A Day To Remember

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At 6 o'clock we were woken by the alarm clock playing some relaxing music. Today we were due to walk the 5km to Trang An to hire a kayak and do a beautiful river trip. We wanted to have the river to ourselves so would benefit from an early start, but the adventure took a sudden turn...

Toothache was the name of the distraction with a little face swelling to add to the mix. What were we going to do!!!

We searched online for symptoms (dangerous) and decided to get it checked out sooner rather than later. We spoke to a friend in Hanoi and asked if she knew a dentist in Ninh Binh as she was born here. 10 minutes later she called back with an appointment for us! We arranged a taxi from our homestay as we needed to get to our appointment pretty quick.

On arrival Christine was greeted and taken straight in to see the dentist, who was just so kind.  After a thorough examination and an x-ray it was confirmed ... there was nothing wrong with the teeth.  The only explanation was sensitivity.  This was a huge relief!! A short search found us a shop which sold Sensodyne toothpaste.  As we were about to leave the shop we were suddenly invited to join the family for pomello.  2 pomellos later, having expressed our thanks we continued our walk towards the river.


A few metres down the road a voice from nowhere shouted, "OY! Come and drink beer.  We turned to find a chap signalling for us to join him and his friend for a drink.  It seemed rude not to,  so we joined the 'lunch break' party and drank a beer whilst having interesting conversations via Google Translate.  Again having expressed our thanks on we continued to the river with beautiful views of the limestone Karsts.


We walked to the Ecovillage where boat trips could be arranged.  We had read online that it was possible to hire kayaks to do a self guided tour but upon enquiring it was confirmed this was no longer possible.  You could only join a traditional trip - 4 plus a guide in a rowing boat. As it was starting to get dark we decided to abandon the boat trip for today and started to make our way back to our homestay.  

We walked along the river with beautiful views as the sun went down.  On arrival at our homestay there was playing and dancing to be done with their youngest daughter. This was truly hilarious. Only yesterday we had been singing Boney M's Daddy Cool with her and she knows the words. Well not exactly but she can make the sounds of the words which is not bad for a 3 year old Vietnamese girl.

We ordered dinner, which was proceeded by drinking homemade rice wine with the owner and another couple of lovely Danish guests. We spent the rest of the evening sharing travels stories and relaxing in our homestay.


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