(sorry had to be done!)

The flight out of Vientiane was excellent. Easy Jet and Ryanair could learn a lot from Lao Airlines. We had a free beer and sandwich on our one hour flight and paid about £160 for the two of us. Beats the 24 hour bus through the hills! (Although it was a tiny propelor plane...so Charlie was a bit scared).

Arrival in Vietnam was very smooth, we opted after some research to book a car from the airport to our hotel. The internet is full of horror stories about scams and being taken to horrible hotels. Luckily research paid off and we arrived at the Hanoi Guesthouse to a brilliant welcome. They were so friendly and poured us a glass of water and carried Charlie's bag up to the room which was on the 6th floor with no elevator!

After a quick break we set out to explore the old quarter. Traffic here is something else, you genuinly take your life in your hands when you want to cross the road. Scooters are everywhere, horns blare constantly and the buses and cars dont swerve for anything! We slowly found our way towards the lake at the centre of the old quarter. It wasn't much quieter but the water offered some tranquility, we walked round and found a bar where the cheapest drink was Carlsberg?! It was strange how watching the sunset over the lake with a cold beer seemed to dim the noise of the horns in the background. Following this we decided it was time to get some food. We found a nice place with AC called Gecko and had our first taste of Vietnamese cuisine. Charlie had prawns cooked in a coconut cream sauce and Tom had stir fried Beef with Lemon Grass and Chilli. They were both very nice but for some reason we both agreed we would swap them for a bowl of street noodles that we've been having recently (I think Laos must have spoilt us)! On the way back we got hopelessly lost but eventually found our way back to the hotel via a cake store, very tasty 20p cream cakes, Vietnam could become a very fattening place for us!

The next morning we had breakfast at our nice guesthouse. We both ordered the beef noodle soup from the breakfast menu and it was really nice. Armed with full stomachs we set out for the train station intending to book train tickets to Sapa. Following several brushes with death on the walk to the train station we found a lady who spoke English at the information desk. She quoted us $35 for the sleeper train which seemed a bit high compared to what the guide book said. We queued at a ticket counter and then got quoted $45. Clearly we were doing something wrong or had "Please rip me off" stamped on our foreheads. We gave up and headed back to our hotel to check out since they were full the coming night.

We stopped off for some street food for lunch on the way. First we had what we call asian cornish pasties, They're kind of like a rice dumpling with a boiled egg and similar meat to a cornish pastie in side. Was really tasty and a good starter. We then went down the road and food another street food place. Here they were serving what looked like deep friend tofu (Not sure what it actually was) on noodles, with a side salad and some dip that we can't even begin to decribe. It was a really nice lunch though and the lady seemed to even give us a westener portion which was great.

Back at the hotel we caved in and arranged some tours for the next few days. You hear a lot of stories about people paying too much for horrible tours. We did try to organise our sapa tour ourselves but in such a big city it just seems easier to have a tour and get picked up at the hotel and dropped back there with all transfers inbetween sorted out. We picked our guesthouse based on online reviews of the quality of service so we hope these tours will reflect that. Anyways we booked a 3 day trip to HaLong bay and then were off to Sapa for a few nights.

We then transfered across the road to our new hotel, since our guesthouse was full that night they arranged it for us at the price we paid for a nights stay there. The IndoChina Queen Hotel II is quite a step up with a minibar, flat screen and a bathroom with a bath! Apparently its well over $35 a night so were pretty pleased to be getting it for $16. The guesthouse even inite us back to have a free breakfast wih theem in the morning, even though we weren't staying there (I guess there must be a pretty good commission on those tours)!

Following checkin and standing in front of the AC for a bit we decided to take another wonder. We managed to get massively lost again and actually managed to walk in circles for a little while as well! When we found ourselves we also found a street serving "Fruit Not Shakes" as we've decided to call them. Basically its all the ingredient of the fruit shakes we've been enjoying but for some reason here they prefer not to stick them in the blender?! We took a walk to the temple in the middle of the lake in the centre of the old quarter. Was nice to be away from the sound of the traffic and saw this amazing massive embalmed turtles. Apparently they live in the lake which is pretty impressive considering how filthy the lake looks! And the lake is pretty small really, so one wonders how they managed to get there...

We went to see the famous water puppets that evening, basically they use water to hide the sticks controlling the puppets. Its actually really quite impressive, the puppets are accompanied by a small collection of musicians and vocalists who are equally amazing. The highlight of the show was quite near the beginning where they have dragons swimming in circles and then they make the dragons shoot water out of their mouths! Following the show we had a beer on the shore of the lake before heading in search of street food. It was pretty difficult to find a decent price for a bowl of noodles, we suspect foreigner price was in play. We ended up at some random place and probably had the worst meal of the trip. It wasn't awful it was just ordinary and we've clearly become too used to eating amazing food. (Also slighly suspicious about the meat described as "beef-pork" it was marinated ribs...but the ribs were pretty small...and.. they eat dogs in Vietnam!

It was an early night in preparation for our trip to Halong Bay!!