Its cooler in Hanoi

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Finally a break from the heat, first time we're wearing our good old 'tekkies' we've had stashed at the bottom of our bags for a month! We flew to Hanoi on Wednesday to try make up some time as we were unfortunately not able to move our china flight a little later as hoped...

On Thursday we decided we weren't going to pay for a tour to Halong Bay, we would do it ourselves! A mistake, as it took us all of thursday to get there-taking the wrong city bus and getting an unintended tour of the city, getting sold down the river (yet again) and having to pay for a big aircon bus but getting what ultimately can be compared to a taxi from home, that came with a 'co-driver' you could say, who stood hanging out the door flagging down and shouting to all pedestrians we passed to try full the minibus, (which unfortunately for us only eventually happened 3 hours into the trip) and an air-horn that was pretty much permanently on... we arrived after 4 1/2 hours (it should only take 3 1/2 hours) with ear-ache and a 2 /5 happy travel-o-meter.

The islands of Halong Bay were lovely, quite impressive, but we were there in the foggy season so I think the scenary wasn't the best it can be. Oh we were scammed again, paid double for the boat ride around the bay... we're getting used to it!

So when planning how to get to Sapa tomorrow we decided it might be worth it to just pay the money and do a tour...so we leave tonight on an overnight sleeper train and will spend the next two days there seeing minority villages and doing some walking...

Happy easter everyone! We watched a full on easter production outside a cathedral that we stumbled upon on our way home from the bus station yesterday, all in Vietnamese!