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Published: January 26th 2011
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Apart from a couple of nights in Hong Kong, to start off with, the beginning of the first leg across Southeast Asia was a trip along the Vietnamese coast. I few by Vietnam Airlines from Hong Kong to Hanoi and have to say that the flight and service was pretty good. Not to be under estimated at all, and the food was probably the best airline food I've ever had.
There doesn't seem to be much concept of road sence in Hanoi, and I think the rules that you would normally associate with the road either don't apply or at best might just about pass a guidlines! Most get around on mopeds or scooters and it has to be said this is literally an extension of walking. You could be ambling through a market, ducking for the makeshift roof and weaving through the people, and someone will ride through beeping their horn on their Honda Wave! They sometimes just drive in to shops! It's nuts, the mopeds cram in at every juction, particularly in Hanoi. It's entertaining in its own right. For 70000 Dong, about GB2.40/USD3.50(ish) you can sit on a little plastic chair on a street corner and have
a plate of excellent food and a beer and watch the world go by. They say that the smaller the chair, the cheaper the food, and it seems to be a good saying. After a while though, there does seem to be some sort of order... Or maybe I'm just getting used to it?!
It was funny to see the small shops in the old quarter of Hanoi selling their wares, they have small shops and conduct much of their business and back office ops at the front of the shop, outside, on the street. There are also street traders everywhere and some of the street food should be sampled.
Hanoi has one of the best water puppetry theatres in the county, an art they developed as a way of entertaining themselves in the rice fields of northern Vietnam. Good fun to watch.
My first thought on arrival in Hanoi, and Vietnam, was 'How am I going to cross the road?'. There is no way you can simply wait for a gap because there will never be one. The only way to do it is to just start walking across - slow and steady. This way, the
bikes will go around you... hopefully...
A few hours east from Hanoi is Halong Bay, about one thousand six hundred limestone rocks and islands in the sea. Although this has become a bit touristy, a night on a junk and a sail around the bay is a definate must do. It was only about 10 or 12 degrees so two jumpers and decent coat were required! The lakes and scenary are something else and people live in, what they term as floating villages. These are basically big sheds on a network of walkways built on floating plastics drums. They fish. We brought some muscules and took them straight back to the junk to cook. This is as bout as fresh as sea food will ever get. Also, a night on Cat Ba island, the largest and only inhabited of the limestone islands, it has about 13000 people living on it. A couple of us hired scooters for an hour for getting around more quickly.
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