Hi everybody,

I think it's going to be a struggle to try and remember everything I wanted to tell you all about since my last post, but I'll try. There's been so many things that I've seen or experienced but I've been pretty poor at writing them in my journal so I'll probably forget about half of them when writing this.

The train back from Ayutthaya to Bangkok was quite an exerperience. I would have been hanging out the carriage, holding onto the bars, if two thai men who seemed quite practised in travelling this way, hadn't offered to swap with me to make room for me and my backpack inside the carriage doorway. Very full to say the least. But people selling beers and rotis (pancakes) still managed to squeeze through all the carriages.

The flight to Hanoi wasn't too bad, I feel a bit more at ease about my 16 hour flight home with Air Asia now (who are basically the asian version of easyjet or ryan air). But I was quite nervous about Hanoi, I'd heard some scare stories about being scammed, having bags snatched by people on motorbikes, being short-changed, being taken to 'duplicate' hotels that are set up with the same names with other popular hotels but charge loads more and are pretty awful. Along with the fact that my flight didn't get in until 9ish, I thought it was best to book somewhere and ended up booking a bed in a dorm room at Hanoi Backpackers hostel. It's a pretty cool place and easy to meet people. And they have a free breakfast that includes banana jam (yes, I eat jam now. My sweet and savoury principles have been completly comprimised on this trip). And so far, no bag snatching, real scamming or being taken to the wrong place has taken place (touch wood) but the short-changing is a bit of an issue! They always act as if it was an innocent mistake on their part but it happens a lot. I think because it's hard to get your head around all the zeros, so its easy to get confused between 10000 (about 45p) and 100000 (about 4 pound 50). Even the woman at the scared temple of literature managed to short change me by about 50,000 dong (about 2 quid). But sometimes I guess you have to think that that 2 pounds probably means more to them than it does to me. Otherwise you'd end up getting very angry.

The other scary thing about Hanoi is the traffic. There are motorbikes everywhere, which means that the 2 laned main roads in town are actually about 10 vehicles wide. And there is never a gap. After watching the locals cross I've worked out the best way to go about it is to try and make yourself as avoidable as possbile. This means stepping out and walking across in a slow but confident straight line across all this speeding traffic.
But apart from that, I'm really loving Hanoi. The backpacker's hostel is in a place called the old quater and it's full of winding little streets with odd little shops, random food markets and street vendors wearing conical hats. I didn't realised how popular the conical hats actually were with local people, I always assumed it was one of those 'typical' national costumes that nobody actually wears apart from at tourist resturants. But all the people working outside seem to wear them as protection from the sun.

It is cooler here in Vietnam, but so humid still, so it doesn't feel much cooler. And when I looked at the weather forecast before I got here, it said thunderstorms for a week. So far there hasn't been any and it's only rained two or three times, for short bursts. But I'm still sure the tan is rapidly fading! I can't wait to get back to a beach to top it up!

My first day in Hanoi, I decided to try and follow the walking tour of the old quarter in the lonely planet guide. I started off at the big lake, where they have a tortoise tower dedicated to the tortoises that apparently live in the lake. There's some legend involving a sword being restored by some ruler to the golden tortoise of the lake and also some controversy about whether the tortoises are placed in the lake every so often by somebody to keep the legend alive as the sightings are few and far between). Then I went across into the temple that sits on the lake to see on of these preserved tortoises. Very odd! Eventually I found though that I was spending more time with my head in the book trying to work out which road sign to look out for next then actually taking in any of the sights. So I discarded the book and just wondered. There was a cute little street market that was full of (mostly still live) food and flowers, including turtles, live prawns and massive shark-looking fish. There were also a lot of pig trotters and chicken feet. It was weird though, you'd be walking down one street and it'll be full of tourist t-shirts, fans and postcards and then you'd literally turn around a corner and you'd be in proper local territory with people buying their fruit by the kilo on their doorstep from vendors and others sat round on little stools playing cards.

