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....great first impression! Anyway we set off on the 3.5 hour bus journey to Ha Long Bay. When we arrived we formed a little group of friends, 3 kiwi girls, 2 Danish girls, an American guy and a Argentinian guy. We got on the boat and set off, almost immediately we were served lunch, all pretty cold but a good amount of rice so we filled up on that. Food and dodgy tour guide aside the view was unquestionably incredible. It's not a modern wonder for nothing! The slightly misty and cold weather actually made it look better, we got some awesome photos. After about an hour we moored the boat and got off to explore a newly found (22 years ago) cave. We were told that the local people believe it was visited by a dragon, it was found by a local fisherman looking for medicine. The tour guide actually improved on us as the day went on, probably because he was telling us hilarious rude stories about the history of the caves and the local people. We got back on the boat and headed off to see more of the limestone rocks in various natural formations. We parted with half of our new group as some where doing the 2 day tour we were meant to do the day before, we were so pleased not to be staying as the boat was freezing and the weather was set to deteriorate. Instead we started the 3.5 hour (which turned out to be 4.5 hour) bus trip back to Hanoi.
We spent the entire time talking to our new kiwi friends, laughing on the back seats like naughty school kids. Once back in Hanoi jay and I were so tired we just grabbed some takeaway pizza and headed back to the luxury of our (only 3 stars, but it's not a hostel and it doesn't have bed bugs and in Asia that means luxury) hotel.

Tuesday 26th Jan 16
Goodbye Vietnam

We had another lovely breakfast at the hotel and headed off in a taxi to the airport. After a quick 2 hour flight we made quick work of crossing Bangkok via various trains (thanks to Jays organisation skills, I played no part). We got to the main train station with an hour to spare so we bought some pastries and snacks (now 1700 and not eaten since breakfast) for the train. We caught the train and prepared for another night on a sleeper train, this time we had soft beds, with air con and both had bottom bunks, which are considerably larger than the top ones. We felt pretty comfy and smug as we said good night from across the aisle of the train. Next stop Chiang Mai.