Hanoi was very cool, I just had bad timing. The Chinese (Lunar) New Year began on February 17th so the few days before and pretty much the entire week after that date had the effect of shutting down the whole city, and from what I could tell, a lot of Asia in general. Everyone goes home for the New Year to be with their families, thus crowding the buses and trains and closing down all businesses. Instead of waiting around and killing time for a week+, I did a couple of tours out to sights that were still open then headed off to Okinawa, Japan.

The first thing I did when I got off the train in Hanoi was go find a guest house, as usual. I was sitting in it's tiny downstairs lobby looking through my guidebook at about 8am when I heard a familiar voice. Looking up I found, to my surprise, my friend Alex from Vancouver Island who I'd sat next to on the bus a couple of days earlier and chatted books with. He was going to be around for the next couple of days and he immediately showed me over to a little breakfast joint down the street and took me shopping through the criss-crossed alleys of the old-town. After my tours and in the evenings we went out in search of street food and wandered around the lake watching the most random acrobatics going on as New Year entertainment. We had a good time.

As for the tours, first I took a day trip out to the Perfume Pagoda. This consisted of a bus, then a little 4 person boat trip for an hour down a picturesque little river, then a 45 minute hike through the hills to the Pagoda. And this wasn't just any Pagoda, it wasn't even a building, it was a shrine down in a large cave on a mountain, and it was BEAUTIFUL. After climbing two and a half kilometers worth of stairs, I was very ready for the descent into the cool, damp cave air. There were insense-waving worshipers as well as photo-snapping tourists and the atmosphere was wonderful.

There were some fun people on that trip too. My boat-ride buddies were Nui, a really sweet Thai guy who was visiting his Vietnamese friend Gong, (the most attractive Vietnamese dude I'd yet seen, btw) and this 15-year-old Korean kid. Well, I could talk to Nui, who spoke Thai and English, then he could talk to Gong, who spoke Thai and Vietnamese, then Gong could talk to the lady rowing our boat, so the four of us could hold a decent, if not rapid conversation. Only the little Korean guy was left out, as he only understood the generic "hello, my name is" phrases of English.

The other little trip I took was a boat tour of HaLong Bay and I was excited for that. HaLong Bay consists of giant limestone formation things out in the water off the coast of Vietnam and they really are beautiful. It was such a nice change after weeks of wats, pagodas and museums. (Though I did see a unique water puppet production in the capital.) About 30 of us piled onto a somewhat junk-ish style boat and cruised around the bay all day long, with a stop to check out some great cavernous caves, one of them lit up with colored lights making it appear a fairy's secret den. They were fantastic and kept reminding me that I need to take up spelunking.

For the rest of the time we pretty much just cruised around the bay enjoying the scenery. Eventually we shipped about half of our number off to Cat Ba Island to spend the night while the rest of us bedded down on the boat. I was sharing a little cabin with a 50-or-so-year-old English man who, though a very nice man, decided to smoke in the room (even in the middle of the night) and wake me up every couple of hours with loud phlegmy coughing. Lovely. In the morning we had the opportunity to do a bit of kayaking, and what with the mist making everything look, well, 'myst'ical, I was quite satisfied with the whole experience.

What absolutely made my two days though, was the fact that I met a group made up of a Spanish girl, a Chilean guy and two Columbians who, obviously, all spoke fluent Spanish! I was in linguistic heaven! The four of them all work for a law firm in Beijing (what?) and are 4 of only 15 spanish speakers living in of China. What are the chances? We all hit it off pretty well and I will probably be seeing them when I fly into Beijing in a couple of months! I'm giddy with excitement just thinking about the prospect of speaking Spanish with native speakers again.

Next stop: Japan