The night train was def an improvement on the sleeper buses, once you got used to the rocking!!! So we got up to Sapa nice and early, this is the main tourist spot in North Vietnam, a steep valley full of rice terraces like nothing else! Our time up there was spent walking about the rice terraces, into different villages, being amazed at what they farm....and having our heads wrecked by the very insistent local women selling anything and everything!! You can see in some of the pictures Shane with a harem of women following his every move and Phil had a shadow who always needed to stop when pictures were being taken etc etc!!! We were really lucky to get great weather while we were up there, but we were even luckier that Shane resisted the urge to strip down and jump into the water with all the local kids....not sure the locals would have ever recovered after that!!!

We had a great time here and hopefully the pictures can showcase the place better than our words!!!

After Sapa we had a couple of days in Hanoi, mostly spent eating some great food, walking around the city taking in the atmosphere and the madness and watching the water puppet show....most of the time walking was in the dangerous streets as the pavements are used for everything but walking on!! People wash their hair, sleep on motorbikes, sell food and generally live their lives out on the pavements...great for entertainment, not so great when you are trying to look around to take it all in and keep ending up with bruises from walking into things!!! (dad you should be happy to hear that riding the bikes isn't the biggest danger!!)

Once all that was done we said goodbye to Vietnam and set off on our 20 hour bus journey to Laos!