Nigel: Between Hue and Ninh Binh there isn't much to see, so we decided to take the train all the way up to our next destination. It was a uneventful 10 hour journey, except for the TV that was set to full blast and had the worst type of music possible playing from it. This hindered our chances of reading any of our book , so it was just looking out the window and wincing on every loud screech. Once you arrive at the train station you are welcomed by many hotel reps trying to get you into their hotel. We had a choice of 2 and with one being close by we said we would have a look at the room. The hotel was called Queen Mini Hotel and the room was mini and also not very appealing, so we said we would look else where. When we got outside and said to the guy from the other hotel that we would look at there's, the owner from Queen Mini started becoming a bit aggressive as we hadn't choose his place. When we were offered the chance to jump on the back of a scooter and get a ride we declined as the hotel didn't look to far on the map. Not the case. It was a 15 minute walk in the dark and up a very steep hill. We weren't , however, disappointed as the hotel turned out great. We did find out later on the owner of the Queen Mini attacked a guest with a knife over a dispute. If we knew that before hand we wouldn't had said no.

The first thing we noticed the next day was how cold it was, and I mean cold . It must have been at least 12oC and that wasn't with the wind chill. We know that isn't anything like back home but when you have been use to temperatures of 30+ we felt it a lot. (Poor us!!!) There isn't much to do in Ninh Binh but the main reason why people stop there is to go rafting through the karst mountains. We decided one day to hire bikes and go on a bike ride and have a go on the rafts. We were given a map from the hotel and set off. The map states that it isn't to scale and that it might not be to accurate but we thought we would give it a try. After about 4 hours of cycling down cul-de-sacs and then my bike breaking we decided that this wasn't going to be, so we walked back. We weren't too disappointed that we didn't make it as we had already done something similar in China (in the hot sun).