Hanoi PD shut down the Par-T! (Well, they tried anyway)

We arrived in Hanoi at 5am, and when we got to our hostel a sleepy receptionist came to the door in his pants to let us in. Once he had cleared away his mattress from the floor of reception he cooked breakfast for the boys on a little stove behind the reception desk!

After breakfast we basically crashed out for the day, Amy was out for the count after being sick all morning, but the boys did venture out to get their hair cut. In the evening we went to meet Katie, Charlotte and Jess from our G Adventures tour for dinner. The food was lovely but just as we asked for the bill we heard some rats (which sounded HUGE) running around and fighting inside the benches we were sitting on! After that we made a pretty speedy exit!

The next day we met up with the girls again to go and see Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum, where he had been embalmed and you could file through and see his body. This is taken very seriously by the locals, there are signs up saying 'no laughter' and lots of guards with guns. After that we went through the buildings where Ho Chi Minh lived and worked, before getting a taxi back to the town centre, (who unfortunately had a dodgy meter and ripped us off royally). That afternoon, after a speedy KFC, we went to see a water puppet show, which was made up of a series of traditional stories which were explained in English on a screen before they began, so the foreigners knew what was going on. The stage was basically a swimming pool, and the puppets were made to dance on the water to tell the story.. It was much better than we thought it would be, but unfortunately Steven and Amy still couldn't quite stay awake for the whole show..

That night we decided to have a night out, as it would be the last time we would be seeing the girls from our tour. We had already been told that the bars and pubs all close at 11, but that if you stuck around after then you could go to some secret clubs which stayed open later. 

So we went to a couple of bars, until at 11 the Hanoi PD shut down the Par-T! Sure enough, there was an Australian man who said he knew where we could go for drinks, so everyone in the bar followed him like a drunk Jesus, and after the police had gone we went to his club. 

You couldn't hear the music from outside, and the only sign there was anything going on were some lights coming from a tiny window upstairs. So we all went upstairs to the little secret club! After a couple of hours the place started emptying, so we decided to see if we could find another club we had been told about by some people who had been there last night. However the only directions we had were to go over the highway and then through a hole in a wall, and then you would be there. 

After a while, we realized that we would never actually find the club, and as the streets were pretty much deserted we decided to get some beers from a shop (that was somehow still open) and go back to the hotel. We eventually got to bed about 5am! The next morning we went to say a final goodbye to the girls.. we were all feeling a bit worse for wear, and as soon as we finished saying our goodbyes and stepped out of the hotel, poor Marc was sick on the street - what a disgrace.

On our final day in Hanoi, we took a boat trip on Halong Bay. It took about 4 hours each way on a bus, and then we had another 4 hours on the boat. The bay was really impressive, and after having a seafood buffet for lunch while being taken round on the boat, the four of us got onto a bamboo boat, rowed by a local woman, who took us round a floating village, where people lived in houses which were anchored down and basically floated on polystyrene blocks! After that we went and explored some caves, and then the boat took us back to shore. That evening we went for our final meal in Vietnam, and then the next day we had to catch our flight across the border to Laos!