Ab nach Ninh Binh

We took the night bus to Ninh Binh. It was a 400 km journey in 8 hours 🙄. In the end, it took 7 hours and felt like forever. This time the seats were extremely uncomfortable and we arrived at 4 am. What do you do at 4 am in a city where everything is still asleep? That's right, you look for a taxi and hope that someone is awake 🤣.
But the taxi ride to the hostel turned out to be an adventure of its own.

Two other people, one German and one Canadian, got off the bus as well. As soon as the bus left, an official taxi and a driver appeared who offered to be our taxi driver without a meter. Since the four of us needed to go in roughly the same direction, we wanted to ride together. However, we preferred to take the official taxi driver as he had a meter. But he told us to take the illegal driver instead and just left. So we started with the other driver who couldn't speak a word of English. After negotiating a bit, we agreed on a price for all 4 people and the 2 different hostels. He found the first hostel quickly, but he got completely lost with ours, despite using Google Maps. He cursed a lot and in the end, he wanted to overcharge us. But not with me. I simply gave him the money and we got out and walked away. Of course, the hostel was not open yet. We sat down in front of it and watched the sunrise. There are definitely worse things 🤣

At 6 o'clock, a staff member came and gave us a key, and finally, we could get some sleep. At eleven, we went on the scooter and explored the area. Our first stop was a temple, or at least we thought so. In the end, it turned out to be a boat trip. There we met Chris from England. I had already met him during the scooter tour from Hoi An to Hue. Ninh Binh should be imagined as a small town that is currently being paved by upscale houses. In addition, there are rice fields around the city and mountains in the middle of the landscape. Very impressive. At least the boat trip was really impressive. It went through small caves and past Chinese temples. The women who had to row the whole time must have arms like tree trunks.... Huge respect...

In the afternoon, we went into the city for a short time to buy tickets for the train ride to Hanoi on Sunday. In the evening, we went to the viewpoint in the area. After climbing 500 steps and sweating through our clothes, we were rewarded with a stunning view. On Sunday, we went to the penultimate destination... Hanoi...