From Hillbillies back to City Slickers
Trip Start
Jun 11, 2008
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85
349
Trip End
May 14, 2009
Hanoi,
Vietnam
Sunday, August 24, 2008
The film we watched was a completely legal version of Indiana Jones 4 film. Well, maybe not completely legitimate, but it was still a good copy from the market in Hanoi. The only problem is that the film was pretty rubbish, I mean, come on, aliens!!!
We ordered a pizza and a club sandwich from room service and caught up on a couple of hours sleep in the afternoon.
In the evening we met up with the rest of the group to go to the "Ancient Town" restaurant for our last meal together. The tour officially finishes tomorrow, so this was our farewell meal. It felt good that everyone was going home and we still had 9 months to go. The jealousy was so sweet!
A group of 6 of us stopped off on the way to the restaurant for a few streetside beers. This is just a few plastic chairs outside the front of a house or little shop where they serve you homemade brew (I think). The beauty is, the price of the beer is just 3000 dong (about 15 pence!!)
Streets of Hanoi
. Hasten to add, we remained at the streetside bars for a couple of hours and spent about a pound!! It was a good laugh and to be honest we could have stayed there all night, but we had arranged to meet the rest of the group at the restaurant, so we departed.We had a nice meal at this restaurant and will probably go again before we leave for Laos as the prices are really cheap as well (sweet & sour pork, rice and drinks for less than 2 pounds!!).
After the restaurant we found a bar called the "Hair of the Dog" which was doing cheap cocktails and playing some good tunes. A few Long Island Iced Teas were therefore consumed just to be sociable - all the way until about 1am! They even closed the bar and shuffled us upstairs to carry on drinking - yes, we got a lock-in in Vietnam!! It was a really good night of drinking, dancing and pool playing, a good end to the tour of 'Nam.
A lot of the group are from Australia, so we grabbed a few addresses and plan to stop by and see some of them on the way down the east coast when we arrive in November. They might pretend they are out though when we get there, especially if Lorna has the hunger pains kicking in. Mike & Desley also have a pool, so we may just park up on their drive for about a week!!! That will scare them.
It's been a fantastic tour of Vietnam and one I would recommend. We had a really good group of people on the tour as well and hopefully we can stay friends with some of them for some time. All in all, Vietnam has exceeded all my expectations and I am chuffed to bits that I have had the opportunity to spend 3 and a half weeks in this lovely country. Stu, you were right about this place and you definitely need to come back yourself and spend more time here!
