Coming to the end of Vietnam

We haven't done very much today because Izzy has had a really bad migraine. I would say it has been quite nice to stay indoors away from the cold for a day, but our hotel room has a balcony with doors that have some lovely big gaps to let the cold air in and no heating. Our room is on the fifth floor, and I'm pretty certain that it's colder in our room than outside! Anyway, we feel we've seen most of Hanoi and are pretty keen to get away from the icy weather!

Tomorrow we are taking a day trip to Halong Bay as it would be a shame to have come this far in Vietnam and not see it, and then on Thursday we will be leaving early to fly back to Thailand. Phuket, to be precise. The even better news is that the temperature is meant to be 36c on Friday!

Another day in Hanoi

Me and Izzy were thinking of going to Halong Bay for a few days but we've been struggling to find somewhere to stay that we like the look of. There are so many tours to Halong Bay from Hanoi, ranging from one day to one week, so now the plan is to stay in Hanoi and take a one day trip. It might have been nice to find somewhere to stay if the weather was really warm, then we could take advantage of being on the coast and going snorkeling etc. We were going to book something this evening for a day tour tomorrow, but we got distracted! We found out there is a big shopping mall with a cinema nearby, so we walked down there this afternoon to find it.

We ended up having some food and going to the cinema. By the time we got out it was too late as the tour operators had closed. We'll have to book something tomorrow now, for the following day. We went to see Tron in 3D which was great! The standard of 3D is so much better than anything I've seen in the UK. The glasses we were given were made by Dolby, and had to be returned, otherwise you are fined 800,000 Dong (bear in mind going out for dinner with a couple of courses and drinks for two comes to 200,000 Dong if it's quite a nice place). There was a trailer for Transformers 3 too, I'm pretty damn excited about seeing that!

BRR it's cold in Hanoi

Because it's so cold at the moment in Hanoi, we decided to do as much sight seeing as possible. That way we can hurry up and get back to some sun, which is feeling very far away. First of all we walked to the Ho Chi Minh Museum. It isn't always open to the public, and today was no exception. There are always armed guards surrounding the grounds, which has a white line painted on the floor with signs saying 'No Enrty' spaced 15 or so metres apart. It's obvious that this place is of great importance to the government because of how clean and up kept it is. It's a shame we couldn't get in, because apparently the building contains Ho Chi Minh's embalmed body.

Arrived In Hanoi

Today we checked out of our hotel in Ninh Binh, and got a coach headed for Hanoi. It was only 45,000 Dong (£1.50) for the 2 hour journey, but the bus was quite a small and uncomfortable. I didn't really mind about how crap the bus was, until we arrived at the bus station. There was a flock of men surrounding us shouting 'Taxi!', it was like a crowd at a gig or something. If we had taken a bigger bus with other tourists we wouldn't have been such targets, but because everyone on our bus was Vietnamese, when we got off the taxi drivers homed in on us. They started grabbing us and pulling us in all different directions, so eventually we gave in and got a taxi to our hotel.