Sooo, I am sitting in an internet cafe in Hanoi with some Aussie mates,
having returned from our 3 day trip round the islands at Ha Long Bay. We
started on saturday morning early early with a bus ride out through the
provinces to HaiPhong, the harbour town. The bus ride was amazing in itself
- vietnamese towns consist of a dusty strip of shopfronts splilling goods
and wares onto the street, and then miles of flat field and rice paddies
growing all manner of delicate looking herbs and rice which ladies in
conical hats wade through ankle-deep all day. Other ladies spend all morning
peeling veggies for lunch and watch the world go by- the peeling is an art
in itself...we jumped on a junk boat with the rest of the people we were
with - one other Brit, four Aussies, a Finnish girl, two Swiss and two
Germans, wrapped ourselves up warm (it was coooold, but Swanage summers
prepared me for that!) and watched the spectacular scenery glide past while
sipping beers and waiting for our dinner! Rors and I had dinner with the
Germans, a middle-aged couple, the wife who thought singing was 'guut and
vunderful for everyone' and the guy who was a stonemason and looked like he
could fight a bear. We slept on the boat and woke up in a cove surrounded by
rocky islands, the put-putted over to Cat Ba island, the largest inhabited
one in the bay. It's a fishing village that has only had power for 6 years
but boy, they've put it to good use with neon palm trees...We sailed around
the local islands, including Monkey island where we met some monkeys and
climbed a sharp, rocky escarpment to the top - you should have seen our
faces when our viet guide Hieu told us we had to go back down the way we had
come! Today we've got back to Hanoi; it's about 7pm and we're on a 11pm
night train down to Hue, which is in Central Vietnam. Am strangely looking
forward to the journey.

One special thing that happened before we left for Ha Long which I must tell
you about - Rory needed a haircut so we went to 'haircut alley' in Hanoi and
selected a likely looking salon (when I say salon I mean an open front room
with a couple of blow-driers in it) Three ladies in there, we sign-languaged
haircut and Rory was put in a chair, swathed in robes and shorn with a pair
of huge, rusty scissors while the remianing 2 ladies patted my hand, sat
next to me conspiratorially, then took pictures of me on their phones - they
think I'm 'veery beeootifool' which is quite amusing...one lady then caleed
her Husband on her phone and held the phone to our ears, laughing like a
hyena and chanting 'I-love-you-I-want-you' which was just about the only
english she knew(!) It was honestly the funniest thing ever, Rory sitting
there perilously under these huge shears while the rest of us bellowed and
guffawed behind him. Hairdressers must be the same breed the world over!