I left chill, Brisbane and Australia on the Friday evening for a flight at 11pm to Taiwan, with a 3 hour stop over before catching the next flight to Hanoi.

Soon as I got off the plane you could feel how strong the heat was, very sticky and humid.

I arranged a taxi through my hostel to pick me up so after I collected my bags there was a guy standing there waiting for me with a sheet of paper in his hand that said my name.

We went to his car and set off to the hostel. I was warned beforehand about how crazy the roads are over here and straight away I knew what they meant. So many people drive motorbikes and scooters its crazy, they just weave in and out of the lanes, and sometimes even go on the curb, and the cars just fly along and everyone seems to go as fast as they can overtaking each other and even at a cross section or roundabout nobody stops driving until they are about to hit one another, which they you get a bunch of vehicles stuck in the middle of the road for about 5 seconds with horns sounding until they manage to drive around and past each other.

The worst part is if your walking across the road, if you wait for an opening it takes too long, which I found out when a guy in KFC started filming how much of a fail I was attempting to cross. The method is to just start walking at any given chance and expect the people on bikes to drive around you until you get to the other side which after 9 months of being in a country that is illegal to jay walk this was very difficult to get the hand of but ill just have to get use to it.

Hostel

I arrived at my hostel, which was a lot smaller than any previous ones I had been to as it could just fit two 10 bed dorms, but the staff were really nice and the woman that ran it was proper helpful and honest when it came to booking tours from what I heard, between 8-9pm there was a happy hour where I was expecting there to be a bar of some sort but just turns out that they have beer in a fridge that they keep handing out to you, it's also a good way to meet the other people staying in the hostel and they do free breakfast in the morning but I'm not so fussed about that.

The room itself isn't so bad considering its a 10 share, the wifi is free and usually great signal in the room and we had a bathroom for our own room, and I've noticed since I've been in nam the past week nearly is that most travellers in Asia I've come across have been from the uk which is actually pretty nice so we generally get along a lot better when people meet.

City

Hanoi is the capital of Vietnam and you can tell why instantly, it's a vast city with so much going on, motorbikes and scooters boss the streets and the locals populate the pavement and soon as they see a westerner, especially in the old quarter, they start asking you to buy their merchandise, hats, shirts, taxi rides, even polish or fix my sandals, anything to get your money, but never in an aggressive manner, always a smile, be it a cheeky one sometimes, on their face.

The great thing about hanoi is the atmosphere and the vibe, pretty much everyone trying to make a living, so many small businesses with there shop the size of a door selling all manner of things, even barbers do their job in the street cutting people's hair, or women preparing fruit and veg on the pavements wearing the iconic hats and carrying baskets of products on their bikes as they stroll down the lane. Bia hoi, the most common drink in Vietnam is sold and drank literally on street corners, normally large groups of men will sit on tiny plastic chairs, or squat if they feel like it, in a little empty building on the corner of a block and have a casual drink of beer.

Also the local cuisine like chicken pho, or pho bo, which is pretty nice noodle soup and meat, is sold in so many little restaurant type cafe areas, and there are seats and tables outside for everyone who buys them to eat there. After the working day you would expect the streets to start emptying but after they finish work it would appear that instead of sitting in there little homes behind the shops and whatnot, and sit and have their evening meal on the pavement, or play a game of cards, or just sit and relax and people watch.

It's a total different way of life here and I'm loving every minute of being immersed in this colourful and charming capital of Vietnam.

It helped massively that on my second day while I was trying to acclimatise and get my sleeping pattern back to normal that I met two girls who I had checked in to chill about 4 months ago, that awkward moment when you recognise each other but your not sure why but we got talking and hung out since, going to a place called joma pretty much everyday together as it was a lush sort of bakery cafe place with free wifi so you would end up spending hours in there.

One night after taking advantage of the free beer at the hostel we talked to 6 Irish guys who were going to go on a night out, since it would be my first night out in Vietnam or Asia for that matter I was keen to join. After all sharing a load of vodka we went off to find the bars still open. A rule in this country is that no bars can be open after midnight, but there is a sort of secret pub crawl where I'm sure the police know or must be bribed but turn a blind eye for a while. So everyone who wants to stay out joins a pub crawl which normally starts a certain hostel with a bar, and they make their way around the different bars in the city until the police come in waving around their guns telling you to leave and repeat the cycle at the other bars until its game up.

We wandered the streets looking to tag onto this pub crawl and finally made it, where a Vietnamese guy showed us through the city to the bar called the lighthouse, by the front you would never know as it is like a large gate, presumably to stop police or neighbours hearing it so it looks a bit weird from the outside, as soon as I walk in I ask for the toilet and apparently there isn't one, you just go out the back and relieve yourself among the bushes and stuff. Inside the bar seems fine and normal so we had a good night getting drunk, only downside was what to drink, they only had carlsberg as the only beer there which was odd and although I didn't realise until after but I played pool with what was probably a "woman of the night". We left at 3.30 which at that time the bar was still open but we had our fill and went back to the hostel.

During my time in Hanoi I visited the war museum which was pretty cool teaching about the history of Vietnam during the war with America and also it's independence from the French, I also went to Kiem lake which has a little meditation temple attached to it, the Ho Chi Minh museum which was a little random and odd. Checked out the old quarter which is what use to be the original hub of the city but it now a sprawling nostalgic network of streets full of shops and cafes and random other businesses which is so busy and chock full of people trying to flog anything to get westerners to pay them money for the likes of cheesy nam shirts or clean my sandals etc.

To try and do something a bit different from the norm and get a bit of culture on the go I suggested s water puppet show to a couple of my room mates which might not sound that cool but in fact it actually was. Essentially it was a show about the history and beginning of Vietnam told through music and puppets, each different type of puppet had its own unique sort of movement and the faces looked funny on some of them and some were just pretty cool designs, it was a pool of water with plastic door things around it so that the puppets could get in back and forth and perform, being worked by the guys standing in the water behind the plastic doors. The techniques and formations coupled with the music and puppets made it actually quite entertaining. But now I've had a few days to look around and soak up the atmosphere and what Hanoi has to offer I need to get into the swing of things being a traveller and start travelling places and doing tours.

Halong bay and Sapa to come.