Hanoi

Goooooooooooood morning Vietnam, well, evening as I write this! Arriving by air was expensive from Hong Kong but as we said the China celebrations were making our trip difficult! The flight was delayed, the captain informed us something was being repaired...nice.

We were landed and out of Hanoi airport approximately 15 minutes which is surely the fastest time I've ever got out of an airport! Thankfully our pickup from the hostel was there and we had arrived at the hostel by midnight. The room was suprisingly large and clean which suprised us. We paid 10GBP a night. We could've got a lot cheaper if we negotiated on arrival instead of booking through hostelworld but we were arriving late.

We had breakfast on the roof terrace which showed us how hot and noisy it already was! Toast, eggs, ham, cucumber + tomatoes for breaky was a good fillup for the day. The first thing about Hanoi was the bikes...everywhere. After a few days we got used to walking accross the raods (which is an fine art!). We headed to the cash machine and I became a millionaire, in Dong that is! 1,000,000 Dong = 30GBP. We walked to the lake and realised that the city isn't that large despite taxi bikes wanting to take you everywhere. We walked round the lake and into the temple in the midddle which was nice. The legend of the lake is based around giant turltes that lived in the lake. They had an 'embammed' on display which we were dubious about. There was an actual turtle walking around the temple but it was regular Blue Peter size!

We tried to find 2 markets and both had bulldozers where there should be hussle and bussle! Not happy as that makes up 50% of the toursit attractions! We had our 1st lunch which was nice. We paid the 100,000 dong and as we left the cheeky waiter tried to get more for the coke we had despite telling us we the total price. We walked out and the guy in the shop opposite laughed, so I think everyone knew he was trying it on! As we didn't ask the price, we were overcharged. From that point on we realised we would have to ask a price for every item.

We mulled around until the evening and went to the night market which was very long and quite good. We had a few beers by the waterfront (beer was 35,000 dong) which had a nice setting. Around the corner, with no view beer was 18,000!!

The next day went to tourist information and were pointed to a shop to book bus tickets. The area was swamped with fake shops for the same tour company which was pretty funny but we (think we) found the right one. We booked an open tour bus ticket which will take us all the way to HCMC (Saigon) via 4 stops - Hue, Hoi An, Nan Trang, Dalat. This was really cheap like 20GBP and 2 were night buses. We also got a free t-shirt, nice.

We saw a few western faces drinking outside a shop and decided to join them. This is where we found Bia Hoi, which was beer out of a barrell for 3,000 (10 pence!) We had a few (rude not to) and wished we had found the place the day before! We got to bed earlyish for the early pickup to Halong Bay!

The museems were closed during the 2 days we were there and Ho Chi Mings body was being re-embammed. EEEwwww.

- We just rememberred (12/10) that we saw the rear half of a cooked dog in the market. Back legs, tail n all!