Very Full in Vietnam

   We'll go ahead and say it...the food in Vietnam is amazing!!  As soon as we arrived in Hanoi, we hit the streets in search of some Pho (pronounced kind of like Fuh); a delicious noodle/soup dish with beef or chicken and served with sprouts, basil, cilantro and chili sauce.  They love veggies here and we're happy to see that...we've been missing our veggies since we left the states.  We found a few great restaurants in Hanoi and gorged on good food before we left for Cat Ba Island/Halong Bay.
    Halong Bay, in reality, is exactly like the postcards! Beautiful.  We took a full day boat tour through the bay to see the insane rock formations rising out of the ocean.  While the boat was a little lack luster, the sights were not.  We went kayaking through some caves, saw a "hidden" lake and visited Monkey Island, which did not turn out so well for Derek!  Monkey Island is just that, an island full of monkeys that have, unfortunately, been spoiled by the tourists over the years.  As we were walking along a path, one of the head honcho males sees a candy wrapper we forgot to take out of the backpack....and jumps for it!  So now Derek, who despises monkeys, has one on his back trying to steal the backpack.  He slowly takes it off and shakes the monkey off only to have him hiss (teeth bared) at us.  (By the way: the other tourists are finding this much more amusing that we are).  Then one of his smaller minions jumps back onto Derek's leg and steals our water bottle! At this point, 6 or 7 monkeys have arrived to see what all the fuss is about and we take off back towards the beach as fast as we can pass the other tourists.  Finally safe, we return to collecting shells and sea glass on the beach....prettiest shells we've ever seen.
   Then we flew down to Danang and caught a train up the coastline to Hue, a cute town on the Perfume River.  We toured the city and sights yesterday and plan to visit the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) tomorrow.  We've only been in Vietnam for a little over a week, but we've learned a lot.  It's easy to get caught paying much more than you should for just about everything, but we do our research so we know the real costs (it sometimes works, ha!)