We woke up from a wonderful sleep at the fancy hotel ☺️ and had a lovely breakfast (although the beans where still luke warm but hey it's Asia). We were waiting to be collected for our tour in the beautiful hotel lobby when a suspicious looking fella comes in, I say to jay 'he looks super dodgy' and of course he is running our tour! We were pointed to the bus where the tour man started arguing with another person on the tour claiming they owed more money....g...

Saturday 23rd January 2016 After a lovely train journey into Hanoi (probably the best overnight journey we have had), we immediately saw how cold it was going to be. We had seen on a weather forecast that it was going to be about 12•c but when we saw how grey and wet it was, we were kind of upset and annoyed. We thought we were going to be missing out this winter. Oh well won't be for long. We walked quickly towards our hotel, I was still dressed in shorts bu...

Thursday 21st Jan '16 We flagged down the bus and were literally grabbed and pulled on by the bus conductor. She was really nice and said to sit up the back where we could stretch out and lay our bags down....until we had to pay. We gave exactly the right amount and seemed really put out and said we needed to pay more because our bags took up an extra seat, so we moved them into our laps, she then said we still needed to pay more because they were heavy bags, ja...

Woken up by the horny Russians again, almost exactly the same time as the first morning, 0630hrs...... At least there consistent. We still had the moped so after a scrummy breakfast we headed off to a supermarket to buy some sun lotion and hair conditioner. Asia is amazing, the culture is so set against darkening your skin as this would suggest you work outside and therefore are poor, meaning that they don't sell anything other than factor 50. But they do sell wh...

So another early start and another early train, this time we were up and out waiting for a taxi at 0445hrs. We literally walked out of our hotel and flagged a taxi down, it was very Hollywood-Esk but without the awesome wolf whistle (I must learn how to do this). Once at the train station we had to wait, even though it was the first train to depart from the first station, somehow it was still 20 minutes late.... Only in Asia! We had booked the cheapest tickets p...