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Published: June 13th 2008
Water Puppets
Very cool water puppets - apparently only in Hanoi is this popular!Well, not really, exactly the opposite actually. See, I have a pretty cool aunt and uncle who live in Hanoi. With a cool apartment.
Excellent.
So, after flying in from Luang Prabang (and surviving the bad reputation that is Laos airlines ..), we set off to get to their apartment - which happens to have a sweet view over the city, a fridge full of cold drinks and spring rolls and airconditioning that would make a penguin feel at home - just the thing for 'slightly humid' Hanoi.
Oh, not t mention the inside word on the coolness that is Hanoi city. It has an awesome little area called the old quarter, where all the hustle and bustle of millions of motorbikes, cyclos (a 3 wheel bike with a seat up front), bikes, taxis and none too few tourists collide. Some of the streets are named after the product sold on that street - ie. silk street (or rather, the vietnamese euivalent - ) sells silk products. Also notable are aphrodisiac street and shoe street (kellys favourite). It all adds up to a good old fashioned hot and smelly good time. We ended up with a couple of
Uncle ho
Oh, I forgot to mention the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum .. kinda creepy and very cold ..no photos inside and no tomfoolery in line please! shoulder bags (backpacks make for unsightly damp patches in this heat), some slik sleeping sacks and a couple of pairs of shoes - quite the show of restraint we think!
Anyway, other highlights are the lake in the middle of town, complete with story about giant turtles that live in the lake but are never seen (except for the stuffed one in the temple on the lake), the awesome food, random nightlife (we hung out with some expats at a fancy english style club and then went along to the local cowboy bar which has phillipino gogo girls singing creedence, eagles and guns'n'roses covers) and the water puppets (kind of thunderbirds meets kung fu movie with the puppeteers up to their waists in water). A lot of people were pretty down on Hanoi but we think its just great.
Our mid-week excursion was out to the beautiful Halong bay which looks like (memory test here) Yangshuo but on water. Basically, somewhere around 2000 limestone karsts stick out of the water all over the place and we jumped on a boat and cruised through them. On the way, we had counting competitions - that got old fast, kayaked through
The fam
At the local bamboo hut shouting us a few beer hois and an enormous meal! some caves (while mistaking cave swallows for bats), and met various folk from Britain, Canada, Switzerland and Ireland. The cool part is the boats only get 14 people on them so its pretty easy to get to know everyone. After a couple of hours, we switched boats again and headed over slightly (!) choppier water to a private island where our oceanside bungalow was waiting (jealous yet?). The rest of the evening was a beautiful seafood meal then a few drinks (the Irish bought along a rum stash - good move!) and stories before heading off to bed in anticipation of a big day of swimming and relaxing ahead of us.
Alas, come the morning, Kelly was feeling a bit ill (no, it wasn't the rum ..) so nurse Andrew tended with the tools of panadol and copious amounts of water. We were going to head back to the boat to stay a night there but that was ditched in favour of the stability of dry land. Plan B had us taking a short boat ride to Cat Ba Island where we joined a group biking across the island. We sat in the van and judging by the strain
Halong bay
And lots and lots of boats - they did thin out later though.. on a few people's faces, that was a good option! The island houses a fairly cool underground hospital - they built it in a large cave system to keep it secret from the US bombing runs. The place had ping pong rooms, a swimming pool and a cinema room to boot! Kind of the first thing we've seen from the war - kind of weird considering throughout the trip out there we had seen Vietnamese and US flags flying together over a number of factories (a bunch of which we think were where the bulk of clothing and shoes are made .. sweatshops for want of a better word).
Anyway, a couple more buses and trains and we are back in Hanoi, about to go for a swim in the pool (!) and then tomorrow saying farewell to Kate and Gray and heading off to Hoi An to enjoy the beaches ... cause this just seems a little too much like hard work!
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