Good morning Vietnam!

---

Arrived safely in Hanoi after a very eventful bus journey from Ventiane! The 'VIP' bus turned out to be not so VIP. It broke down before we even started and we had to wait until it was fixed which took a couple of hours. For some reason we were taken by minibus to pick the bus up from the side of the road further down the route. By that time all the best seats had gone (taken by the locals who had been allowed on at the bus station) - so we all got relegated to the back rows where you couldn't recline the seats and had to spend the whole 24 hours in a sitting up position! In addition, the aircon wasn't working properly, which just added to the discomfort! We got to the border of Laos/Vietnam at 3 in the morning, but it didn't open until 7, so we grabbed what sleep we could in the 3 hours wait. Some of us slept on the floor and the rest made the best of the space on the seats. Once the border opened it then took another 3 hours to get through exit and entry (it was worse than any of the African country border crossings I'd experienced) - and when we finally got through we discovered the bus had broken down again. We had to get a jump start from another bus to get it going, which was actually quite entertaining to watch. Thankfully, we managed the last (10 hour) leg to Hanoi without any problems - apart from the discomfort from the lack of aircon in 90 degree humidity - and the hour we took out to buy a new battery and replace the old one! We also came to the conclusion during the trip that most of the locals on the bus were smuggling goods in from Laos. There were televisions, kids bikes, huge bags of sugar (at least we think it was sugar!), live birds stored in the luggage areas above the seats and one guy even had 3 sack loads of live lizards which he had the cheek to store under our cramped seats at the back!!

After the stress of the journey, my frame of mind was not great for arriving in Hanoi at night - which is probably not the time to get the best impression of it. After the calm of Laos which has so few people and very low levels of traffic, it was a bit of a shock. It felt even madder than Bangkok! The constant streams of motorbikes and taxis day and night make crossing the road almost impossible. Pedestrian crossings don't mean anything - you just have to dodge the traffic and hope you make it across the other side in one piece! You also get hassled every 10 yards or so by the motorbike taxi drivers (they have to use motorbikes as taxis rather than cars in the centre or the traffic would come to a complete halt) which becomes extremely irritating, particularly when you know they've just heard you refuse someone else.

I've decided I'm not going to spend too much time here - I'll see the highlights - the water puppetry and Ho Chi Minh monuments - and then move north to Halong Bay and Cat Ba (including a visit to a monkey island) for a few days and then on to Sapa - both areas are supposed to be extremely beautiful and pretty much untouched so I'm really looking forward to getting away from the madness of Hanoi!

---

Comments

[Rob t]

Entertaining
They should get rid of that eastenders soap and replace it with `Hewstones world tour` its a sight more entertaining. Great blog entries julie. Rob