Rice Paper Choo Choo

After walking around Hanoi for a couple of hours, we decided to pop into one of the many coffee shops (Vietnam grows and roasts it's own coffee beans which have a distinctive, but not unpleasant taste) and have a relaxing cup of something. At the time we happened to be in one of the more local residential areas and the people in the shop weren't used to foreigners and had no English (most of the people in the city centre shops seemed to have a smattering of our language), the seats outside were suitably tiny! I went for the safe option, the universally well known "cappuccino", but my wife asked for a "fruit tea", I thought this was slightly ambitious, I wasn't wrong (see picture below)

To this day we're not sure what was in that cup, it seemed to be a mix of flowers, seeds and vegetables but, although difficult to drink, it wasn't horrid. For lunch we opted for a local staple, rice paper rolls, filled with a variety of things the concept is a little like Chinese spring rolls except that you assemble them yourself with edible rice paper rather than little pancakes. They're very moreish, we managed to polish off several plates of them (Chicken, Pork, Beef etc.) along with various dipping sauces (see picture below, nice!) the whole meal for four people came to the grand total of £8

All good things must come to an end and as the evening drew in we headed over to the railway station to pick up a night train to our next destination, although clearly not without dropping into the Pasteur Street Brewery tap room on the way for some (cold) cans of their excellent "Jasmine IPA" for the journey!

The train itself was functional but pretty basic and although we were in first class the accommodation was simple (a couchette with two bunk beds, sleeping four people) thankfully clean and cool, although after an hour or so the toilet in our car became predictably blocked and stinky! Anyway, we passed a few hours drinking beers, having a laugh and playing cards and the girls worked their way through a bottle of wine and a couple of tubes of chilli flavoured Pringles! Eventually we turned in at around midnight, and TBH, slept pretty well considering a number of noisy stops and various violent shunting episodes along the way. We arrived at our destination around 7am as the Sun was shining brightly through a crack in the nylon cabin curtains, we packed up our things and headed out into the light, an air-conditioned mini-bus and the city of Hue were waiting for us!