Greetings from Ninh Bhin

Ninh Binh, where the hell is Ninh Bhin I hear you say (maybe), its a good 4 hour drive south of Hanoi. Steve, Lloyd and I thought we would come here for two nights before heading off to Hue. There's not much to do here but today we booked a trip to the CUC Phuong National Park,it turned out to be an amazing day.

We started by visiting the Endangered Primate Sanctuary, I really enjoyed this and it was nice to see the  monkeys been really well looked after, they all seemed lively, happy (I swear one of them was grinning) and well fed. The Primate Sanctuary seemed to have a large number of western volunteers helping out, it was nice to see.

After we had finished at the Primate Centre we drove for a short while to a cave where remains of Prehistoric man had been found. The caves at Halong Bay were very touristy but these felt like the real deal, we had to go in with torches and there was only the 3 of us and our tour guide who was full of information about the caves and was always ready to answer our questions.

Once we had finished at the cave we had lunch, we were served a massive banquet the 3 of us we couldn't finish it all. Steve made friends with the local cat and dog, I tried to keep my distance because I didn't want to catch rabies, I may already have malaria and don't want to add another illness to my list.

After we had finished lunch we then set off for a trek to see a 1000 year old tree, unfortunately my camera ran out of batteries on the way so I couldn't take any photos. On the way to the 1000 year old tree our guide kindly took us into another cave called the Palace Cave, it was pretty much like the first cave we went in, I can understand why prehistoric man used the caves because the further in you go the warmer it gets and I can guess in the hot summers it remains cool. I think if I move back to Leeds I'll rent a cave instead of a flat.

Tomorrow we have to get the 8:30 train and hopefully 11 later we will arrive in Hue!