29 seconds

Up at 6am, to breakfast by 0630 before they finished preparing. One last adventure with the hose and bucket toilet and onto the bus for a 4 hour and something bus trip, which I suspected would be over 5.(at the time of typing, my prediction is spot on). One of the ladies was charged extra at checkout for having a dirty towel. I'm guessing they hadn't found ours that was covered in mud from yesterday's waterfall swim. 

Anyway, in a long bus trip, what else do you do between Spotify and Netflix but time the longest distance between a banana tree sighting. Is the banana a fruit or herb? Good question Mark, but let's leave it up to anyone who cares to look up the answer. Oh, 29 seconds is the result outside of the Hanoi built up areas.

We stopped for a brief break where to my delight they sold Helicopter Coffee. 280,000 dong first 4 boxes. Bargain.

My first actual big whinge about the tour is the last minute changes to the plan with no consulting of the group. We had our afternoon planned, but because our rooms are not ready, we are stopping at some place that is supposed to take half an hour, which may mean closer to 90 minutes. I get the feeling we will be extra rushed to finish our planned day. If we could dump our stuff at the hotel lobby and go, we would have been a lot happier. Tam our guide has been excellent but this has been the only problem. 

It's nearing 5 hours on the bus. I will be sure to continue later.

So finally after 40 minutes in the lacquer painting shop we finally backtracked to our Hanoi home away from home, the Skylark Hotel, dumped our bags and headed out for one last afternoon of traffic chaos. 

We visited the jail known as the Hanoi Hilton. A good place to go if you're too happy and want to bring yourself down a bit.

We then wandered until we found the area called Silk Road and judging by the lack of shop entries and purchases, it did not live up to any hype I may have heard.

It was nearing 530pm, and apart from some lollies, we hadn't eaten real food since breakfast at 0630. 

Somebody had recommended a little place called Chops that did hamburgers 🍔.  As a matter of fact, all places are small and mainly skinny structures. Anyway, the burgers were good and I think we are glad to have gone Western.

Surprise surprise, the night markets were on, so we did a wander, spent $75 Australian on what are surely totally authentic Hoka and Air Jordan shoes, because I'm sure there are no fakes sold here.

Back through our last battle with night traffic and just a day of travelling to finish off the trip.