YO, YO!!! It's Lukey for a change now, cos we all know Elizabeth enjoys these, and likes to hog them! :-D (Joking!)

So, our journey to Vietnam began with yet another tacky, pathetic excuse of a bus leaving the ever so energetic, bustling Xam Neua or Sam Neua, as it was spelt in some places. (I DO NOT LIKE THEM, SAM NEUA, I DO NOT LIKE GREEN EGGS AND HAM!!!) :-D

The journey was exhausting, and every so often, we had to stop, so the Vietnamese people could load more stuff onto the bus from random villages, it's not as if the bus had like 20+ people on it, and all this stuff in boxes were being dumped in the back, on backpacks, or in the aisle, so as you can imagine, I literally felt as if I wanted to be sick every 30 seconds. If I hadn't have had a bottle of water, and my tunes, I think I would have lost the plot! I kept checking to make sure Liz was okay too, she looked drained! These long journeys threw South East Asia have been the highlight so far... :-)

We crossed the border into Vietnam, and at first I couldn't see any difference to Laos, the same mountain scenery,and remote villages, but as soon as we came into a city, it's like the mountains etc were a thousand miles away! Crazy! My first impressions of Vietnam was; HOLY HELL, There are so many bikes, the drivers are reckless, and nobody really gives a toss if your standing at a crossing about to cross the road, they will happily go straight through you. We were dropped off at a place that I now cannot remember the name of, lol! From there though, we managed to get a bus onward to Hanoi for $5, but that wasn't before the bus we took from Laos tried to rip us off by saying they would take us to Hanoi for 15 dollars, uh no thanks, we'll go to the bus station and probably get it for much less. AHHHHH ASIA, I love the scams!!! U look like money instead of a human being, lol! We got off the bus after four or five times of insisting that we didn't want to pay that, at least we've learnt our lesson from the other times. We started walking with this Danish guy off our bus, who was encountering the same problem as us on that bus, suddenly a Vietnamese guy came running towards us and said, "HANOI, you want to go to Hanoi?" We said, yes, because, it was nearly 7pm, we'd been travelling all day, and just wanted to get there, and get to bed. It was only $5, it took 3 hours to get there, and the journey was even funnier than the last, the Vietnamese dude kept opening the door and shouting HANOI at people waiting for buses, he would sometimes get off the bus and physically pull them onto the bus, lol! Me and Liz were in tears, he'd also open the door and kick his foot at buses, lorries, whatever, in order to stop them overtaking us! That's when it dawned on me that the roads of Vietnam were clearly INSANE!!!!

When we got to Hanoi, it was nearly 11pm, and we were out of our depth a little. We hadn't booked anywhere, totally hadn't done any research in Laos, as to what area was best to stay, and to be perfectly honest, we were quite scared now, taxi drivers came running at us, and we told one to take us to a guesthouse in the centre. He responded with, "Centre" then again, "centre". I was a bit worried because it was obvious that the language barrier was harder than in Thailand, Cambodia etc. Were we really in Hanoi, or on the outskirts or something? We were a tad concerned as it was very late, so we just needed to find a place to crash, then tackle Hanoi in the daytime.
We found a hotel in the end, after seeing a big neon signpost saying "HOTEL" we thought we might aswell give it a try.
The taxi we were going to take was rigged, the meter was going up a LOT and we'd hardly moved! We decided to get out and walk to find somewhere, there's no way it should have cost that (58,000 dong... only three dollars, but within literally a few seconds?!) and there's no way I was paying any more to some idiot who clearly had his meter rigged.
We got to this hotel and had a really nice room, good standards. The location? RUBBISH!
We went out the next day and discovered we were not in a backpacker area, and the Vietnamese weren't very welcoming in this part of town. We seemed to get weird stares and laughs everywhere we went...
We did find a good local place to drink, which was a very basic bar (which didn't even HAVE a bar, just crates of drink!) and little plastic seats.
It was fun to mingle in there, it was a very local place and some guys sat next to us asked where we were from. We told them "U.K", and tried to explain Wales to them, but they seemed to think we were from New Zealand...we ended up having to tell them we were from England just so they'd understand where we were from...I think they heard us say "Land". :-)
In the end we just let them think it, the language barrier was a bit hard here.
We wondered how we'd get on in the rest of Vietnam if the capital was like this, but it's not been so bad. We were just in the wrong place.
The drinks in this bar were about 50 Cent. In general everything was quite cheap.

We went across the lake on a big plastic swan boat that you pedal yourself. The chain on our swan came undone from the pedals and we got stuck, we had to scream and wave our arms for the guys to come and help us. Took them bloody long enough.

The first couple of days in Hanoi we were beginning to wonder why we'd bothered, maybe we could have stayed in Thailand and seen other parts. Then we discovered the Old Quarter. We did some research online and realised there was a more touristy place we hadn't yet seen, so decided to stay there for a bit.
Once we got there we felt a lot better. There was a lot more English speaking people, who all seemed friendlier and we ended up booking our trip to Halong Bay through our hotel. The trip was to go on a boat for three days and see parts of Halong Bay and Cat Ba Island.
We stayed one night in the Old Quarter, in which we went out and had some food in a place called "Gecko's" - a bar and restaurant which had been rated one of the best places to eat.
We had an early start for Halong Bay so we got back to our room early and watched some films. Looking back, it was good to see two completely different parts of Hanoi instead of just a touristy area. All experience I guess.

Ooooooooh I've enjoyed writing this! :-D

Luke
Xx