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Last September my husband and I embarked on our 3rd trip Vietnam in the past 2 years. This trip was just to explore the North as we had previously concentrated on the South. With a background of backpacking in my youth, I now call ourselves the 'Cheap & Cheerful Travellers'. Sure we can afford to stay in 5 star hotels but chose not to as we prefer to mingle with the locals. So we signed up to go on a 3 day tour to Ban Gioc Waterfalls right up the top of Vietnam on the Chinese border with a Vietnamese Tour Group. I couldn't book it from Australia because the website I found was in Vietnamese but with the help of Google Translate the page magically became English. The Travel Agency wouldn't respond to me, I guess they couldn't speak English. So I asked my Hanoi Hotel if they could contact the Travel Agency on my behalf to book the tour which they happily obliged. My husband came home that night and I asked him 'are you up for an adventure?' he said why. Well I told him I had booked a tour that had a home stay in Ba Be Lake the first night. I didn't know what to expect because not many tourists go to Ba Be Lake & Ban Gioc Waterfalls, it's off the beaten track a bit and the drive up is very mountainous and time consuming. I told him the trip was cheap and included almost everything, I had no idea we would be the only Westerners aboard! We arrived in Hanoi about 4 weeks after I had booked this tour. So on the morning of departure we packed our backpacks and went down to reception of our Hanoi Hotel wondering if anyone would turn up to collect us. To our surprise a Tour Leader came into our hotel looking for us, he didn't speak a word of English but the receptionist told us this was our ride. Tick, they picked us up so that was a first. He guided us to our mini bus where we made a few more stops to collect other travelers. They were all Vietnamese and we were the only Westerners. At our final pickup stop a young guy got on the bus and sat behind us then poked his head between ours and said he was our English Tour Guide. So we got our own guide and we felt very special, there was an extra rate we had paid for our tour USD$18 extra each for foreigners, we thought it was a way of making more money out of tourists but it was in fact for our own guide. So off we went travelling out of Hanoi on our way to Ba Be Lake, there were 12 passengers on this minibus, 2 tour guides and of course the driver. First stop was breakfast outside of Hanoi at a little restaurant, then when we stopped for lunch this is when we started making friends with the Vietnamese. They were all tourists themselves from Saigon (Ho Chi Minh) they were friendly and included us in everything. The wives in the group would serve up our food as it arrived on the tables because we had no idea how to eat the weird food, remember we are now outside on Hanoi where not many tourists go. Even though we had a language barrier they still helped us in showing how to eat their food. This group of people became our friends for the next 3 days. The men would include my husband in their nightly drinking rituals of rice wine and even me once. They were warm, friendly and really funny, after all they are just like you and me, just because we didn't speak the same language they never once excluded us from anything. We over nighted in Ba Be Lake in a very nice home stay, our room was just like a Harry Potter cupboard, you could hardly swing a cat in it but it was clean and comfortable. Next morning we drove to Bang Gioc Waterfalls and it was simply amazing! So worth the trip.