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...

GOOD MORNING VIETNAM!! Although not such a good one.... Hanoi did not get off to the best start as it was freezing cold and pouring down with rain for pretty much the whole time, it was like being back in Manchester! We spent the best part of day 1 agonising over which tours we were going to book for Halong Bay and Sapa. It's just so hard to know whether you're getting scammed or not and how much you should be bargaining for things. Anyway after finally decidin...