Hanoi - Thursday 15th

Arrived in Hanoi airport and handed in our papers for the visa.There were four vacant looking 'officials' who passed our forms and passports backwards and forwards to each other, looking as if it was the first time they had clapped eyes such things.After waiting around for what seemed like an age, someone with a walkie-talkie and a few badges on his uniform turned up and muttered a few words and then finally everything sprang in to action. Our taxi driver, a boy looking about 14 years old - and his mate, drove us to the Splendid Star Hotel in the Old Quarter of Hanoi.The two lane 'highway' was full of trucks and mopeds vying for a bit of tarmac.Sheikh Zayed Road is tame compared to these maniacs.We passed many open-fronted bars back away from the road, which were full of locals drinking and eating.There are people everywhere you look in Hanoi. It's crammed unlike any other place we've been to.The buildings are a real hotchpotch style of French colonial and ramshackle Vietnamese and all extremely thin and there's a moped repair shop every third building.The reason the buildings are so thin is because originally taxes were based on their width. (How strange! It's like basing taxes on the number of windows you have in your house. Hang on…didn't England once have that?). We arrived in the Old Quarter, which consists of a myriad of small cluttered streets and alleyways.We guess the photos they had taken of the rooms for the website had been taken using an ultra-wide angled lens!There was no hot water in the shower despite turning the tap full on hot and nothing but freezing water emerging.Only when we were brushing our teeth and nearly melting the toothbrush, did we realise that the taps had been put on the wrong way round! Apart from the bars on the window making it a complete fire trap - for £25 per night, all seemed fine.

Friday 16th

Using the Lonely Planet book as a guide, we went out to explore the city.We didn't get far before we were being offered 'taxi', which was repeated every few minutes. Choking on the exhaust fumes, we managed a polite 'no thanks' and then struggled to get across the hectic roads.It really is a free for all and quite difficult to say which side of the road they drive on. A red stop light seems to mean that you can stop if you want to. Crossing the street takes courage, but if you walk slowly the mopeds dodge past you. Walking on the pavement is pretty much impossible too, as here you are fighting for space with parked mopeds, families and friends sitting outside their shops on small plastic stools with everything, literally, including the kitchen sink around them.Sitting in the middle of the nearby HoamKiemLake is the NgocSonTemple (JadeMountainTemple), which was founded in the late 19th century. Incense sticks are burned to honour the dead and the smell was quite overpowering. There were beautifully carved shrines and the preserved remains of a huge tortoise that came out of the lake measuring 2.1 metres and weighing 250 kg.We then joined the queue for tickets for tonight's water puppet show, an ancient art form originating in northern Vietnam in the 11th Century by rice farmers.We then passed through streets where there were rows of shops selling shoes, silks, herbs, toys, counterfeit money (which we saw used to burn as an offering for the deceased ancestors) and the usual tacky souvenirs.Hidden amongst the shops, we stopped in Memorial House, which is a traditional Chinese merchant's house, having been restored and now is a museum.We had lunch in a café with the locals and found that the toilets were located in the ground floor of their house out the back with all their personal items scattered around the place.We found walking around exhausting with the humidity, the battle to cross the road and the general noise and mayhem!In the evening the alleyways and streets become even more crammed as the locals descend on the street cafes.In western standards these places would probably be condemned. Raw meat is cut up on old grubby looking wooden tables, vegetables left to the elements covered in flies and whole raw chickens sit in big buckets with their long necks flopped over the top.They seem really popular, so who are we to say with our lilly-livered western hygiene standards!We sat in a bar overlooking a junction of streets and watched trucks, mopeds, push bikes and pedestrians zig zag through each other. In amongst all this, vendors stand in the middle of the road selling penguin balloons!It was a fantastic venue for people watching and it's not uncommon to see a family of four squeezing on a moped, or a baby wedged between mother and father with very little protection!The water puppet theatre was next and while we are sure it must have been the entertainment equivalent of HD-surround sound for the rice farmers in the 11th century, it all seemed a bit strange to us.The puppeteers stand in the water behind screens (in the 11th century many of the puppeteers died from water-borne diseases, as they stood for so long in the murky water).However, in modern Hanoi it looked very much to us as if the puppets were on acid, as they whizzed through the water with their arms flailing and their manic eyes staring out!The show lasted 45 minutes and each act is part of a story and whilst we appreciated the art form we were ready to move on about half way through.After that we sat amongst the ex-pats, travellers and locals in the 'Polite Pub' where things seemed much more normal!

