On our bikes

Hi everyone! We haven't posted in a couple of days as we've been on a boat, cruising round Ha Long Bay. Its an amazingly beautiful place - lots of limestone pinnacles, a bit like Yangshou in China or Krabi in Thailand but on a larger scale.

The weather has been interesting! Each morning it gets hotter and hotter until there is a monumental rain storm that lasts about 30 mins. We've been caught in it for the last 3 days, and are getting used to being drenched either with sweat or water.

Today we discovered yet another way of getting wet. On a bike ride on Cat Ba island our guide suggested we take the "low road" across the island. Little did we realise that because of the rain the low road was actually the "submerged road"! We cycled as best we could until the water started rising above knee level, and then had to resort to pushing our bikes through waist deep water (my waist, not June's!). It was a really funny experience, made even better by the fact that it started to p!ss down as soon as we came out of the water.....

What else to report? We're really enjoying the food and beer, although drinking snake wine today was an experience due to the presence of a (dead) snake at the bottom of the bottle. Tomorrow we head back to Hanoi and then on an overnight train to Sapa, which is a mountainous area inhabited by Hill Tribes.

June is coping admirably without hair-straighteners and we're both having a fantastic time, although had a brief home-sick moment yesterday.

We'll try to upload some more photos when we get the chance - the ones from the first 2 days in Hanoi are here :

http://www.flickr.com/photos/markfuhrmann/sets/72157601933580365/

bye