Days 3-4: Hanoi, Vietnam

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Arriving into Hanoi felt like the real beginning of our trip, we'd never been to Vietnam before so it was somewhere completely new. Our hotel was in the Old Quarter which definitely made us feel much more part of the craziness of Hanoi. It was this cute little boutique-type hotel with only 37 rooms, it had a great location right in the thick of it all so was perfect for a few days in the city. We woke up the first morning, and in the breakfast room found that for our toast we had the choice of Craig's Jam or Anchor butter..... for a place that you wander most streets and recognise NO western brand names or chain stores or anything to have NZ products for brekkie was funny as!

While crossing roads in Bangkok is somewhat dodgy, crossing streets in Hanoi felt like virtual suicide every time! There are a million motorbikes on the roads at any one time with no apparent heed for road rules or the like. The hooting of horns is the soundtrack to the city 24-7. And the pavements prooved none other than parking places for the bikes, so to get anywhere you had to walk ON these dodgy roads! However, we seen learned that you just went wherever you wanted and the bikes would swerve to avoid you and carry on. Fantastic!

Hoan Kiem lake was fairly nice in the centre of the Old Quarter, well until you looked into the murky green water ;-) But the bridges and temples around it were cool. The touristy restaurants were down near the lake, so we spent a fair bit of time here (for Martin to consume the local Vietnamese beers). After travelling through so much of Asia on past trips, Vietnam feels mightily untouched by the tourist wand - there's no American chains here, no McD's, no Starbucks (although we saw a Vietnamese attempt at Starmaxx...), nothing at all like that. The Vietnamese people too seem a lot less used to tourists and just stare as you pass by. It's so funny!

The prices were cheap! Cheaper than Thailand and Bali even! It's crazy! They use Vietnamese Dong and USD though and we tried to avoid places that used the USD, being Kiwis that's not so great!

The architecture is very different in Hanoi, all the buildings are 5-6 floors high and incredibly narrow, about 2m wide each one. All packed together really tightly. Really quite strange, we couldn't figure out the rationale behind it! But through the build up of grime they were all artfully decorated, and a huge range of colours and the hints of French were definitely evident as well. We had a good view of the Old Quarter from the breakfast room on the 6th floor of our hotel.

We went to this Water Puppet show too, and were glad we only paid $3 (for the First class seats too!) It was for tourists but completely in Vietnamese and you can only watch water dancing puppets for so long having no idea what is going on! And the musicians and singers were sooooooooooooo bored they had these grumpy looks on their faces the whole time and chatted to each other when it wasn't their turn. It was most bizarre!!!!! We were stuck in the middle of a row so couldn't even leave early but had to wait out the entire hour beside another 100 tourists all thinking the same thing! It was quite a laugh really!

However, the city is dirty and smoggy, the people generally unfriendly, and we were sick of walking in the roads so it's pretty obvious we didn't feel too big an affinity with it. Not like Bangkok! We were looking forward to Halong Bay.

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