Today we did a tour around the city, we visited the Citadel and some tombs. We watched the women that make the triangular Chinese hats from leaves and also watched them making incense sticks by hand! Productive day!

We Woke up at 8 and got a phone call at 8:20 to say the bus was outside waiting! They were 10 minutes early!! Unheard of in Asia! The coach was already full of 20 people waiting for us to board! Whooops....

Our tour guides English wasn't very good so I gave up trying to listen must of the time as I couldn't work it out! We went to the citadel which is the old city where the 9 emporors used 'hang out'! ;) it's a city within an even bigger, moated city, it's huge! The moat that surrounds it is full of tall lotus leaves and a few bright flowers just coming out, beut!

Inside there are endless temples to walk around and there are numerous pagodas! There's an exhibition showing the colourful costumes worn by the emporors dancers, (where we tried to put our heads above the collars to see how they looked on :p) got some funny looks trying to take photos of this! Ha! And then there's also parts where you see the emporors thrones and the usual shrines etc! Thus was a day tour in itself!

Then from there we went to visit a pagoda, which shall remain nameless, it does have a name but i cant understand a word that the tour guide speaks! There was loads of exotic plants in the well maintained gardens surrounding it and lots of fruits growing, including figs! (is fig even a fruit?) and they have beautiful koi pond too! In fact I enjoyed the outside garden tour more than inside the pagoda, as I couldn't tell what he was saying! The things I did catch were, the Chinese writing that's etched into plaques places around the pagoda is Chinese poetry! And the doors of the pagoda lift off of the hinges so that everything can be removed for between November-December when the heavy rainfall comes! In November 2001 the pagoda sat under 3mtre deep floods!

After that we went to our first tomb! There's again a pagoda, a lotus pond, a temple, lots of shrines, lots of stairs, lots of walking about in ancipitation to see a dead body! When we finally got to the tomb we realised it is just kind of a lump of concrete! I wanted to lift the lid just to check that no ones actually stolen the body in the night!

I got my zombie profile on for the picture but ended up looking more like the emporors new groove! :s

After here we went for lunch, no wonder it was free and we only paid $10 for the tour it was vile! Cold mushy rice, warm soggy tofu, and water with celery to act as vegetable soup! Rank! Vietnam has such amazing food, give me some of it!!!

After the poor excuse for a meal we went to the second tomb! This one was very aesthetically pleasing, its all rustic, made with black marble and rote iron and it's decorated with gouls, dragons and spears! It's looks 'criptic'!

Have to walk over 9 million point 6 steps to get up to it though but the view is worth it. The tomb says you can't take photos, everywhere you walk there's signs, so first things we do is pull out our phones! We don't care! And to be honest everyone here took photos no one seemed to mind. I would just tell security I'm answering a call if they told me off :) I have blog fans that need photographic evidence of my travels! The tomb here is real epic about life too, the emperors body lay 9 metres deep! There's no escaping that hole!

The next tomb we went to wasn't even there! Well it was but it was hidden, we had to trek a million miles to get to it and when we did it was protected by a moat and then a 4mtre high brick wall circling the thing! Let down :( I came to see mummies!

We then took a boat ride along the river for around an hour! I was falling asleep on the boat! We'd had such a long, exhausting day and I only ate a grain of rice for energy! We docked and then he told us there was one more tomb! I just want my bed now! When we make it to this next tomb I might just slide the lid open and ask to see if there's any room for me to crawl inside and die too?

I made it there, saw more temples, saw some monks and made it back to the boat! Done, now take me home! The half an hour boat (floating shed) dropped us god knows where, and we had to make our own way back to the hotel, we couldn't even remember what it was called? Made it though and then slept!