square is quite bizarre, and I guess is evocative of images of this city being bombed during the war. After a quick look at the one pillar pagoda, which was pretty much as described, we headed back through the hectic city streets to the sanctity of our air conditioned room!

Our plan was to travel to Laos overland, after doing an overnight boat trip round Ha Long Bay, a stretch of very scenic coastline in Northern Vietnam.. But we’d been told stories about how hard the journey to Laos is, 20 hours on a questionable bus on very dodgy roads!! We’d looked into a flight but felt it was too expensive, but we woke up the next morning to a much more cloudy day, so we made the decision to save the money from the boat trip and put it towards a flight to Laos. And the boat trip sounded very touristy anyway - with entertainment and games it sounded a little too much like our Yangtze river cruise for my

liking - and Hel didn’t like the idea of catching your own fish for Tea!! So a quick trip to the Vietnam Airlines office and it was all sorted.

We had a pretty lazy day after that, wandering around the shops and stalls, and checking out Laos on the internet. We decided to go and eat a snack in the afternoon - thinking we’d get our last Vietnamese meal later on. It seemed like we’d headed out at rush hour though! The traffic was absolutely Mental!! We stumbled upon a school which was obviously chucking out as there were a million kids driving scooters rather erratically!! It was at that point that we decided that although Hanoi was lovely in parts - the hecticness of the traffic and cyclo drivers and touts really does start to get to you after a while, and were pretty pleased that we‘d be in Laos tomorrow rather that in 3 days!!. Almost simultaneously, we stumbled across a Pizza Hut