Good morning Vietnam!

Tuesday 18th October:-

Well, this travelling lark is proving to be great fun! Not even through our first week into our travels and things are all going rather swimmingly.  We left a cold clapham last Tuesday morning for a gatwick bound flight to Bangkok via Dubai.  The flight was all good, even despite my best attempts to eat my own body weight in plane food along with eating pretty much all of Ann-maries, so needless to say I fell asleep pretty much straight after the last gobful was shoved down my neck, but my gluttony would come back to haunt me, more on that later.

Anyway, we touched down early hours of Wednesday into bangkok, and after a few early fears that the city would be under water, we managed to check into our hotel with no problems, however when asking nearby taxis to take us to the north of the city so see the sights near the river bank, we were told in their finest Thai   "no chance sonny jim, it's flooded".  Now back to my gluttonous actions from earlier that I said would come back to haunt me...well, they did, big style. We returned to the hotel, only for me to projectile vomit all over our 4 star bathroom suite, praying on the White telephone would be where I would stay for the next 4 hours, Macca epic fail number 1 of the trip so far.  I could see ann-maries eyes well-up when i said that i definitely wasnt well enough to venture to the markets so that she could buy her moody mulberry and channel handbags.  I guess plenty of time for bartering for hooky goods....Anyway nothing that a good 10 hour kip wouldn't fix and the following day we took a flight out of Bangkok and into Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam.

Hanoi, Vietnam: (19-20th October):

Wow, this place is pretty crazy, crossing the road in this place you need balls of steel (which I definitely don't possess, and last time I checked I don't think Ammi does either!) Hanoi, is quite a diverse place, an ancient history, a colonial legacy and a modern outlook.  We found ourselves in the old quarter bubbling with commerce, buzzing with motorbikes and again full of people trying to flog me dodgy ray bans, I accepted, obviously....  

We spent the day wandering around Joan Kim lake and the ho chi Minh mausoleum complex and in the evening found ourselves at a water puppet show.... Yes you heard correctly, puppets dancing on water, pretty homosexual but its a traditional north Vietnamese art form, so when in Rome... See dancing puppets!