Hanoi

When we arrived in Hanoi it was overcast, foggy and quite cool. After a short walk from the hotel we arrived at a lake where a significant crowd had gathered and were staring into the water.

A local told us that they were looking at a 1,000 year old turtle that lives in the lake - Lloyd also confirmed it was in the UK media before they left. Apparently, the local opinion is that it's recently been unwell and by the look at the state of the green slime it was swimming around in that was supposed to be the lake, we weren't surprised.
As we continued our wander further around the streets we happened upon a guy who seemed to be equipped to repair Helen's glasses which had recently broken.

There were also a number of interesting retailers selling all kinds of stuff..

There was also a number of women of Hanoi and the surrounds who constantly sold goods from their heavy balancing wicker baskets. A trip to the local womens museum had a short documentary illustrating how far the ladies come to sell their goods, the amount of time they are away from their families, the long hours they work and the small, yet significant sums of money they can earn to take back to their families to help to feed them and make a difference.

We also walked past 'Uncle Ho's' mausoleum, but were too late in the day to go inside and take a peek.

The weather in Hanoi was a complete mixed bag and cooled rapidly soon after we arrived and descended into a number of days rain, but before we left it had begun to improve significantly again. So much so, that a walk over to the 'big lake' revealed just how huge it was and stopped David in his tracks from thinking we could take a short stroll around the whole of it in one afternoon.

Hanoi was where Lloyd & Margaret left us to return back to Blighty via Kuala Lumpur, but not before Lloyd found his Utopia.

The traffic in Hanoi deserves a special mention: It does seem to get by in a merged-chaos kind of a way. One way streets are of no consequence to either mopeds or cycles of various sizes and pedestrians might as well not exist. Peripheral vision and a horn that seems to suggest an 'OK, I've made my mind up and I'm coming through this gap/junction/crossing' regardless of what is coming in the opposite or sideways direction. It appears to work the majority of the time, but clearly there are many instances when the deafening horns can not be differentiated from the mass of others and there are painful consequences.

Hanoi was also the first place we noticed the many couples openly checking each others hair for nits. Is your head itching now as ours did when we saw this?

We also treated ourselves to a performance of water puppets. It was a show loosely based on sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll. It was a privilege to hear first hand the in-theatre Vietnamese band for the first couple of numbers, but admittedly it did become a bit repetitive throughout the sixty minutes of the whole performance. As for the sex bit, it really was quite something to see the puppets of the local farmers running around attached very closely behind the water buffalo! Finally, the drugs part - by the end of the performance we were unsure if we'd been on, or just needed them. Honestly though, it was well worth witnessing and the start of a good evening.

Our final few nights accommodation were at a back packers hostel in the style we'd become accustomed to on our overland journey out to Australia. It was a clean, almost palatial room overlooking the old town complete with flat screen tv and balcony. Worryingly though, the other double doors in the windows overlooking the roof tops of Hanoi didn't have a balcony, they just opened out, so no sleepwalking for us!



On our final night in the city we met up with an Australian couple, Richard & Anita, who we'd bumped into a few times in both Hanoi and SaPa and we ended up visiting the local Bia Hoi's (outside bars) where fresh beer is served up for about 15p a glass, nice and cold. However, we sat on tiny plastic stools the size of those you find in primary schools and we're sure that those chairs were responsible for the wobbly legs at the end of the evening rather than the content of those glasses that just kept being refreshed into the late hours of the night.