The long overnight bus journey from Hue to Hanoi did not start well. Within minutes a loud Canadian guy sitting a couple of rows in front of me decided to 'entertain' anyone who would maintain eye contact with his hilarious travelling stories, full of piercing insights such as have you noticed how the toilets here are different from home, and no-one speaks proper English do they...?

After about an hour, he finally, mercifully, shut up, by my reckoning about ten minutes shy of a public lynching.

When I'd boarded the bus, the seat next to me was vacant – often the difference between getting some sleep and none at all – but at the last minute a pretty Vietnamese girl sat next to me. I gave her my best friendly, winning smile, but got not response.

Over the next 12 hours or so our relationship went through three distinct phases. There was the giddy first few hours where she used me shamelessly as a pillow without ever actually acknowledging me or making eye contact.

There was then the difficult middle period where she was being sick every five minutes and I was passing her my water bottle between waves of nausea.

Then there was the last hour or so where she just cried continuously. I don't know what I did wrong or what I said. Maybe I was too needy. Or maybe I didn't listen enough. Or perhaps it was just never meant to be. But in the end she got off the bus a couple of hours outside of Hanoi, without so much as a goodbye, leaving me with only a vacant seat to remember her by. I consoled myself by stretching out and actually managing to get about an hour's sleep.

The bus dropped us all off at a hotel in Hanoi, where they hoped we'd stay because that's how the whole open bus ticket thing works. I established very quickly that if I wanted to do a three-day Halong Bay tour, which is what I'd planned to do, I'd need to leave in the next five minutes or fall foul of the almost total shutdown that occurs over the "Tet" New Year holiday.

So I signed up, and jumped on the back of a scooter to take me to the minibus that was leaving for Halong Bay. Which was all fine, but all I really wanted to do was sleep.