Our train arrived on time at Haiphong Station in the early evening on Tuesday 17 July. The hard wooden seats had been pretty uncomfortable, so we were glad to be able to walk around again. We had been put in contact with a guy named Duy (pronounced Zwee) who is a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend back in Cape Town. He is an English teacher and pastor and he was kind enough to meet us at the station. He helped us get a taxi to a hostel and then then, once we'd showered, took us to his house to meet some of his students and also a visiting American missionary team from a Southern Baptist church in Texas. We all went for dinner at a local restaurant down the street and then we sat in on two sessions that the Americans presented. Afterwards, two of the students gave us a ride back to our hostel where we went straight to bed.

Wednesday we woke up after an uncomfortable nights sleep and got a lift over to the hotel where the Americans were staying. We joined them and some of the students for breakfast and iced coffee at a little local coffee shop overlooking a park. We then all wandered down to a street market where we browsed around. We decided to change hotels, so Kevin went off to get the things while Monique waited patiently in the foyer. After clearing up some confusion over the price of the room - we took our things upstairs and then joined Duy and the Americans for lunch. They took us to a fancy restaurant on the top floor of one of the tallest buildings in the city - amazing view :-) The food was delicious and we enjoyed chatting and hearing Duy's story. Kevin and I really felt so blessed to be included in Duy and the American team's plans. They really showed such kindness towards us and we had a great time hanging out with them. After lunch, we headed back to our room to do some admin, and then walked next door, pulled up tiny plastic chair and had a pretty good fried chicken dinner on the street - a bit like KFC just with a lot less meat on the pieces. We got to meet and chat with an interesting Vietnamese/Canadian woman, who helped us order and was cool to talk with. Later, we chatted briefly to the guys at the table next to ours and joined them for a few shots of the dodgy-looking black liquid they were drinking (turned out to be Vietnamese vodka) before heading up to bed to finalise our plans for our trip to Halong Bay the next day.

Thursday we woke early, packed up our things and checked out. We left our bags in storage and walked to the nearby bus station, picking up some egg & beef rolls on the way for breakfast. After a two-and-a-bit hour bus ride to Halong City and then a quick moto-taxi, we arrived at the pier. We bought tickets from a reputable looking guy - quite a bit more expensive than we were expecting, but none of the signs were in English and the boat was leaving soon so we had to take him at his word. Our boat wasn't crowded and we got a seat on the open deck on the top to admire the views. Unfortunately, the water was just teeming with other boats and litter (Halong Bay is actually a pretty big port, so apart from the private and tour boats, there are a lot of ships sailing around) which didn't make for a very peaceful trip :-/ We stopped at some caves to look around which was interesting, and then sailed on to look at a floating fish farm. After that, we sailed around some more of the islands and back to the pier. It was dissapointing to see how commercial tourism has completely taken over here. The mentality of everyone seems to be "try and make a quick buck" with no regard for anyone or anything else (we had felt it in other parts of the country as well but here it just seemed so in-your-face.) You feel especially taken advantange of for being a foreigner. If we had known it would be like this, we would definitely have passed on Halong Bay.

The tour was an hour and a half shorter than was promised, so we went to talk to someone about it. It was there that we also found out that we had been waaaay overcharged for the trip in the first place :-( We walked around trying to find the guy who we had bought tickets from, but he had dissapeared. We were so grateful for the lady that we were talking to - she spoke good English and she said she was able to get most of our money back! She spoke to someone on the phone and a few minutes later, we were reimbursed and off to get a moto-taxi and then a bus back to Haiphong. We ran into the Americans back at the hotel so were able to say goodbye. It was early evening when got a taxi down to the train station and boarded the train for the trip back to Hanoi.

By now we were so over Vietnam. We had read before that many people who travel there vow to never return, but we had decided to go anyway, thinking that it couldn't be that bad. Now we can totally see now why people feel that way. We toyed with the idea of just cutting our losses and flying straight back to Bangkok, but after calming down a bit, we decided to just shorten our time in Vietnam to be absolute bare minumum.