"Chuc mung nam moi!"

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We wander through the streets in the early evening on our way to dinner, past stages set up all round the Hoan Kiem Lake, which is lit with hundreds of multi coloured lights and lazers roam across the sky and water. Everywhere I look are orange trees covered in fairy lights...the Vietnamese Tet version of our Christmas tree. We've had a few laughs this week watching people wobble up the road with 6 foot orange trees strapped to their mopeds. We eat quickly and return to the streets, where we watch magicians and then a snake man do their thing, before heading to the lakeshore to find a spot for the midnight fireworks. A group of young Vietnamese insist we join their group in a prime spot. They are really sweet, barely 20 but already married and in one case pregnant. They share their snacks with us and are chuffed that we like chilli on our pineapple and raw turnip slices! (this is a new sensation...they sell expertly carved pineapples here with a serving of chilli salt...it's wicked!)

The fireworks are seriously impressive, the sky fills with huge explosions, then they finish with the launch of hundreds of flaming paper lanterns over the lake...a serene and beautiful ending after all the noise and colour that came before. We bid our new young friends goodnight and "chuc mung nam moi!", before heading to Le Pub where we make some fireworks of our own in the form of Flaming Sambucas. Chuc mung nam moi indeed.

The next few days in Hanoi are incredibly peaceful. After the party last night, the next part of the holiday is like Christmas and New Year's Day rolled into one; spent with family, feasting and resting. The city goes to sleep and it's a pleasure to roam around the streets without nearly getting run over everytime you cross the road. There is only one technique that works when crossing the road here...there will never be a gap in traffic so there's no point waiting. You just have to slowly and confidently weave through the chaos and somehow make it to the otherside, sidestepping rickshaws, bicycles, cars and thousands of mopeds all blaring their horns.

During this quiet time though, it's easy to get around the city for some sightseeing. We visit the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum, joining the queue of Vietnamese come to pay their respects to the embalmed one. He resides in the biggest tomb I've ever seen, an imposing block of solumn dark grey marble, it couldn't look more communist if it tried. We file past his body which is in remarkably good shape considering he died in 1969, never seeing the victorious conclusion for his army. He'd actually requested cremation and I wonder how he'd have felt about all this. Afterwards we walk around the gardens of the old Imperial Palace. Ho Chi Minh never lived in the grand building, opting instead for a simple two room wooden stilt house in the grounds which has been preserved intact. I guess it wouldn't look good to the comrades if he'd been living it up in the palace.

I find out later that day that the bank has refunded the stolen grand into my bank account, it's such a relief. So our last night in Hanoi turns into a mini celebration with more $1 G&Ts at Le Pub, and a bit of culture at the traditional Water Puppet Theatre. The theatrical productions originated over 1000 years ago, using flooded rice paddies as a stage, but these days the theatre stage is a pool where the marionettes act out ancient stories. The animal puppets...fish, dragons, birds, frogs and turtles are beautiful, but the human marionettes are a bit freaky and I have weird dreams that night.

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