Cat Ba Island to Hanoi

Today we got up at 6am to get a bus-boat-bus combo back to Hanoi. We wanted to get down the street early to make sure we didn’t miss our bus (like we missed the boat yesterday). We found the bus straight away and got on heading for the pier, the boat we had to get on had no plank to it so you had to jump down into the boat, we chose to stand at the back so we could keep an eye on our packs and suffered from a fair bit of pollution thanks to this, the boat had large amounts of black smoke pouring out the back of it the whole time. Also the men working on the boat spent a lot of time looking worried and opening various hatches and climbing all over the outside edges of the boat studying the sides so that was comforting….

After the boat trip we got on a bus to take us to Hanoi. We arrived in Hanoi at about 11am and got a taxi straight to the train station to book beds on the overnight train to Hue. The train didn’t leave until 7pm so we put our bags in some lockers at the station and set off in search of some lunch. We had lunch at a kfc which was about the same as in Australia… gross!
We then consulted our lonely planet book and found out that there was a café not too far away that had free wifi so we got a taxi here, I think the café was called Puku and despite been down a very dark alleyway it was really nice and relaxed inside with lots of travelers on their laptops. We spent an hour or so here before going shopping where I brought my very first souvenir, a silk scarf.
We did a bit more shopping then went and sat at Hoan Kiem Lake for a little while before going to have an early tea at the real kangaroo restaurant which was great, again we were surrounded by other travelers which I found very comforting.

We headed back to the train station and got out packs out of the lockers, after I took out my bag I saw a mouse crawl from under it and then scamper into the next locker so we spent a few minutes searching out packs for mouse holes but luckily their were none.
The train was pretty good, 13 hours of travel went quite quickly, we passed the time playing paddocks, watching a couple of episodes of big bang theory until our laptop ran out of batteries and then sleeping for the most part. The worst part was when I had to go to the toilet at 4am (Ewen had been earlier and had seen a cockroach on the toilet) the toilets were not great as you can probably imagine.