Vietnam Update!

Day 48       Halong Bay to Hanoi

At 8.30am we left for Hanoi which was a 160km journey but takes 4 hours.. so the average speed is obviously very slow. It was an okay drive except for the fact that it was long straight roads but we had a limit of 40km/h because of government rules so you just wanted to go faster. When we arrived we had lunch at a rooftop restaurant overlooking the lake which was really pretty. I had steak which was nice too. We then went for a walk around lake - Heidi, Sophie, Sarah and I. On the way we found a post office so Heidi stopped with me to post more stuff home - this time it's the tailored dresses and a pair of white linen trousers which have proved to be incredibly impractical. It was a very difficult trip to the post office.. I had my stuff weighed at DHL and USPS because I wanted to see how much it would cost and it weighed 1.86kg but was too expensive. VNPT which is the Vietnamese postal service was a lot cheaper and I looked up the price for 2kg. So I decided to send it with them, I did all the form filling (which takes a long time), had it packaged up and everything and then the woman tells me it's 2.015kg which means I have to pay for 3kg!! I argued with her for a bit because I had weighed it myself and knew what it was then all of a sudden she lost her ability to speak English and played dumb.. So I gave up on that as it was still cheaper than any of the western postal companies. I then asked if I could buy insurance because in Ho Chi Minh I was offered it for $10 but she said you couldn't buy insurance and it went on for ageeees, it was all very dodgy but I just resigned myself to the fact it may or may not get home - fingers crossed it will. After all of that stress Heidi and I decided to do a golf car tour of the city. We got into the little golf car and were taken around all of the major parts of the city for an hour which was good - we picked out all the shops we wanted to go back to. On the way we saw where Fanny ice cream was and so we headed back there after for an ice cream. I had one called Fairy which had chocolate, vanilla, raspberry and banana flavoured ice cream with a fruit salad at the bottom, dried fruit sprinkled on top and flowers made of chocolate. Heidi had some tropical one which was served inside a pineapple. It was lush. We had dinner at a place called 'Little Hanoi' with 'recommended by the lonely planet' underneath.. On the way to the restaurant there were at least 5 of these all identical... Which one is the real one, I could not possibly tell you but the food was not so great at the one we went to. Afterwards we checked out the bars/clubs for the following night as the other group would be with us also and it would be our last night together so we wanted to go somewhere good. We found a few places then gave up and had a walk around the lake with Heidi, Sarah and sophie.. We ended up at Fanny ice cream again! This time I had profiterole ice cream which I think I've uploaded a picture of to my website so you can see it there, it was so good! We got back around midnight and went to sleep. BYE.x