As we finish our trip to Ha Long Bay the bus ride seemed forever long. Not to mention we had to catch a train at 7pm to head to Hue so we were a bit worried if we would make it in time. As we get closer into Hanoi traffic is even more nutty than usual (if you can believe that !) because it was a holiday new years day. Our bus was stuck at an intersection for 20minutes so we decided it would bd much quicker to just hop out and walk to our hostel as it would bf mu...

We woke up to the sounds we figured we were going to hear first thing in the morning. Loud rooster calls, these chickens were everywhere! Roaming through the house, outside , in cages etc. It wasnt too hard to get up because it was chilly in bed all night. There wooden walls have holes cut out for windows and it's open to the outside as well as no heating. We're talking a very very basic house. It was pretty much 2 rooms. One room had 4 beds in each corner, a l...

We pigged out with our breakfast buffet available at our hostel before we left for Ha Long Bay. It was very good, definitely worth more than we paid for our stay there! Then it was off to the bus for a 3 hour trip to get to the beautiful waters. It was new years eve so we decided to pick the party boat cruise -- boy oh boy did we ever pick it haha. As we hopped on the smaller transport boat to get to our lovely party boat we took in the clear waters and large...

After we met our tour guide ( a nice 16 year old lady) we walked a quick tour around Sapa. After seeing a few sights we started our trek: 12 km and 6 hours to our little village. After 30 minutes of down hill walking we started to trek and a very un-even ground. As the clouds begin to clear the bright sun presented us with the picturesque views only a post card to show. From there we hiked the mountain side for a while and had three local ethnic ladies jo...

After a very nice and pleasent free breakfast, we organized our day- sorta did at least. We got a map of Hanoi, detailed enough to get around. We got rid of our little backpack in Nanning so our first mission was to find a new one ( and on the cheap side). To our little hearts content Hanoi has a lot of knock offs around ! Weoooo! We found a shop that was selling The North Face back packs at really cheap cost: $10 got us a backpack that would go for $70 in ...