Hello people, Well, on our first and last night in Hanoi we visited the water puppet theatre, which was actually quite entertaining, even though puppets freak me out quite a bit (remember Pob? that was just plain disturbing!) The following day we took a two day boat tour around Halong Bay, which consists of thousands of limestone cliffs spread over about 150 km of water. We did a panoramic journey around the bay, taking in the spectacular views and visiting some of the most scenic areas including the appropriately named 'amazing cave', which lives up to its name (although is slightly superficial with 'mood lighting', pathways and penguin bins...) We spent our days sunbathing, swimming and kayaking, and by night we drank vodka and sprite under the stars on the deck of the boat before retiring to our cabins. Drinks on the boat were quite expensive so we managed to blag one of the locals to smuggle us some drinks in her little rowing boat. The captain on the boat had banned any of the locals from selling us drinks (obviously wanting us to buy his own 'special priced' beverages. Pah!) so the little lady, bless her, rowed her little boat up silently after dark. sprite smuggling! Last night we caught the overnight train to Sapa; a picturesque village which lies on the mountain range near the Chinese border. From our balcony we can look out across rice terraces, lush vegetation and many hill tribe villages; it's really stunning. Today we took ourselves off to the tourist mountain, which incorporated a orchid garden, an ostrich park, flower garden and many trails which take you out to the best spots for viewing the whole town. They are not too used to westeners over here in Sapa, and many people have stopped to chat to us and some even wanted to take our photo, or have their photo taken with us, which was very bemusing but quite flattering really. Tomorrow we are headed to China for the last leg of our trip, so we are desperately trying to get a grasp on the language because it will be the least touristy of all the countries we have visited and therefore we don't expect many people to speak English. We are designing some picture cards to make things easier (ie we have drawn cows and pigs for when we go into resteraunts...I can see the whole thing is going to be quite amusing and complicated!) Well bye for now, Claire x