I decided to try the famous 'pho' noodle soup for lunch (they traditionally eat for breakfast here but I don't know if I can handle that!). It was really nice, very filling, but quite hard to eat with chopsticks.

In the afternoon I went to the first of the many museums of Hanoi and it was a good indicator of the biased-ness that was to come! Much of the downstairs was all about women's contribution to the war. They have an actual title here, which is something along the lines of 'Vietnamese glorious mothers' and is awarded to women who 'donated' 'matyrs' to the war effort and lots of other stuff about 'comrades' and 'brothers' and 'the enemy'. Upstairs though was actually a really interesting and well presented temporary exhibition about the street vendor women and what they are facing now that there's been a ban in some of the streets of Hanoi on street vending. I also walked past the big catholic cathedral they have in the city, which is quite odd to see in the middle of an asian city. Apparently at easter there is a full on 'performance' of the crucifiction. I'm sure that would have been interesting to see.

The evening I went to see the water puppet show. I didn't really know what to expect, but it was basically a big pool set up at the front of the theatre with a curtain down the middle which you couldn't see behind and the puppets were mostly on poles so they danced them out in front of the curtain. It sounds crap but it was actually really good to see and pretty amazing some of the things they did with the puppets. Some of the puppets smoked, others let off fireworks from underwater, and the fish puppets moved in such a way they almost looked real.

The next day I got up early to go to see Ho Chi Minh's Masoluem, which is only open between 8-10am. I had to jump on a moto taxi to go and see it (scary but fun, and I got given a little helmet to wear so I'm sure it was all very safe...). But when I go there, I found out that the place was closed on Mondays and Fridays. So I didn't get to see him! Luckily the museum and the place where he lived were still open to look around and I'm glad I did. The museum was very interesting, but almost more like a modern art gallery than a museum. There were lots of displays, such as a giant table with a massive fruit bowl on, which apparently symbalised the fertility of the country and a whole room with a model volcano with a totem pole which was something to do with the folk history of the country. In the afternoon, I went to the Ha Lao Prison museum, which was used by the French to keep Vietnamese prisoners when they occupied the country and was also used by the Vietnamese to keep the american pilots who were captured during the american war. This was where the bias-ness really kicked in! There was lots about the appalling treatment of the vietnamese prisoners, about how many died of what, the conditions they were kept in and even a guilotine that was used for executions. All pretty horrific. But then there was a small display about how well kept the American pilots were, with lots of diaplays about the christmas dinners, pictures of them being well treated in hospitals and a little film about how they were better kept than most vietnamese people at the time and that they 'all greatly appreciated the way they had been treated by the vietnamese people'. Which might be true but the fact that senator John McCain apparently can't lift his left arm higher than his shoulder because of the torture he recieved there suggests that there was a bit more that went on....

After that, I decided to go and read by the lake, as it was such a nice day. I'd barely sat down when I was approached by 3 vietnamese people, 2 about my age and one slightly older. They asked if they could sit and talk to me, as the older guy was a teacher and the two younger were his students. I was pretty sure I was about to be scammed or mugged, but I thought I could easily make a getaway if this was the case, so I said they could sit with me (and clutched my bag tightly to my lap). As it turns out, they were completly genuine and they were joined by a few other students from the class. After talking for about an hour and a half what kind of music they were into (Coldplay, Queen, The Beatles, Neo were all popular) and what they liked to do in their free time (badminton, cinema, eating ice cream) and where they were all from (most of them were from the northern part of Vietnam and they all said they were looking forward to the holiday they would be getting from 30th April to 4th May so they could go and visit their parents), they all wanted their picture taken with me. The teacher had left by this point and they all asked if I wanted to go to a place that sold famous ice cream with them. It was a really little place, hidden away, that you would never have found by yourself and the ice cream was really cheap, about 5000 dong (15p-ish). They bought me 2! Some of them ate about 3 or 4 so I didn't feel too greedy (they were little ones). Before everybody went their seperate ways they asked if they could take me to the history museum in the morning and if I wanted to get some breakfast with them before (pho). I was quite excited about it, but the next morning it was raining and they sent me a message saying that it probably wasn't a good idea.

