Stepping off the plane in Hanoi it was immediately clear that Vietnam was a very different place to Thailand. The roads from the airport into the old town were covered in every conceivable vehicle, motorbikes laden down with whole families, hundreds of chickens in cages and every type of cargo you can imagine vied for space alongside bicycles, trucks and regular cars. Oh and of course all of them were touting their horns for absolutely no reason all the time!! Crossing the road anywhere in Hanoi involves taking your life in your hands and it seems that traffic lights and lanes are really just there for the sake of it - no one actually follows them.

We wandered around the Old Quarter for a while taking in the sights and sounds, lots of the streets are still dedicated to just one trade so you get a whole street of metal workers, bamboo, glasses, silk or shoes - just the way it was in the olden days. We also wandered around the lake which forms the heart of the city and took a trip out to the temple which sits on the island in the middle of the lake. The lake seems to play a really important part in the lives of locals with people sitting in the shade all around it and in the evening we even saw a group of ladies doing yoga on the banks of the lake by moonlight. We also visited the Temple of Literature, a beautiful site in traditional Chinese style and the oldest university in Vietnam where students used to study the teachings of Confucius.

The French quarter of Hanoi is like another world, gone are the little laneways and tiny streets and in their place there are huge wide Parisian style boulevards and grand old buildings like the French style Opera house. In our wanderings we stumbled across the jail where American prisoners of war were kept after the Vietnam war, the most famous of which now has to be Senator John McCain!

No visit to Hanoi would be complete without visiting with Ho Chi Minh who reunited Vietnam and masterminded the Vietnam War setting Vietnam up as a Communist country and establishing independence. His mausoleum is massive and houses his embalmed body which the Russians attend to for a month every year for maintenance (which coincided perfectly with our visit!) but we also visited his museum and the simple house on stilts where he lived after refusing to use the French built and very grand presidential palace.

Our first nights sleep in Hanoi ended abruptly when the public loudspeakers went off at 6am with the local news on full volume for an hour or more! Apparently this happens every day - they just broadcast news and information relevant to the local area, but its not like radio that you listen if you want to - there is no escaping it! Hilarious!