My back hurts

Breakfast was the usual massacre, followed by getting in the bus and heading for the mountains (Ninh Binh). First stop was the bamboo outlet, where a demonstration of what bamboo can do, was closely followed by a trip to the shop. We were swayed by the promise of assisting our ailing bones with magical heating ware. FYI, the back heating works but the jury is still out on the neck warmer. 

We then headed to a couple of small temples, followed by an extreme oversized lunch again, where we were introduced to goat for the first time. It officially tasted like meat. 

After the meal, with everyone except me visiting the toilets, there was panic amongst the restaurant staff who thought that we had skipped without paying for drinks. 

To the bus, then to the 3 hour boat tour. I hoped that the tiny boat would not be lost if the weather started getting rough, but if it did, I was going to grab Thurston Howell's dong first. Wow, did it really take me this far into the holiday to get my first dong reference? And then having to explain the rest to anybody under 50 could be interesting. 

We went through some caves and just paddled along with our official paddler and about 1 million other people. 

It's a good thing I purchased the back warmer. The scenery is very nice, but very repetitious. 

Our paddler passed us a note in Vietnamese near the end and after much confusion we ticked the boxes, wrote the boat number, gave him a tip and everyone was happy....except for some of our tour mates, who refused to fill out the form and thought their guy was being rude and didn't want to pay. Sigh. The paddling wasn't hard but my back is very angry with me.We made it to our nice modern hotel, I had my first egg coffee and in future won't eat the frothy stuff first, leaving the coffee.

I then convinced the sensible part of my brain that doing laps in the extremely cold swimming pool was a good idea. 300ish meters under my ever growing belt was followed by 2km on the treadmill. At least I got rid of some calories before going totally Australian and having a ham and pineapple pizza for dinner.

Back to the room and couldn't find any sport on TV despite there being over 170 channels.

We also did not have any hot water, but the staff promised to fire up the boiler. an hour later we had upgraded to lukewarm, and with multiple jug boils, the night time bath was saved. Note, read tomorrow's episode, Your Child Looks Like Shit, for jug update.

Oh, who is the G.O.A.T. of the American Wild West Outlaws?    Billy the Kid. Thank you and goodnight.