Saturday 17th

We took a walk to the Ho Chi Minh Complex in the North West of the city, part of which is a mausoleum containing Ho Chi Minh's embalmed body.However, typical of our timing Uncle Ho is off to have his embalming touched up in Moscow, so we didn't get a chance to see him. As most museums close for at least two hour for lunch we had a drink by the lake and started planning the next stages of our trip.When we left we were getting waved at from across the street by a guy with a tuk tuk, so we dutifully squeezed our selves in to the narrow seat while the string-bean sized 70-year old Vietnamese guy struggled to peddle two larger-than-average westerners round to the HCMMuseum.He wouldn't take any money from us when we arrived there, as he wanted to take us on to our next destination and waited for us.The museum was well presented, but the text a little hard to follow with just snippets of information translated in to English.We then went on to the Ho Chi Minh's Presidential Palace and House of Stilts, where Uncle Ho used to hang out, and although we were able to walk around the grounds, we were not allowed in to any of the residences, so the whole thing took us less than 15 minutes.When we came out we were hassled by a moto-taxi driver.We got on to separate mopeds and just hoped to God we weren't going to go off in different directions.The assurance of the constant mutterings of 'don't worry be happy' was a bit hard to believe, as we were almost scraping knees with cars, other bikes and pedestrians.We more or less rode side by side, as he promised and then realised we had asked for directions to the wrong hotel! So we had some Sushi and Cocktails to console ourselves in the beautiful conservatory of the Metropole! (Oh dear, never mind!) In the evening we went to a really busy, smoky pub to watch the football and then got lost walking back.We had walked too far and the streets were quite deserted, except for someone passing by on his moped who offered us a lift.This time we both got on the same bike and we couldn't stop laughing, as we imagined ourselves doing a wheelie down the road.The driver was also laughing like a demented nutter, which was a bit disturbing, but got us back safely - all of a two minute walk from where we were! Of course, that cost us a few thousand dong (about a dollar) and was worth it for the laugh.

Sunday 18th

As the internet in our room wasn't fixed we moved in to a different - and better room and this time no bars against the window.As we walked in to the main square we were again surrounded by taxi drivers, although none of them seemed to know the way to the Ethnology Museum, 7kms out of the main town The museum had exhibits on the different tribes, languages, cultures and traditions of people in Vietnam and surrounding areas of Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Tibet.In the grounds there were full-size samples of the types of houses families would have lived in.We had de ja vu, as there we were tripping over more brides and bridegrooms having wedding photos taken.It is the tradition here to take the photos before the actual wedding; this is so that all the guests get to see the pictures.The beautiful wedding dresses must be covered in sweat patches and dirt on the actual day.We got a taxi to the Sofitel, to see if we could get a day pass for the gym and pool, and realised that we had come to the wrong hotel again!We walked to the Sheraton along the side of the road past all the tatty shops and houses.The walk was a bit further than we thought, but were pleased to find out once we did get there that we can have a day pass to use all facilities.It's quite difficult to explain the total feeling of this place without experiencing the full package of sights, sounds and smells.

Monday 19th

We went off by taxi to the Sheraton for a swim, sweat, gym and spa.We sat by the pool in the beautiful surroundings and enjoyed being away from the fumes and noise of the city, but, of course, we couldn't escape the humidity.We used the gym and then enjoyed a massage and beauty treatments.In the evening we went to a traditional Vietnamese restaurant overlooking the lake and listened to the traditional Vietnamese band while trying to choose something off the menu.There must have been at least 250 dishes to choose from, so feeling over-whelmed, we settled for the set menu and hoped it didn't include any dog!

Tuesday 20th

We spent most of the morning sitting in a hot travel shop arranging our trips for the coming few weeks while we are in northern/central Vietnam.In the afternoon we went to the restaurant for a Vietnamese cookery course and were surprised to be the only two people doing it. A young student took us back through the crowded streets to go to the market.There were fish in dirty looking bowls that were barely alive, but of course this is better because at least they are 'a little bit alive' (according to the student!).There seemed to be lots of blood and scraps of meat amongst some bright and colourful vegetables.Everything is shoved in tight, so not much room to move down the small road, but still the mopeds are squeezing through the tiniest gap.Back to the restaurant we discovered that the student was the translator and upstairs in the restaurant the chef had everything prepared for us.We put on our chef's hats and aprons and tried to ignore the very tiny insects running around near the chopping boards.We began by chopping up some sweet potato for dessert and we added ginger, corn-flour and sugar and left that boiling away. Now for the starter ……. Shrimp, pork (fried with out of date peanut butter), noodles, coriander, fennel all wrapped up in rice paper with a dip.It was up to us how much chilli we added to the dip and Stephen's one nearly blew our heads off, but it was soon subdued with another teaspoon of sugar and water. We chopped chicken off the bone, scored the fish, seasoned it all and then our time was over.We followed the chef down to the kitchen and were quite gob-smacked that they didn't mind us seeing the state of it.However, there were lots of staff eating there, so if it's good enough for them, it's good enough for us.We were then served our food, which we thought was really tasty especially washed down with a Tiger Beer.

