24.2.23
We’d been told to be ready by 9am for our 9.30am minibus pick up.
Another similarity to Turkey is Vietnamese time. At 9.30 I asked the reception girls to call and check they’re coming.
15 minutes later they arrived, then we had 3 more pick ups.
A young lad at the back by me keeps doing very loud yawns and is singing badly along to his ear buds.
The tour guide lady tried to freeze us out with the air con and the Vietnamese lady next to me at the very back keeps having conversations with her friends at the front.
Thankfully the singer really was tired and doesn’t sing in his sleep.
It took almost an hour to get out of the Hanoi madness.
Bye Bye Hanoi, we’ve loved our time here.
We had a brief stop on the way at a centre where the most amazing craft items are made by people affected by Agent Orange during the Vietnam war.

The journey to Ninh Binh is only just over 2 and a half hours on a, straight run, but with late pick up and picking up others we were dropped at our Tam Coc homestay at around 12.30pm.

It was really exciting getting our first glimpse of the incredible landscape that this area is famous for, even though it was a bit foggy..

When I was researching for this trip I fell in love with the photos, I love unusual lanscapes.

There was no mention of this area in my 9 year old Lonely Planet,so it’s relatively new to tourism.

There were only 9 of us on the bus, but total chaos working out who was going where 😂

Anh Huong homestay is down a small side road just a few minutes walk to the small town main road area, they dropped us right outside.

Anh is lovely, John was mobbed by their dog and challenged to a game of pool by their daughter in the time it took to hand over passports and look at the local map.

We have a bungalow, one of just a few around a pool. It’s basic but has everything we need and was a great price.

We presented Anh with 5.2 kg of laundry 😂

The lane where we are staying has beautiful murals on some of the walls 😍

We wandered into Tam Coc town, stroked loads of dogs along the way and had very good rice and noodle dishes, Na Da beer at 35p is Johns new favourite and I had a fab iced coffee.

We wandered along to an area reportedly meant to take us back to 18th – 20th century Vietnam but we fell in love with the most unusual cat and dog instead.

Goat is a speciality here. Not sure we’ll be trying that.

Inevitably it started to drizzle. Johns shoulder hurts from his mud fall and my blister is really sore, so rather than walk any further we looked around a small supermarket and also made enquiries about buses or trains to Dong Hoi in a few days time.

They seemed very pricy at between 750k and 900k dong each, both taking around 8 hours. I asked which he would choose. The bus because the train is noisy.

Of course we decided to go for the train and once back at An Huong started researching online.

John found 2 train tickets for 710k for both of us.

We have 5 nights here in Tam Coc. There’s a lot to see and do.

Most refer to this area as Ninh Binh which was the former capital of Vietnam.

While researching it looked like most of the attractions are over this side. I’d still like to see Ninh Binh for comparison, they’re only 6km apart.

On the way through in the limo we spotted 2 Indian restaurants. When in Vietnam..

My butter chicken was really good, John didn’t enjoy his madras, it wasn’t what he expected.

It was very noisy in there, especially an Irish woman who was obviously hoping they could hear her down in Ho Chi Minh. The staff kept turning the music up maybe to drown her out but she just got louder.

When the bill arrived, John had Kadai, not Madras.. We’re blaming the Irish lady, poor waiter didn’t really stand a chance.

So far it’s absolutely love at first sight.

We even like the karaoke bus

So looking forward to exploring further and maybe finding out why the tins in the shops are upside down.