Ninh Binh is a small town a couple of hours south of Hanoi. The selling point is the scenery, it is often compared to a small Halong bay because there is a river which flows between fantastic limestone karsts and caves! We arrived into Ninh Binh at 5 in the morning after a terrible night bus journey. And through nobody's fault (it was Ben's) we ended up with a plan to meet Walt but without the address of where we were going to meet him. So after standing on the road for a while we took action and decided to go and find somewhere to stay! Where we found was a bit of a hovel but we sucked it up and sorted out a trip for the day.

We went first of all to Tam Coc and boarded a small row boat. In the pictures of Tam Coc the river meanders through rice paddies, however I guess this is no rice season and all the paddies were empty. The scenery was still pretty beautiful though! In our little row boat we were dwarfed by the magnificent limestone mountains! As we continued through the river we entered eerie caves and then emerged through the other side to see some more fantastic scenery! At the end there were some ladies selling food and drinks in boats and we were warned (by the paranoid lonely planet) that you might get a pretty hard sell but luckily they weren't very aggressive! One advantage to arriving in Ninh Binh in the middle of the night was that we got to Tam Coc really early and so it wasn't very busy - by the time we were on the way back it was starting to get busy. It was still during Tet and so there were a lot of Vietnamese and Chinese tourists around. On the way back we actually seemed to become part of the attraction with people shouting hello at us as they passed our boats and taking lots of pictures (some surreptitiously and some a lot more blatantly). One other little highlight of the boat trip was that a lot of the rowers row their boats with their feet!

After visiting Tam Coc we went to see Bich Dong a pagoda (temple) built into a cave which was cool to see. After that we headed to another Pagoda built on top of a hill. It was a 500 step climb up to the top which was the first bit of exercise any of us had done for a little while - so a little bit of a struggle but totally worth it. When we got to the top we realised we had in fact already seen it from below and were able to see the little row boats as the meandered along the river. The scenery was beautiful. We returned to town after this. In the evening we went to a local restaurant (they only really had local restaurants) to try the local speciality of fried goat - which was fantastic! After dinner we found an ice cream shop and had some ice cream - which interestingly had some rice at the bottom. That ended our Ninh Binh trip - which was actually a massive treat. We had pretty low expectations I guess and were really pleasantly surprised. It was by far the least touristy place I'd visited and the scenery was beautiful!