(Good morning) Vietnam! (Sorry, very unoriginal, but I felt compelled!). And no chill-out time permitted to come down from our rollercoaster China ride. We thought Ulaanbaatar was a bit crazy, then Beijing was a slightly crazier still, but Hanoi is the craziest of them all! An absolute frenzy of motorbikes, which must outnumber all other modes of transport combined by about ten to one, and all trying to navigate streets only usually a single lane wide. And with pavements rendered useless by parked motorbikes, we had to battle with them on foot to make our way around. We decided after a day that it just isn't physically possible to look for somewhere (e.g. a bar or restaurant) and walk at the same time! The method you have to adopt to make safe progress is to dodge motorbikes for ten or twenty metres, find a safe standing spot, stop, look around and reassess, decide on the next stopping point to aim for, and then move again. Multi-tasking is not an option, not even for ladies!

We'd aimed for Hanoi on the 29th October because of the exciting prospect of meeting friendly faces from back home, and Rob and Emma duly landed on the 30th! Very surreal, to be honest, but brilliant to catch up over a few Hanoi beers, even though Paula and I quickly demonstrated our newfound intolerance levels, following our drastically reduced alcohol intake whilst travelling (although this is set to change now we've reached the lands of the 25p beers!). Great to catch up on gossip, football news, etc, and apparently it's been raining a bit back in England?...

It's become clear to us, though, and not just through meeting up with Rob and Emma, but also through general Skyping and emailing, that whilst it seems an age since we departed from Derby train station back at the beginning of August, because we've been to so many different places since then, and seen so many different things, not as much happens over the course of a month or two in normal life! Um, not sure where I was going with that, actually, just thinking aloud. A random comment on perspectives, but I'll get back to the subject now!...

Although not a lot to report about Hanoi, really, beyond busy streets and the inside of bars, as we were only there for a couple of days before heading off to Halong Bay for two nights, and then for another (very drunken) night before Rob and Emma got a flight on to Hoi An and Paula and I embarked on a fairly unplanned loop around the less travelled roads and less visited towns of the North West of the country.

The one major difference that comes to mind, though, from our previous destinations, and that hit us immediately, is the bargaining culture of Vietnam. And possibly from here onwards, through Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, etc? Nothing has a price tag! The routine is they gain your interest in what they're selling, you look at it, they offer a price, you offer half that value (or even less, sometimes!), and if you want it, you settle on a figure somewhere in the middle! It was fun at first, haggling to the lowest figure possible, which I quickly developed a technique for: take the money you're prepared to pay out of your wallet so that they can see it, and start walking away when they don't accept it... they quickly call you back! However, the process became tiresome after not very long at all, and bargaining is just a chore now. We've more recently taken the view, though, that although it's just how they do things around here, sometimes, if we think they've offered a fair price, we just accept it (the 60 pence difference being much more significant to their income than ours, I'm sure), and on other occasions when they ask for such a ridiculous price that they're clearly trying to rip us off, we'll just walk away immediately and forget about it. But we long for a return to price tags, set at reasonable amounts!