Nha Trang - Hoi An - Hanoi

So we've covered some ground since my last post. We left Nha Trang several days ago and headed north to Hoi An via an 11 hour night bus ride on a "sleeper bus," which is basically a bunch of pseudo beds that are smashed together on a gi-normous bus. It seemed like a great plan to us since bus riding is so boring anyway and it was going to be such a long one that sleeping through it would save us the cost of a hotel room and keep us from wasting a day on a bus. We failed to factor in the primitive road conditions in much of Vietnam, likely excacerbated by the recent flooding. To say the least, it was a rough ride. We would barely doze off only to be jolted awake whilst catching air as the giant bus sailed over God-knows-what. This went on for the entire 11 hours. By the time we reached Hoi An we were so fried and exhausted that we promptly passed out at our hotel and still wasted the better part of a day. Oh well.

After recovering from our bus ride we managed to have a pretty good time in Hoi An. We visited some ancient ruins which Ray blogged about and posted pictures of so you should check out his blog, and we had some clothes and shoes made for us. Hoi An is famous for it's tailors, and you can quite literally get anything custom made that you could ever dream up. Ray had two pairs of slacks, three shirts, and two pairs of shoes made, one of them dress shoes, and the others were sneakers with his name on the sides (mostly ridiculous but pretty cute). I had a really nice fitted wool coat made and a pair of dress shoes made that are chocolate brown with green frogs sitting on lily pads embroidered onto the toe (completely adorable). In total we spent $110 for completely custom clothing which is pretty amazing. The process was pretty far from painless, especially considering that we were working with an 18 hour timeline and several fittings ended up being required. We both ended up taking something from the floor and having it fitted for us after the one that was made for us ended up being, in my case ill-fitting (coat), and in Ray's case lower quality(dress shoes). But over-all we made out pretty good considering what we were asking for.

So now we are in Hanoi. We flew from Danang which is an hour north of Hoi An and we arrived here last night. We have had an interesting experience thus far. We just evacuated from the hotel we checked in to last night because we found a bed bug after getting several bites that we thought were mosquito bites. I am still feeling fairly traumatized, it only happened like 5 hours ago, but we are in a super sweet hotel now, I just beat Ray at Scrabble, and we are heading to Halong Bay in the morning for an overnight stay on a mini-cruise ship around limestone peaks and caves so things are still pretty good. I am definitely praying that the bugs stayed behind in that awful room and that the experience does not haunt us. I think we're going to be just fine.

I am just posting some random pictures of the last few days in no particular order, they are mostly from Hoi An though.