Later on that day, I met a couple of girls staying in my dorm room called Laura and Jane, and we decided to head to the BBQ at the hostel together for a beer (yes, I drink beer now, but not very much because I still think it tastes a bit rank) before heading to the night market. The night market wasn't hugely impressive. Quite tacky. The next evening though, we decided to go and try the street food and some snake wine. We ended up at a place where you chose your meat skewers to be barbecued (along with your barbecued bread!) and then they bought it over to you. It was a bit worrying that we didn't really know what any of the meat was, especially since we'd been told that dog was a popular dish over here. On the way back we decided to buy ourselves a bottle of the snake wine (which is literally a bottle of wine with a big cobra inside it) and sit by the lake to drink it (along with a 'suprise filling' donut to take the taste away afterwards). It pretty much just tasted like nail varnish remover. More like a very strong spirit then any kind of wine I've tasted. And the donut was strawberry flavoured, which was slightly disappointing!

The next day, we had booked a tour to Halong Bay. Laura and Jane were just staying one night, but I'd signed myself up for the 2 night tour, which included one night on a junk boat in Halong Bay and one in a nice hotel on Cat Ba island, the main inhabited island there. The scenery was pretty amazing (although similar to Krabi in Thailand) and it was so cool floating out in the eerie silence of the night with the huge cliffs overlooking you from the water. We went kayaking to 'fairy cave' before heading into the pitch blackness inside to try and see some of the formations, including a lucky 'buddha' (it didn't look much like buddha to me) and the formations that made different pitched drum sounds when you banged on them, so you could play a tune. Back at the boat, we went for a swim, ate a lovely dinner, and then the drinking began. All day, the guide had been speaking with a broard scottish accent, which led to some shock and confusion when at dinner he made an announcement that his name wasn't really 'Angus James' (really we should have seen that coming) but Andrew James and he was Canadian. Some of the group were still convinced this was a double bluff and he was actually still Scottish.

Next day we all woke up very tired and hungover (some people had stayed up the whole night) and wishing we'd only done the 1 night tour so we didn't have to go on a trek up a massive hill! But when we got to the island and started climbing (extremly mucky and slippy) we all started feeling better. I think we sweated out all the alcohol! And the view from the top was pretty amazing. There was a viewing tower there also, which looked very rusty and there was a hole in the platform at the top. Quite disturbing. We got back and checked into our hotel. It was very posh and lovely and the food there was gorgeous (all the food was included in the trip, so it was nice that it was all so good, because we would have had to eat it anyway!). Then after a wonder around the island and a power nap in the afternoon, we all went out for dinner, then to a bar, and the drinking started again. Including free rice wine, which again, was not very much like wine, more like tequila! My poor liver. After trying and failing to find the beach, we all headed back to the hotel and most people were in bed by about 1ish! The next day was mostly spent travelling back by boat and bus but we made arrangements to all meet up for dinner in the evening. After the boys decided they wanted to eat 'something that wasn't served with rice, preferably steak or ribs' we ended up at an Irish bar. I had bangers and mash and it was amazing. But I was strictly on the soft drinks so as not to push my liver too far after being ill!

Today has been mostly spent trying to sort out plans for the next few days. Because of the national holiday, a lot of the transportation has been booked up already and some accomodation places hike up their prices. But now I've got a place booked on the night-bus to Hue tomorrow (along with a girl called Jennifer who I met on the Halong Bay trip and who's headed the same way as me), so we'll see what the room prices are like when we get there... Apart from that I've not been up to much in Hanoi since we got back. Apart from eating ice cream with Jennifer and another girl called Charlotte who we met at breakfast this morning. Well, I had gone a whole 4 days without eating any...

I'm going to try and see Ho Chi Minh again tomorrow morning. Fingers crossed I'll be able to this time!