...the flight from Ho Chi Minh to Danang (Hoi An) only took an hour - don't really know why they bother with the overnight train! The train is about $25 each, the plane is $50...

As soon as we stepped off the plane, the cold hit us!! The temperature is 10 degrees cooler than where we were (we have gone north though) - it's only 22 degrees! Cold.
Another 45 minutes on the mini-bus to get to our hotel, and it started raining! Rain ruins everything!
Hoi An is a much smaller place with a population of only 76,000 and we're looking forward to a much calmer place after the madness of Ho Chi Minh City.

We arrived at our hotel around 7pm so quickly got our rooms sorted and headed out for some food. It's a much smaller and compact town, with small roads and not much traffic. We made our way to the Old Town area. It's such a nice place, with little alleyways and roads, small shops and restaurants, and has a lot of old Chinese influence with lots of lanterns lit up everywhere. It's on a small river too - very picturesque! Everybody fell in love with the place straight away even with the miserable rain.

Our tour leader booked us into a restaurant called Morning Glory. There's so many nice things on the menu, and it's pretty much the first time we've been so stuck on what to get. We shared wontons with crabmeat, onions and tomato for starters - was lovely. Then I had Caramel Fish in a Clay Pot, which was mackerel in peppercorn and pineapple sauce with pickled onion, and boiled rice. It was so nice and tasty - peppercorn with pineapple goes really well! Therese had Mackerel in banana leaf with different spices and rice which was really good too. We shared waffles with ice cream and chocolate sauce for desert! The food was so good and cheap - only 333 Dong (just over £10)! That includes 4 beers of the local stuff called Larue - 15,000 Dong a bottle (50p). Definitely want to come back here before we leave - the problem is there's quite a lot of restaurants that are supposed to be good.

We had a little walk around and saw lots of nice looking bars and restaurants - they're all small and cool looking. Saw the river overflowing onto the road too - it's normal apparently...
We went to a bar called Before 'N' Now. Cool little place and it's where a lot of backpackers head to. It's got a huge bed thing at the back but a load of people were already on there. Cheap for beer as usual.
There's another place that we need to go to that does beer for 4,000 Dong (13p)!!
There were some guys going around with fliers trying to get people to a "beach party". We weren't really interested given it was throwing it down still! But 4 of us gave in at about 1am and got the free mini-bus to the party. It wasn't actually on the beach, thankfully, just inside a little building with a swimming pool outside it. We walked in, to hear a Vietnamese band playing all kinds from Lady Gaga to Bon Jovi - they were quite good actually. It's only a small place and was fairly busy - cheap drink too! I was pretty knackered but did start to perk up a bit and got a bucket cocktail of vodka, red bull and fanta to keep me going. Contrary to what you might think, we are not drunk all the time with all this cheap booze!
There were people who started stripping off to their underwear and jumping in the outdoor swimming pool! Wasn't exactly warm and was raining (yeah yeah, I know you're going to get wet anyway!). We weren't that drunk to start swimming...
There were some characters in there - plenty of very drunk people, but everyone is out to have a good time and everyone chats to anyone. It's a really good atmosphere! Got talking to a few different people and strutted our stuff on the dancefloor.

We went for the 3am mini-bus back to town and while we were waiting in the mini-bus, all the power went off in the club! We were glad to get going. We still had to walk 10 minutes to our hotel in the damn rain though.

Been another long day...