The lack of curtains in our hotel helps us get up before 7 at least ????

We hightail it outta there to the Ninh Binh railway station to catch our train down South

It’s an 8 hour trek to Hong Doi and as any typical train is, it’s late arriving to pick us up; it’s entrance is quite cool though

A bit of faffing with people getting off – mostly backpackers looking a lot worse for wear – and we are on

The train is a bit… run down, shall we say…

There is an old man sleeping in Dave’s seat which is annoyingly not next to Daisy’s anyways – thankfully, there are a few seats free so we move

There’s also a very loud man behind us watching some TV and sneezing all over us makes us move again

We find solace with some seats at the back; they are a little broken but at least serve the purpose for now

It’s a rather toasty train ride for a so called “A/C class” – we’re now seeing why train is not such a popular form of travel here (for travellers at least, our carriage is full of Vietnamese)

We tick the first three or so hours by doing some work and enjoying the views

Around 12:30pm, we start to get hungry so after snacking on Stax (Pringle-like crisps) isn’t enough, we go hunting to the restaurant car of the train

They aren’t doing anything now and the food they were bringing around looked kinda dodgy for us – chicken feet and rice – so we hold off

A couple hours later, we’re getting very hungry so cave for a couple Thai tom yum noodle pots

The signal/internet also seems to have stopped in th region we pass through for the latter part of th journey so we keep ourselves entertained by watching some of The Good Place

Finally, at 4:40pm, we’ve landed in Dong Hoi!

We hop straight in a taxi that does a reasonable price to take us the last leg of our journey

Then, after about 40 minutes, we’re into Phong Nha as the sun is starting to set

Phong Nha Moonlight Villas is where we’re staying and it’s not too shabby either for around £10 per night – it even has a pool

We drop our stuff off, have a little freshen up and then get out to find some proper food

Ganesh Indian Restaurant is not far so we opt for here and we’re wanting a treat tonight for our 2 year and 5 month anniversary ????

We have a CTM, a chicken tikka jalfrazi, some onion bhajis, a special naan as well as a cheeky bottle of Chilean sauvignon blanc

It’s a very nice meal and they even prepare our remaining naan to take home with us

Just as we’re leaving, Dave notices some rawkus from above and spots a little face as we leave ????

We have a stroll up to the end of the road, before it bends, to find the tourism centre and get some ideas for activities tomorrow before checking out the other side of the road we initially walked along

A couple places seemed to have a reasonable amount of customers so we want to take a look at their menu to go maybe tomorrow

We wander past Lantern Vietnamese Restaurant and they’ve got a very decent happy hour deal on cocktails on, so we indulge

After these, we continue to see some menus and then get enticed by Bamboo Chopsticks Restaurant as they do a good menu as well as the local beer on draft; we indulge again

This is one of the busier places and has a map of things to do in the local area

We pay up and walk over the road back to our place and have some Godzilla vs. Kong on the laptop before getting some much needed sleep