Calling this blog 'a taste' of Vietnam feels wrong in a sense. 'Tasting' something implies that your senses are being given the chance to slowly feast upon something new, taking your time over all the delicate flavours, processing it and letting it sink in - like opening a nice bottle of red wine in the garden on a sunny day. Vietnam isn't a nice bottle of red and you can't open and take your time over it while the flavours hit your palette and sink slowly in. It hits you smack in the face. As my friend the Lonely Planet says 'prepare for sensory overload as Vietnam is one long trip of sights, sounds and smells....there is no volume control on the soundtrack to Vietnam - it is the story of a people on the move where the bustle of the cities as they rush towards the future, the buzz of bikes, the cries of sellers, the hum of voices and the clink of beer glasses (woo hoo shouts Wills) collide head on with the tinkle of the past in the pagodas, the swish of the scythe or the haunting music that accompanies sadness or success'. I love that paragraph - that is Nam down to a tee.

So after a long 9hour journey from Sydney Australia, we touched down firstly in Bangkok at around midnight to sleep in the airport until our next plane to Hanoi left at around 7am. Hanoi is the capital of Vietnam and is in the Nort, at the head of a 2140mile long snake of a country which stretches all the way down to the Mekong Delta in the south. At Hanoi Airport we waited another 2 hours to get our visas with me running back and forth to the toilet because of my first bad tummy in South East Asia (I blame plane food). So when we finally got to the beautiful gem of Hanoi's old quarter where our hostel was, our sensory systems were already at a pretty low threshold thanks to exhaustion and weakness. Then 'pow' out of the taxi and Hanoi says it's first hello. Motorbikes buzz and zip up and down the narrow streets and alleyways of Hanoi's old quarter, where, historically every single thing you could think of was bought and sold in a sort of spread out market place of streets. The different streets are still named after the things they used to sell although nowadays the goods are even more varied, from shops selling marble buddhas to motorbike helmets of every colour and design (the government recently made it compulsory to wear helmets), to welding shops where you have to jump out of the way to avoid the sparks, to fabrics, bathroom equipment etc etc. So the first task - to cross the road to get to the hostel. All you can do is hold your breath, take a step into the street and just keep moving with the flow of the traffic. We learned very early on that to hesitate or stop in the middle of the street is more dangerous than crossing in front of the motorbikes - they're used to snaking around people so you just have to hope for the best. So into the hostel we went, where we paid 10pounds for a double room with air con, satellite tv, fridge and mini bar and the hardest beds on earth. Thats another Vietnamese tradition - keeping your back straight by lying on the hardest mattresses known to man.

At this point we could have easily hibernated in the hostel and hidden away from the sensory overload but we were hungry and the streets were calling us. Eating in Old Quarter - something you have to do before you die. All over Old Quarter there are places to eat where Vietnamese gather, for lunches, for social gatherings and the men often gather to drink bia hoi in the evenings (a traditional draught beer that can be as cheap as 4000dong or 10p a glass!). One evening we got introduced to the bia hoi tradition when some Vietnamese men took a shine to us and kept ordering the bia hois for us and chatting about their lives, amongst shouts of 'Bia Hoi' as we got greener. We went home with some business cards that night - another Vietnamese tradition is that everyone carries business cards with their contact details on them and they were surprised we didn't have any of our own but what would we print 'Emma and William Philander - professional travellers with no fixed address'?! That was a great night. Anyway, these places spread across the streets and mostly have seating outside where everyone sits on small plastic chairs (think primary school size), at small tables, with their knees to their chins, eating dish after dish of delicous food that appears from the kitchen along with a lot of rice, which is a staple food. So there we sat on our first day and it almost felt other-wordly because of our exhaustion goggles. We had no idea what we'd ordered but ended up with chicken pieces with a salt, chilli and lime dipping sauce. We were grateful to the waitress who took pity on us and showed us how to squeeze the lime and mix the sauce!

So that was our beginning in South East Asia and beautiful Nam and that day led us on to cycling adventures, buddhas which are taller than houses, the hidden gem of Ninh Binh and its stunning countryside, water puppets, addictive coffee, white sand beaches, walking around in floods, and many a 30p beer.

But more of that to come...