Halong Bay and Hanoi

We had another long overnight bus trip to Hanoi from Hue. It was quite an exciting one, though, as the bus' rear window shattered at about 1am and covered Paul in glass! I think it must have been a very big stone that did it. The bus guy tried to solve the problem by drawing the curtains and our journey was accompanied by the tinkle of falling glass until they stopped an hour later and covered the hole with tarpaulin!

We like Hanoi. It is big and bustling and there is lots of bia hoi. We've also seen some beautiful pagodas and Ho Chi Minh's mausaleum (didn't go in though!). I think Paul and Ben got a bit sick of pagodas, but cheered themselves up with some KFC!

We did a 3 day, 2 night trip to Halong Bay. It was really beautiful and really peaceful sailing around the islands and rocks in our junk. We visited a huge, beautiful cave and Cat Ba island National Park, where we saw tiny frogs! My favourite thing was kayaking in the rain. We kayaked to a really beautiful lagoon and managed not to capsize, either. Karaoke seems to be a pretty big thing here still and Paul and Ben did a couple of beautiful duets in the evening!

We're back in Hanoi now and are getting an overnight train to Sapa, in the mountains, in a couple of hours. We've spent the day buying toiletries and supplies for China. Ben's headed off to Laos, so its just the two of us again - I'm sure it'll be fine!