Today we slept in until 2! Were too lazy!! We went for lunch at Gecko, Gecko is massive here they have like 30 restaurants, some cheap in the hostel areas for backpackers and some more expensive up-market restaurants!

We then went for a walk around the old Hoa Lo prison! Never have I been so scared in my LIFE! It's so creepy and dark and they play real dreary music. We walked through an area where all the prisoners were chained together in a room with nothing but a bucket for a toilet! They have manakins of the prisoners begging on the floor, starved of food! Trust Annie to compare it to Madame Tussaud's!! :/

Then Annie came running out of the building as she walked into a prison cell alone and thought that the ghosts were trying to talk to her! I went for a look and it WAS haunted! The air suddenly goes so cold and I got shivers running through me, I could just imagine the cell door slamming shut and me being locked inside with all of the skeletons of Vietnam! Freaky! The cobwebs and spiders that cover every crevice of the building also don't help much!

We didn't really do our research before coming here, I thought it was just an ordinary prison but apparently not... It was purpose built by the French to contain Vietnamese political prisoners during the French Colonial Movement. Political prisoners who protested for independence were tortured and killed here. Also, the name, Hoa Lo, means "hell's hole!" great, just we're I planned on spending my vacation... Casually wondering through hell :/

It made for a very depressing day walking around this eery place, and seeing the weapons used to torture inmates, like electrical probes to the head and theres also a huge guillotine on display too with photos of the beheaded!

The coolest part of the prison was the drains that were on display, the drains are what the prisoners used as an escape route to crawl through in the 60's! Some of them got away with it too! Wouldn't catch me squeezing through a wet, smelly, rat infested drain pipe!

Not that It was much different to being inside though, the food that the prisoners were fed would often give them salmonella and in one month a total of 60 prisoners died at one point, in one year, as many as 200 died!

Safe to say conditions were pretty bad to say the least!!! Then the tour around the prison has a very sad twist as you carry on upstairs to discover the prison was later used by the Vietnamese in 1971 to hold the first American US Pilot during the 2nd world war, when conditions where so much better! The American prisoners had life easy here and were allowed communication back home, gifts, they were allowed to celebrate Christmas with a tree and had a church built so they could prey! I personally think the Vietnamese are too nice! These guys just bombed their country and now there hosting for them! Thats why the prison was also sarcastically named, Hanoi Hilton by US recruits!

I have never EVER been interested in history or anything that's happened in the past to do with war or politics... It goes in one ear and the out the other with me, I just find it so boring! But here, I think it's so fascinating to find out what happened!

Anyway moving forward, we went for fried rice at Lucky Restaurant on the way home before getting ready to go meet Toni and Lee at Mao's bar! We had a few beers there and then they took us on their mopeds to South Gate Bar, a nice very modern, clean Wine bar the other end of town! We all had to share a bottle of Rosé as its the only wine I drink so I felt bad but really... When your a traveller spending £20 On a glass of wine you can be picky! My first glass of wine in like 3/4 months... One glass and I was gone.

We met Lee's friend Sean here, he's from Bristol and has been teaching English here for 3 years! This is what Annie wants to stay in Asia to do so she got some advice from him, even though he was that wasted that we were the ones correcting him on his bad grammar!

So after a few hours here we went to go dance in Flow bar, South Gate is lush but it's so modern that you could be anywhere in the world drinking in a wine bar, I'd prefer a more typically Vietnamese place! Flow bar wasn't much better either, full of backpackers, holiday makers and expats, hardly any Asians! I actually feel more out of place in these touristy places now, because I think we're now Asian! We've probably eaten more noodles than most Asians!

The best part about it though was backpacker prices! Sex on the beach for £1.50? That's more like it! Even if it does come in a plastic cup! When it closed here we drove across the freeway to Phuc Tan Bar, a ran down, mucky nightclub by the river that's packed out and hot! We stayed outside dancing by the river for the majority of our stay here, the chavs from the boarder crossing where here with there crutches at 2:00am! I mean please? Go home already!