Good Morning Vietnam! (always wanted to say that!) oh and I was wrong. The crapness returned. With avengance.

Ok, so Thursday night was where i left you last, and everything was rosy - right?! well Friday morning we left for the Hai Van Pass - one of the great sights of vietnam. except that i didnt see the great sight because i was busy trying not to vomit all over the minibus the entire journey to the hotel (which by the way was around 2 hours!). the only redeeming facor was that no one got to see the pass because it was so bloody misty that morning! literally, you could see about 20cm in front of you and thats about it! So i didnt make it to the hotel, about 5 minutes before we got there i gave in and vommed. It was not the start of a beautiful friendship or anything of the sort. infact it was the start of an entire day of vomming and various other ailments that was definitly not a pleasant experince. from what i was told though, the rest of the group went for a motorcycle guided tour round the rice paddys, and then went for a great night out to celebrate Chris's 19th birthday at a club nearby. I hear it was swell. I was literally in bed the entire day and according to ian and tess, i looked like death. always nice to hear! anyway, about 2am everyone came back and Tess, chris and ian came in to see me which was nice :) given they were quite drunk at the time but its always nice to hear people say you were missed :) plus its really funny to watch drunk people try and communicate with each other! so after a nice little gossip and chat about how cacada got so pissed he didnt recognise the hotel when they got bak and was adamant they were at the wrong one (what a guide! :P) they went back to their room and i went back to sleep!

Next morning (Saturday) i felt slightly better, slightly. well enough to walk to the supermarket anyway - or so i thought. turns out that intense sun does not bode well for illness such as mine and i ended up slumped on the seat in the lobby for most of the late morning whilst everyone else had lunch :( by 2pm we had left for the final night train of our journey and i was feeling a little better, enough to have something to eat anyway, but still definitly not 100%! By the time we reached Halong Bay the next morning, i was still fragile but feeling basically human again! which was good since i was about to spend the day on a boat! it was actually a really nice boat trip into halong bay and we saw the little villiages that survive on the water - literally people are born there, live there and die there without ever stepping onto dry land! they even had a bank floating on the river - with an ATM and everything! We got lunch included on the boat and wow it felt good to eat again! it was mostly seafood but the shrimps and crab were bloody fantastic in the words of Cacada! That combined with a nice little trip into some caves and an impromptue water fight between ian and sasha on the boat back to the hotel made for a quite nice day :) that night consisted of a bit f a rubbish meal at a local restaurant and a good look round the night market...at which me and tess and the other holly discovered a litte cafe that was selling off its cakes from the day for half price. We bought them. obviously.

Monday morning we left fairly early for Hanoi - only a few hours on a minibus! once we got there we checked into our hotel and went for lunch. now cacada up till this point had been the guide above all guides (except wimpy of course!) however apparently in Hanoi he knows b***** all because he got lost. seriously lost. to the point where he called taxi's to take all of us to the restaurant that he couldnt find, and paid for them! i think he felt quite bad really! :P the restaurant when we finally got there was called Gheko and it was defintiyl worth it, the menu wa amazing! i ended up having cheese and ham crepe, simple yet effective! after that we walked into the main bit of town to look around and then some of us went to see a waterpuppet theatre show. all i can say really is WTF. they were puppets, on water, dancing to real people singing at the side of the stage, people were loving it - we nearly fell asleep. i think the high point of the show was when chris tried out his french speaking skills and managed to say in a rather loud voice that he enjoyed looking at little retarded boys in the shower. well if you're going to say anything, might as well be that!

we walked back to the hotel afterwards via some markets and a mcdonalds type place that sold mcflurry type things that were actually better than mcflurrys! it did take us a while though considering we went the wrong way numurous times! still, by the time we got back it was basically time to go for dinner and for once we didnt eat as a whole group - we meant to but we couldnt find the place that everyone else had gone to so me, tess, charlotte, claire, sasha and louise ended up at this place called legend beer which did amazing lamb dishes!! oh and the really weird part - tom, charlie and alex from my first night with the group in bangkok were at the same restaurant! becuase they couldnt find the bar they were looking for, whcih turned out to be the same one we couldnt find! how weird is that right?! anyway after that little rendevous we attempted once again to find the 'hair of the dog' bar, much to a group of taxi drivers' delight and entertainment! and eventually we found it, down an alley, in the middle of nowhere. it was s***. it was worse than s***, it was a dive. we actually couldnt believe cacada had recommended this place! of course it turned out he had never been there and just picked up a flyer for it! so we didnt even bother to stay for a drink in the end, much to the barstaff's annoyance - its only redeeming feature was that it was next to a frozen yoghurt bar - a very nice frozen yoghurt bar!

by the time we got back it suddenly became apparent that tomorrow was my last day with the group because the new people had arrived...very sad times indeed! but that leads me onto today, Tuesday 13th April, my last day in vietnam, and yes, if you were wondering 'J-Goat' is still very much alive and kicking in the chanting department - thanks ian and chris! :P so today was very touristy, we did all the cultural crap that one has to do before they leave such places :P we went to ho chi minh's palace and saw his actual body that has been perserved for like 70 years or something! very creepy indeed! and a bit wrong if you ask me since his dying wish apparently was to be cremated and spread accross the three different parts of vietnam to finally unite them all in peace - and the vietnamese people decided to honour his life by disregarding his wishes completly and basically turning him into a tourist attraction for as long as scientifically possible! i mean it was very respectful and all, you had to be completly silent and well dressed etc but still! let the poor man go for gods sake! bury or cremate his ass already! ok rant over :P but yes, we saw his body and where he used to live etc etc and then we went shopping for nice things like shoes :) me and Tess ended up having lunch in a nice little place by the hotel called courtyard cafe and then it was time for my leaving do at 'little hanoi' - a fabulously nice little restaurant! perfect way to end the trip! - except i started to feel ill again and went home early...so that leads me to now, at the hotel, feeling crap again whilst everyone is out having fun at my leaving do...i guess we will see what tomorrow brings...

So Long vietnam!

oh p.s. did i mention that one of the girls charlotte went to bournemouth uni! and actually lived with laura Hamlin on my course and knows Sophie, who is coming to Oz with me?! tres small world eh!

xxx