More vietnam...

Following our trip to Halong Bay we took an overnight train to Hue (pronounced Hu-ay). We were told the trains had cabins, so I immediately pictured the Harry Potter train, with people coming round with trolleys of weird and wonderful sweets. No such luck I'm afraid! The cabins were small with 4 berths, but best of all there were bundles of cockroaches! I'd been planning a quiet night on the train, maybe reading my book and catching up on my diary. But again, no such luck! The others had all been out and bought heaps of alcohol. Sarah had bought some "Happy Champagne" from the platform. She wasn't very happy to find out it was out-of-date... it tasted absolutely foul. So were were back on Bia Ha Noi and Tiger Beer for the evening. We did wheelbarrow races down the corridor, and then Laura and Hannah decided it would be a good time to see if they could both fit into Hannah's trousers at the same time... they could and they did! But we mainly just stayed up chatting and having a few beers, needless to say I was shattered when we went to bed at 4am, but it just meant I didn't mind the cockroaches so much!

When we arrived at Hue our hotel was absolutely beautiful, it even had a swimming pool. If anyone at work is reading this - please let Mike know that even he would stay in some of the hotels we've been staying in! We haven't exactly been doing the "backpacker hostels" yet... Going to get a shock in Australia when I'm not staying in nice hotels anymore!

So we spent the day by the pool relaxing, it was lovely. In fact I didn't really do much for the whole afternoon, and was in bed by 10.30pm! I was exhausted after the last couple of days. The following day we went to see the citadel and had such a funny guide... he kept doing very strange impressions, I think my favourite was his elephant. It was SO hot though, walking around in the heat is very tiring. We went straight from the citadel to the bus to go down to Hoi An, stopping off at Marble Mountain on the way. We didn't have long there, and next time someone makes me pay to climb a whole heap of steps in the blazing heat, I am going to say NO. The views were nice though.

Hoi An is definitely my favourite place so far. There are huge numbers of clothes shops and tailors. There's just no point in me buying a pretty silk dress when I'd have to carry it around with me for the next 4 months! But luckily working on Regent Street has trained me well, I put on my "blinkers" and zoned out all of the beautiful clothes.

Our first night ended up being quite a big one - when you can get a bottle of Biere La Rue for 10,000 dong (1 pound is roughly 25,000 dong) it is easy to get carried away. And face paints in the bar made our night very fun!!!

The following day we rented bikes (I didn't drive) and the next day we went scuba diving. But time pressures again means I'll have to update you all about this later...