Date: 30th June 2011

Place: Hanoi

Weather: sunny

First thing we did today was book a trip to Sapa. We thought it was going to be hard work but it wasn't too bad. They would pick us up that evening from down the road from our hostel.

To fill up the day we went to the lounge area of the hostel and watched a bit of Slumdog Millionaire with Pete and James. We then thought we should see some of Hanoi so went for a walk down to the lake which apparently had a good coffee shop next to it. It turned out to be on OK lake and we had a good coffee overlooking it.

When we got back to the hostel we had enough time to share a plate of nachos and chill out upstairs again. Then we went to the travel shop ready to be picked up. It turned out that Sam from our Halong Bay trip had booked onto the same trip as us.

We were taken to the train station and got on the overnight train where we were all in the same carriage. It was just is and one Vietnamese woman who fell asleep straight away. Sam had loads of TV programmes on his laptop which we watched for a while. We then went for a walk down the carriage to see if we could find the food cart. All of the Vietnamese seemed really happy to see us and kept offering us some rice wine which I only took one sip of and was instantly taken back to snake village so I didn't take anymore.

Since we were going to be arriving at 5am we decided to go to sleep then. Sam had bought some Vallium so I had one which is meant to just relax you (2 is meant to send you to sleep). I thought Id only take one because I might never wake up with 2 since Im such a deep sleeper anyway.