to cambodia......