Hanoi

Saturday 22nd December - Thursday 27th December

Tired from our broken sleep, we arrive at a guesthouse we'd booked over the internet, being worried that everywhere would be full over Christmas… the owners of the guesthouse say that they haven't received our reservation and are fully booked - but offer to take us around to a sister guesthouse nearby.We trudge, bag laden, through a lively market street, full of flapping fish and mattress shops, through a narrow alley, and up five flights of stairs.

The room we are shown is basic, but has two hard single beds, a see through door, a window onto the back of nowhere and a shower directly over the toilet… not our vision of a cosy Christmas home-away-from-home.Tired out, we agree to the room for one night and get some sleep - although our first job on waking up is a hunt for a nice room within our budget, which is eventually what we find - a lovely, old fashioned family guesthouse with a comfortable room; we even have our own little balcony overlooking the hustle bustle of the winding old quarter streets below.We are very relieved!

That problem resolved, we decide to take a walk around the old quarter of Hanoi to explore.We observe that Hanoi is very prepared for Christmas - the santa outfits on children are here in force, there's fake polystyrene snow on some of the department stores, and there are Christmas decorations for sale aplenty.

Our next task is to find somewhere for Christmas dinner.There's a large expat community here, and lots of western-style restaurants that cater to them.We visit a few restaurants that advertise Christmas day food, only to find that they are either really expensive, include forced carolling or don't really understand the concept of a British Christmas dinner - fish paste for a main, anyone?!We decide in the end to avoid the rigmarole, and after a couple of test meals, we choose a friendly Australian run café around the corner that serves a nice chicken parmigiana on their ordinary menu,have lovely deserts, and are business as usual on Christmas Day.

Having got the basics out of the way, we set out to explore Hanoi.Our guesthouse is in the centre of the Old Quarter - a complex of narrow, winding streets and alleys - packed with tiny shops selling everything from roasted pigs to memorial stones.The buildings are crumbling in places, but mostly beautifully delicate French-Vietnamese colonial style affairs, accompanied by the Chinese influence that has gotten stronger as we have moved north, and garnished with mopeds, mopeds and mopeds!

First stop is the Temple of Literature, where we spend a pleasant few hours wandering the grounds, after following the old instructional sign outside to dismount our horses, of course.The temple was a centre for Confucian learning, and has a large courtyard filled with rows of plaques mounted on carved stone tortoises, each in honour to a student who gained a doctorate there.There are also several ornate fish ponds, some lovely gardens and a large wooden pagoda at the rear. Lunch that day is at KOTO, a training restaurant for disadvantaged Vietnamese, with the aim of providing a route into the high-end catering industry… the prices matched the aims, so we lunched on a plate of (delicious) mixed starters and moved on.

We headed back into town on a cyclo - in Hanoi they're big enough for two people to share, although I doubted the wisdom of this when we got stuck crossing some train tracks after Dave requested a pause to take a photo… momentum was the key!

We made a late start on the walking tour, heading across a dinky red-painted wooden bridge to a temple in the middle of a lake, keeping our eyes peeled for giant turtles, the Vietnamese equivalent of the Loch Ness monster.Disappointed at not seeing anything, we are perked up by the dried 2-metre long giant turtle that they have on display in a glass case inside the temple buildings.

Next stop is to buy tickets for the water puppet theatre for Christmas Eve… we've been studiously avoiding much of the 'local entertainment' since our multiple puppet show experiences in Rajasthan, but are feeling a little nostalgic for Christmas and decide to give it a go.

We continue on the tour through the busy streets of Hanoi - at one point we have to give up crossing a road, even with our new found skills, as it's so busy.Embarrassingly, we are dithering about crossing at another busy junction when an old lady on the other side of the road spies us… she marches across the road and grabs each of our arms, waving down the traffic to stop as she drags us in her wake…

We potter through an offal and fish filled market, dodging the manic crowds of locals and moped drivers, and enjoy the atmosphere in the many shopping streets - each traditionally devoted to the sale of just one thing, such as tin boxes or coffins, although many have branched out a little to keep up with the times - fake DVD shops are aplenty, and one road is interestingly named 'Counterfeit Street', its main commodities being fake dollar notes and temple offerings, which are burned in stacks at the temples in honour of the dead.

Our last errand before we hunker down for Christmas is to rent a DVD player and buy a few bootleg DVDs, and at $2 for all of the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter films, plus series one and two of My Name is Earl, plus our inherited stash that Caroline and Flemming gave us, we plan for a very lazy couple of days… and it's so exciting to have the novelty of choosing what we watch on tv!(Bear in mind that we've pretty much only had CNN or BBC World thus far, when we have had television at all).

We turn up for our mid afternoon performance of the Water Puppet Theatre on Christmas Eve, and despite any misgivings we may have had, we enjoy the experience.As you'd expect, the whole performance takes place on water, with puppets popping up and out from all angles, and a curtain at the back, where the puppeteers are thigh-high in water.There are fireworks, warbling vocal and musical accompaniment and a mostly incomprehensible narration, but the experience as a whole is good natured fun, and we can't argue for one pound fifty.

We spend Christmas Eve and most of Christmas Day munching chocolate coins and toblerones, and watching films back to back, every so often popping out to the balcony to laugh at drunken western tourists wishing the bemused locals a merry Christmas at the top of their voices.The aforementioned chicken and chips is delicious, and we have a quiet lunch before retiring to an internet cafe to call home.

Boxing Day is a day of Communist fun - we have an early start and head first to Uncle Ho's mausoleum; after depositing our bags, camera and phones, we are marched in silence through the room where he lies like a delicate waxwork (there is some debate about whether he is actually the wax version).We emerge to find that many of the Vietnamese who have walked through around us are teary eyed.We crack on past Ho Chi Minh's used car garage, a stilt house where he once lived, an orchard where he once probably did something or another too, and the souvenir shop, which I assume is a recent addition.The whole walk is accompanied at regular intervals by white-uniformed guards, who hurry us on and bark at anyone who strays from the prescribed path.

As its raining, we head into the museum.The ground floor is pretty standard, showcasing lots of Ho's letters to various organisations, photos of him meeting with various dignitaries, and seemingly endless glass cases showing 'Ho Chi Minh's button' or 'a microphone that Ho Chi Minh once used'.However, it gets a little more interesting when we climb the stairs and enter a surreal world... there is a room which is sculpted like a brain which depicts Ho's thoughts and working environment, an American car that was a commercial failure in the US crashing through a wall that makes some kind of statement about the failure of America in the American War.Or something... we are a little bemused by this point, and even moreso when we are surrounded on our way out by about 20 trainee soldiers, who all try to speak to us at once until becoming fascinated and absorbed by our phrasebook.They say a polite goodbye after we prise the book from their paws, and we strike out back to the hotel, via a photo opportunity with a Lenin statue.

Our last day in Hanoi is also my birthday... with a late start, at my request; our first birthday task is to go to the post office to send all our accumulative Vietnamese ticket stubs and souvenirs home.A cup of tea later, and we're ready for our flight to Hong Kong!We glide through the airport, have a pleasant plane journey, and an exciting birthday meal of beef and pasta on the plane... I'm not exaggerating here; when else does one get to have a birthday dinner in the sky, spending the day in two different exotic countries?The only downside is the time difference - I lose out on an hour of birthday but it's worth it for the experience.Next stop, Hong Kong...