Our first ever sleeper train was booked, we had asked to be booked onto the 7pm but the hotel booked the wrong day so we ended up getting some of the last spaces on the 11pm instead, never mind got to spend more time with Lianne before she left at 9pm to make her way back to our home town in England.

I was a little nervous about how this may go. When we turned up at the station there didn't seem to be many tourists, it was mainly Vietnamese, so now, the question was "which one of these lucky people get to share a 4 bed dorm with me and my beaut of a backpacker buddy Becky?" hmmmmmmm (please let it be someone with an awareness of personal hygiene and manners). The train arrived and we boarded, settled into our bunk beds and then we were joined by a very pleasant viatnemese gent and his Chinese friend. We made small talk and he even used his phone for translating things, however when he showed me the phrase "Vietnam has lots of sandals" whilst pointing out the window to the rain sodden fields and dull skies, I was a little confused haha!

Lay on my little bed, pulled down my eye mask and tried to catch some zzzzzz's. Although well rested and comfortable, I didn't get much sleep. This was due to my brain not switching off, I wanted to keep having a nosey outside at the rain and storms I could hear on our casually paced train ride.

14 hours later - YES 14 hours, we arrived in Hue. Backpack on and out into the peeing down rain. The rain doesn't bother me but we were in for a lot more here in Hue, so much so that we decided to leave a day earlier and cancel a night at the Backpacker Hostel...... All we could do was layer up and man up!

Sunshine makes everywhere seem such much prettier and attractive and I could see that on a brighter day this would be a beautiful place.

Whilst we were in the 'Backpackers' we met two lovely ladies Lynn from Colorado and then when she left we met Manu from Germany.

Lynn took us on a walk to find some food on our first evening, wasn't the best place we had been to, had ants in our drinks and the food was just not for me! Lynn left the morning after for Hoi An and Manu arrived. We started chatting about what we could do with our rainy day and we all decided on a trip to and around the Citadel - 'the forbidden city'. So with our waterproofs on and sensible clothing we walked for hours, gazing at the new and the old town which was still in its old village walls and gates. The Citadel has some lovely buildings and architecture and it took up nearly a full day by the time we had got back to the hostel.

Manu had to book her next stop with her bus company so we joined her, whilst we were there we realised that if we were going to book a multi-stop ticket it was best to do it directly through them as it worked out cheaper. We booked 4stops- Hoi An, Nha Trang, Mui Ne and Ho Chi Minh/Saigon, all for about £15 and altogether probably a total of 30 hours travel. Not a bad price really, saying we could probably only just get a one way taxi to Manchester for that price back home! We had booked on the same bus as Manu to get to Hoi An so travelled down together all hoping for a dryer climate!

So time to......yup, you guessed it...... RE-bloody-PACK and begin the next part of our travels further South haha such a hard life ha xxx