After several days fighting with the internet company they have reconnected our internet! It died on Tuesday and finally yesterday morning it got fixed. I think they got sick of the sight of me showing up at their offices all the time to pester them so yesterday a guy finally came to sort it. There was a problem with the cable and fixing it required him to balance on the seat of his motorbike and fiddle around with a bunch of wires in the rain. I had visions of him getting electrocuted but thankfully that didn't happen and he was able to get the wires sorted. Somewhere in this jumble of wires is our internet cable:

and the guy had to cut bits off and faff around with live wires. At least he got it sorted!

Now I've got the internet back I've been able to book some plane tickets for December. They day after the parents fly home from Singapore I'm flying to Macau to spend a couple of days there, them I'm gonna get a ferry across to Hong Kong. After that I'm flying to Malaysia - Air Asia only fly to Malaysia or Thailand from Hong Kong so those were my two options for budget flights. I'm flying into Penang so I'll spend some time in Georgetown then I'll go explore the island and go to the beach. Then I intend to go to the Cameroon Highlands to see what that's all about. It's up in the hills and there are tea plantations and stuff and a bunch of hikes so I think it'll be a nice place to spend a couple of days. Then I'll head down to Kuala Lumpur. I think that's my favourite city in Asia so I'll prolly spend a bit of time there. I want to go out to the forestry research centre place for a day as they have a canopy walkway there which sounds cool, and I'm sure there are still a bunch of sights in the city that I've not seen. There's also a lot of shopping to be done there and lots of good food to be had so it'll be a nice way to finish of my time off before I return to Hanoi and go back to work.

I also found a hotel yesterday for my weekend in Hoi An. I got some cheap flights to Da Nang so on Friday I'm heading down to Hoi An for a couple of days. Last time I went there I stayed in a cheap shack by the beach in the middle of nowhere for $5 a night but this time I've found a decent hotel in Hoi An with a swimming pool which will be nice. I don't intend to do too much whilst I'm there - go to the beach or lie by the pool mainly. I'm gonna prolly get some clothes made and get a couple of my skirts copied, and I might hire a motorbike to head out to some Cham ruins out in the country but thats about all I've planned. I'm looking forward to getting away from Hanoi and getting a bit of peace and quiet for a couple of days!

The beast now has a basket on the front:

so yesterday I kitted myself up in my riding gear:

and went up to Tay Ho to get some goodies from the shops there. It was quite a nice ride over - the sun was out and the sky was bright blue. I realised it's been a while since I've seen a blue sky here and the city just looks so much better in the sun. Even the polluted lakes don't look too bad! I did witness an accident as I was leaving the supermarket - it wasn't major but a couple of bikes crashed into each other and the riders ended up on the floor. What really bugged me was that whilst these people were getting up and picking up their bikes other people were beeping their horns as they had to wait for a minute or two whilst these people got out of the way. The beeping of the horns here is really starting to annoy me. People beep for no reason and hold down their horns for an unnecessary amount of time. When I was sitting in the internet cafe by my house on Saturday I was there at peak time in the lanes and pretty much everyone that rode past felt the need to beep their horns. It drove me insane! There is also far to much beeping on the roads too and I think I'm starting to go deaf from all the horns! I want to get at the electrics on all the motorbikes in Hanoi and rig them so that if people hold down the horns for too long or too many times in a period of time they get an electric shock!

I've joined a gym at a swanky hotel and I went there this morning. There is also a swimming pool, jacuzzi and sauna so I made use of all of them today to get my moneys worth! The swimming pool is open air and it was nice to swim under a blue sky for a change. I've spent the rest of the day doing nothing much to make up for my hectic day yesterday running backwards and forwards to the internet company trying to get reconnected.