Finally we have hit the warm weather again! After barely seeing the sun for over 3 weeks, we arrived in Mui Ne after a long 21 hours on the bus at 130pm on Saturday and although it was cloudy it was still plenty hot enough! We found a cheap mini hotel, which bizarrely also doubled up as an opticians (we saw not a single customer in there the whole time!) and then spent the rest of the afternoon getting our bearings in this odd little place - there's no town as su...

What a brilliant few days it has been! Once we got settled in Hoi An by the early evening we immediately got involved and set off out to find a tailor and get measured up! With literally hundreds to choose from we figured we could walk round for days checking them all out and be none the wiser, so we just took a gamble and went to the one recommended by our guesthouse. No sooner had we stepped through the door than we were seated and had the 2011 Next catalogue t...

As soon as we got off the night bus from Hanoi Hutch confidently declared that we were at the DMZ - when I later explained how I was pretty sure the overnight sleeper bus hadn't dropped us tourists right outside the de-militarised zone I think she understood my reaction! We were then pretty much stalked by a tout on a moped, who we couldn't shake off until we promised to look at his hotel. It turned out to be ok so we stayed there just to shut him up, but we did...

We arrived back in to Hanoi station at 5am on Saturday morning and due to yet more excellent map reading skills we ended up having a nice half hour jaunt in a big loop checking out the sights (ie. the odd local up already having pho for breakfast sat on a small stool on the pavement!) around the train station before we eventually got ourselves on the right route and back to the Drift hostel. There we had to read the riot act to the night watchman on reception to ...

After getting back from Halong Bay around 5pm we then had to fit a few jobs into the 3 hours or so that we had before the taxi picked us up to take us to the train station and we started to get really excited, if a little nervous, about what the next 3 days would be like. We had this cute girl escort us all the way to our beds in the train, and then eventually managed to block out the ramblings of a Vietnamese woman in our cabin chatting to her boyfriend on spea...