A great night sleep for both and up for another cold dribble shower, despite the best efforts of the staff the day before after playing with the water boiler for 20 minutes they decided to install a new one!
Breakfast and good byes and off on the boat back to the bigger junk for the journey back to Halong city. Settled the bill, 3 days in paradise 2million dong or $100
Taught how to make Vietnamese fried spring rolls and that was lunch on the cruise back to shore. 4 hours on a very bumpy mini bus back to Hanoi with grandpa old town at the wheel was not cool!
Back in the amazing old district of Hanoi and its dinner time. The fist experience of Pho for us tonight; beef soup with rice noodles helped down with a Hanoi beer.
Back to the Hanoi hotel for our fix of the 21st century i.e Facebook, travel blog, oh and to check our email to find that we have Glastonbury tickets for 2014 with thanks to our good friends back home!

Tonight's accommodation is a 9 hour sleeper train to Lao cai in north Vietnam. After people watching in the train station courtyard we board our carriage. Room 2, bunk 6 and 8, that's one under the other. We had 10 minutes to ourselves for Siobh to find anything and everything that was wrong with this situation before meeting our roomies for the night; two Vietnamese guys who clearly like singing! After a broken English conversation with one it turned out that they were good guys and just wanted to sleep for the journey, Perfect! The sleep was patchy and interrupted with several occasions of deli belly but on the whole it went really quick.