The journey from Sapa went without incident really. The Vietnamese chap next to me spent most of his time sat in the aisle throwing up into the little blue rubbish bags. We arrived into Hanoi at 5am, a little earlier than we expected and after getting some taxi help from a local we reached our hotel. Only problem was we didn't have enough money to pay. So after quite a lot of gesturing to my bank card and pretending to put it into an ATM and saying "Bank" and "A-T-M" to the lovelly patient taxi driver he took us to a bank, or at least we stopped him as soon as we went past an ATM.

6am in Hanoi is lovelly. It's cool-ish and quiet, very quiet. Which is a complete contrast to normal Hanoi. An old fella who lived across the street from our hotel spent much of the early morning sweeping his section of pavement. This unbeknown to us must have been his warm up because he then got involved in some martial art practice and he seemed to know what he was doing to our untrained eyes. The two trees closest took a beating with his staff work. HiiiYa!

We witnessed this among other things because the shutter to our hostel was closed and we sat on the steps out front waiting for someone to turn up. Thankfully they start pretty early and we got checked in.

After some rest we wandered out into Hanoi's Old Quarter and using the Lonely Planet guide we followed their walking tour. The Old Quarter is a warren of streets which all look very similar and getting lost is easy. The traffic in Hanoi is the craziest so far. We saw it described on another blog as "playing frogger with your life" and that pretty much somes it up. We visited the temple on the lake at Huan Kiem and also got tickets for the water puppets show that afternoon (a tradiditional Vietnamese show). It had rained and Helena was slipping and sliding and falling over in her free with a magazine flip-flops. As fortune would have it just around the corner was Hanoi's shoe shop district. After some stern haggling on Helena's part she got a new pair of sandals for 300,000VND (a tenner down from 1,500,000VND).

We saw the water puppets show which is funny, albeit perhaps not for the right reason. The poor puppets are in need of some re-painting but I would recommend you see it as the chances are you won't have seen anything like it before.

We chilled out that evening and spent most of the next day doing pretty much same as the day before just wandering around the Old Quarter.

After a good restful night we took a taxi to the bus station and booked tickets to Cat Ba Island. A bus-boat-bus journey and our first chance to see the sea.

Andy + Helena

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