Got a Hanoi Heeling!

So after a pretty easy yet long train journey the entire length of the country we arrived in Hanoi at 5am! We were, as with all SE Asian cities, bombarded with an awful lot of people shouting "taxi". Being 5 in the morning, we jumped in a cab after telling the driver to take us directly to the hotel we had booked. Little did we know at this point that he had his meter on "warp speed foreigner rate" so for the 10 minute journey it was equivalent to a London cab fare. Our first interaction with a local and he had stitched us!

We only planned on a day or so in Hanoi as we had a Halong Bay trip booked in which we were very excited about. Therefore, we decided on a day of walking around and taking in the atmosphere of the city, a little less crazy than Saigon but the people far more likely to take the shirt off your back, or the flip flops off your feet which I was soon to find out!

We found a very decent breakfast - we had been craving a cup of tea with actual milk and a western breakfast. We went to a lovely place and chatted away to a couple of Aussies knocking back a fruit shake and vodka at 9.30am. The breakfast was great, just what the doctor ordered which set us up for a stroll around the lake and some of the french quarter. The heat was intense, hotter than the south so it wasn't long before we needed to go an sit in our air con room for a bit and relax watching some TV.

On our second outing we walked some more and then went in search of the cross roads where all the shabby bars on the corners sell Bia Hoi - named in the Lonely Planet at "the cheapest beer in the world". We knew we had found it when we saw a few locals outnumbered by westerners knocking back glasses of the infamous Bia Hoi. We grabbed our child sized plastic chairs and set them up on the street and refreshed ourselves with a glass or 3 of beer that set us back about 14p per glass.

We had noticed there was a guy, a simple chap, sitting with the Vietnamese guy running the bar. He had with him a bag filled with glue, a knife, rubber from tyres and a whole host of other crap. We got chatting, somewhat innocently, with the owner and this guy with a bag of crap and then before I knew it he had taken my flip flops and had super glued a large section of tyre rubber to them claiming they needed fixing. Now, my flip flops have survived since we left home and are barely worn so they were by no means needing a fix. Before I could get the first one back he had cut the rubber to the shape of the heel and handed it back to me happy with his work. Short of me having one heeled flip flop and probably be unable to walk other than in circles he decided he would "fix" the other. When I exclaimed I wasn't paying him for this a) theft and b) flip flop enhancement he got rather agro and started waving his knife about. He told me it would cost 150,000 dong (about £6). I swiftly replied that there was more chance of it raining flip flops than me paying that so I gave him 5000 dong (about 16p). This went down like a lead balloon and then he started getting a little nasty. He was very upset indeed. I wasn't there for any grief, we are afterall on holiday, so I told him he was f'ing out of order and we paid up and left our drinks on the table.

So, about 12 hours in to Hanoi life and we had been fleeced by a cabbie and had a knife waved about for me not paying some fool for putting rubber heels on my flip flops.

Tiredness fully kicked in we went back to get our bus tickets for the trip back south and found some food before going to bed ready for our early departure to get to Cat Ba for the Halong Bay trip.

Surprise surprise the pick up to take us to the bus station which we had already paid for didn't arrive so we asked the lady behind the desk at the guesthouse to look into it for us. You would think that I had just eaten her hamster the way she looked at me. She did manage to get herself, feet dragging, to the phone and sorted us a cab which got us to the bus with minutes to spare.

So, Hanoi whilst I'm sure we just had some bad luck wasn't quite the experience we hoped for. Having said that, I am now about half an inch taller and I don't slip over when the pavements are wet!

Looking forward to 2 nights sailing around Halong Bay!

Sam