After arriving in Hue we went around the Royal Citadel, the former home of Vietnam's royal family. The following day we had a trip up the Perfume river to the Thien Mieu Pagoda before going out into the countryside on the back of motorbikes, thankfully the roads were quieter than in Hanoi! We stopped at villages along the way seeing how they make incense sticks, the iconic Vietnamese conical hats and other handicrafts. We saw rice being harvested in the paddies by hand and being put through threshing machines to separate the rice grains from the stem. The country people are so friendly and they offered our group to have a go if we wanted. As we sped through villages the children loved to run towards us shouting hello, waving and wanting to slap hands with us as we rode by. We saw many duck farms and in one place a farmer was 'herding' ducks up a river, following behind in a small boat. Pigs were going by strapped on the back of motorbikes!

On the way back to Hue we stopped briefly at a small agricultural museum where a tiny but sprightly 79 year old lady did demonstrations of traditional farming methods. She had completely black teeth from years of chewing betel nuts, this was considered beautiful in her generation.

A half day bus journey took us to our next destination of Hoi An, a charming place and shopping paradise. We should have seen some stunning scenery along the way but rain ensured we couldn't see too much. The town is full of tailor shops and you can have beautiful clothes or shoes of any style, design and fabric made to measure in just a day or two. Hoi An is another UNESCO World Heritage Site and has many traditional buildings and streets and a Japanese covered bridge. Another boat trip, this time up the Thu Bon river took us to a small village where they build boats and make other wooden products. A man plugged in his electric saw by pushing two wires into a socket trailing along the wet ground! We saw people fishing on the river with large nets probably 20m square, which they raise and lower by a sort of pulley system from a nearby platform.

We took a bicycle ride out of town one afternoon and stopped to look at a bamboo bridge across a canal, our guide suggested we could try walking across it, unfortunately it broke near to where Martin and another couple of people were standing and they nearly ended up in the water! A whole host of local people came to look and an animated discussion followed, we couldn't quite work out if they were angry or not as they wouldn't accept any money. Feeling very guilty we apologised and continued on the bike ride, through more beautiful green farmland and dodging large plastic sheets laid out on the roads covered with drying rice. That evening we had a meal in the home of a local family in Hoi An and we had a wonderful selection of delicious Vietnamese food. The husband and wife were in their 30's with 2 girls of 11 and 2 years old. Their home was nice and modern but has only been recently built, replacing a small cottage with dirt floors. No mortgages are available and they had to work hard, save and borrow from relatives to build the new house. The best room of the house upstairs was mostly empty apart from a small shrine and the room is reserved for ancestral worship. They didn't have beds or mattresses, just mats on the floor to sleep on.

We've had a lot of rain so far in Vietnam, perhaps only 2 days have been completely sunny. It is rainy season so we have to expect some but a tropical storm in the South China Sea, heading to the Philippines may be having an effect on the weather here. One thing we are trying to get used to is the currency, £1 is approximately equivalent to 25000 Vietnamese Dong. It seems odd withdrawing 1.5 million Dong (£60) from a cash machine!