Sometime this morning the rain actually stopped for a while! We even thought the sky was clearing up. Then it started back up again and settled in for the day! We sat in the Khuyen Trang restaurant having banana pancakes for breakfast and decided that there was nothing for it — we’d just have to go out and get wet! The cyclo riders were all hanging around inside the cafés smoking, there are no fares to be made in weather like this.

Across the Pearl river to the citadel, this time we had the money to get in! A fascinating place, seemingly ancient, some of the old wooden palaces were only built in the last hundred years. Along the way the rain got into my camera and it started behaving strangely, the zoom would shoot in and out and eventually I couldn’t convince it to take any more photos — a shame since there were some magnificent carvings, gardens and buildings, and all very empty since few other tourists were as eager to brave the rain as we were!

It seems that the rain was more of a problem for my camera than I thought. Of course I didn’t find out until after I got home, blissfully ignorant since I can’t see inside the portable hard disk to see what photos it really does have. Nearly thirty photos, the camera numbered them 211-1198 to 211-1199, 211-1200, then 212-1201 to 212-1228. Somewhere between camera and hard disk, the rain managed to convince something that twenty eight of them didn’t exist anymore, so all that remains of the Citadel and palaces is in my memories…