Kicking back at the Win hotel in crazy Vietnam. We are in the old quarter of Hanoi and our hotel is an old 5 story house that is full of charm and character. It is fantastic.
The traffic is just nuts. I'm not really sure that there are any road rules apart from the requirement to use your horn every 50 meters. Intersections just have people going in every direction but somehow it all works. I wouldn't ever want to have to drive here. Crossing the roads on foot isn't much better. If you waited for the traffic to stop before going you would be stuck on the one side of the road for the rest of your life, confined to circling the block. You just take a breath, step out and watch the traffic part like Moses with the sea.
We had lunch at the Kangaroo cafe. Owned and run by Australians I had bangers and mash. Good ol' Aussie snags how much I miss you. We booked our tours through them as well. We head off for a 2 day Halong bay tour tomorrow morning. Spend the night on the bay in a beautiful old junk in our own cabin with ensuite. We get back Sunday arvo and take an overnight train into the mountains as we head to Sapa for a taste of village life. We get back weds morning for a last day in Hanoi before flying back to KL on thurs. To say we are excited about these tours is an understatement. These have been high on our list of must dos since beginning the planning of our travels. We were the last ones to get on the Halong bay tour for tomorrow and if we hadn't it would have thrown our plans in to disarray as we wouldn't have been able to do it the other way around.
Vietnam has always been high on my list of must visit countries and I am loving the beauty of this country and yet we haven't seen much of it. Hope we can sleep tonight.