Sat Feb 2

First thing in the morning we hired bicycles and we were taken to the local orphanage, where we each bought some biscuits & toiletries as presents for the children. We went into their classroom and played toys with them for about 15 mins (they had a lot of toys!) and they were really happy to see us - they all lookedn really young (i thought they were 6 or 7 yrs old) but some of them were 14 - 14 yrs old, which surprised me a lot. This wasn't too bad, fun in fact (one of the kids had an obsession with ryans nipples!) but then we went into the room where the disabled children were - which was tough as i felt so helpless, one of them had to be tied to the bed so he couldn't escape his bed. There were 2 in a bed which didn't look very comfortable. All the staff were volunteers - must be very difficult jobs.

From the orphanage we rode into the countryside and further up the river to a local man with a boat, who transported us to an island in the river - about a 20 min boat trip away. At this island we had a bbq pic-nic - which sounds good but the cold breeze took away from the bbq beef, which was very tasty! Hai (tour guide) brought a tub of cocktails for us to drink with our food. We the took the boat back to Hi An town centre where we returned back to our hotel for a little rest.

In the evening we went for a cooking class at a local eaterie - where we were shown how to cook green papaya salad, chicken soup (not as simple as you would think!), spring rolls. We then ate our various concuctions which weren't too shabby! They use a lot of chilli, so some dishes were a little on the hot side which i'm not really used to. The cooking and eating cost us $10 each - this is extortionate for Vietnam! Afterwards we went to a 'beach party' which was actually just a pub near the local beach, where there were pool tables and showed live premiership football i think i've watched more football here then i would back home!).