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Saturday, February 18, 2012

Are we back in England???!!!

The overnight bus journey to Hoi An wasn’t the best experience ever! Every side I got comfy on I kept getting a dead arm or leg plus being on the top bunk and with the roads being dead bumpy in my half awake half asleep state I kept thinking the bus was going to tip over!! We arrived at Hoi An at 8am and were greeted with pouring rain and it was cold, it felt like we’d arrived back at home! We were immediately scouted for a hotel that in the pictures shown to us looked lovely plus it had a free taxi ride there so we jumped right in. On arriving to the hotel though we soon realised the pictures shown to us must be about 50 years old, it was scabby but it did have a hot shower and as it was raining heavily outside, we were tired and we’d claimed the free taxi we decided to stay the night.

After the long bus journey with a bad nights sleep we went straight to bed for a couple of hours before waking up and deciding to explore our new surroundings. So with a new lease of energy we bought ourselves matching orange and purple plastic rain macs and set off to walk around the town. We made it to a café where we had breakfast and then walked around the town for about an hour. If the weather had been nicer or at least just not raining it probably would have been a lovely place to explore and get lost wandering the streets. Hoi An is well known for it’s tailors and appears to have a lot of French influence making it a quaint and cute town to visit. However in the pouring rain wearing our flip flops and vest tops we weren’t really loving it. We ended going back for a nap and then to a restaurant across the road for tea before deciding to leave today (the next day). When I went to have a shower I realised the towels we were given looked like they had been used by 4 other people since they’d last been washed plus the hot shower only stayed hot until I’d put a load of shampoo in my hair!!!

The staff at the hotel were really helpful though and arranged for an overnight sleeper train for us to get to the capital of Vietnam Hanoi tonight. So we woke this morning, to find our bed to be really damp not sure why but it wasn’t very nice -again shabby hotel, spent a couple of hours in the same restaurant across the road where we had tea last night and wrote postcards and finally got on facebook for the first time in Vietnam! Before getting a bus at 13:30 to the train station and then waiting until 16:30 for the train. I’m writing this on the train, it’s a lot better than the bus. We are in a little room with 2 sets of bunkbeds in, we are both on the top bunk, and are sharing with a Canadian couple who we have just had a few beers with and with a coupe from New Zealand in a room down the corridor. We get to Hanoi at 11:00am so it’s a long journey but hopefully we should have a better nights sleep than we did on the bus to Hoi An.

At the moment very jealous of the Canadian couple, in preparation for the overnight train me and mister Al brought 10 cans of beer with us, the Canadians have bought a bottle of red wine, French bread, a posh cheese, salami and olives, they have a lovely little romantic feast going on!!

Overall I think if we’d visited Hoi An when the weather was nice and we weren’t  so tired from the overnight bus we would have loved it but as it was us being the snap happy couple that we usually are didn’t take one picture when we were there which speaks for itself! Hopefully we will like Hanoi more!!!

Lots of love to everyone, will be posting this in the morning when we get to Hanoi xxxxxxxx

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