Wednesday 21st

We were picked up early from the hotel for the day trip to Ninh Binh and Tam Coc.We had a three hour trip there through the flat land, where wepassed lots of small villages and were surprised to see tombs and whole cemeteries placed in the middle of crop fields. The Vietnamese really like to keep close to their dead! There were a few roadside café's selling 'Thit Cho', the local delicacy that most of the world prefers alive and on a leash.Overtaking was happening on the roads, where it really shouldn't have been. But as long as you beep your horn louder than the person that is coming at you head on - you should be OK!We decided to watch the scenery rather than the scary roads and it was refreshing to see green fields and trees and the mountains in the distance.We stopped at the first point, which was a temple, in Hoa Lu, built for the King in the area, that was once Vietnam's capital city back in the 10th century. We arrived in the pouring rain and as soon as we stepped off the bus there were many vendors shoving cheap water-proof ponchos in our faces.We have realised that in Vietnam they never miss an opportunity to flog you anything, and because it was raining so hard they did manage to off-load a couple of fetching poncho's to us. We visited two temples, which were quite beautiful inside with some great carvings and statues of kings and queens.There were the usual bits of cake and biscuits left for offerings to the deceased king and queen and also the odd tin of Heineken left there in case they fancied a tipple from beyond the grave.It was embarrassing trying to take it out of Stephen's clutches.Out of the group, it was only the two of us who took the option of the bike ride, which was a 14km cycle through the villages at the base of the mountains.We were so glad that we did, as the scenery was stunning and plenty of chances to take some great photos.Also riding through the villages we were able to shout Xin Chuo (hello) to the locals and high-fiving with the school kids.We were really up close and personal to their daily life, which was great to experience.The villages were really quite run down with lots of goats, roosters, dogs and the odd cow sharing the path with us, and of course the occasional moped!We had a traditional Vietnamese lunch and were then taken down to the lake for some kayaking.We took the one hour trip with an elderly Vietnamese couple as oarsmen.He was 75 with a long goatee beard to rival Dicky Rumsey and the only two teeth he had in his head were gold .His wife's teeth were more of a brown colour that she showed us frequently as she laughed and smiled during the whole trip.Sure, she was a lovely lady, but most of the laughing must have been because she was happy to have two westerners on the boat likely to part with some cash.We passed some stunning scenery and spotted goats high up in the mountains teetering on the rocks. There were shrines dotted about, lily pads on the water and lots of rocks covered in bright green foliage.We rowed under some really low caves and which gave 'Brown-tooth Doris' hysterics as Stephen was almost bent double to save him from whacking his head on the rocks.We emerged out of the cave to lots of vendors in their 'floating markets' with their goods to sell.We paid an extortionate price (Vietnam extortionate, not western extortionate) for a couple of diet cokes and then were told we should buy something for Doris and 'Gold Tooth Bert', so ended up buying them drinks and biscuits (probably for them to hand back to the vendor on the next trip out).Then Doris got her doyleys out and was trying to convince us to buy them.Suz's repeated 'we have no money' eventually got heard and soon we were moored up against her son's boat, as he got the goods to try his luck with his western passengers.The photo's also had to be paid for and the hand held out for a tip.You can't blame them for wanting our cash and things are so much cheaper here, so what is peanuts for us is probably a lot to them. But we were getting a bit fed up with the constant harassing for money.We arrived back in Hanoi late afternoon and went to pick up our flight tickets for when we travel to central Vietnam only to find that the girl in the travel agents had booked us on different flights out!After failing to get through to the young girl who was stepping in for the girl we originally saw, we had to leave it with her to sort out.As we only have a window of 15 minutes between the time we return from HalongBay and the time we have to get to the airport, we are hoping that all will be correct and we might actually fly together!