Day 350 - Back to (travelling) reality

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We have made a vow that we will not stay anywhere where we cannot have aircon on in the room. You cannot get the rest you need to enjoy the next day when you cannot find any refuge in your own room, especially when the humid high temperatures persists constantly. Anyway...

Our afternoon flight to Hanoi, on Laos’ airlines prop plane, rudely awakened us to be back in honking and scamming-ville.

A couple of little things annoyed us that can so easily can get a new tourist/holiday maker, for example promoting taxis for $10 for the 40 minute ride into Hanoi city. However these taxis are different sizes and these operators do not believe in small print so as we arrived at the hotel (after a detour to a travel company that the taxi driver wanted us to visit before he took us to the hotel we wanted to go to, oh and Gemma directing him to the hotel using our map) he persisted that even though we had confirmed that it was going to be $10 for the trip he feigned not to know English and ask for more money as the size of the car was larger than the promoted price car. Not annoying at all.

Meanwhile as Ed is trying to check in to the hotel, the hotelier is actually more interested in selling Ed as many trips and tours as he possibly can. It gets to the point that we are sitting down with him and he is planning out the next 5 days in the Hanoi area. We say we want to think about this and to see what we are getting for the prices he is quoting we have a look around. Also just to get away from his persistent bad selling techniques.

Anyway we end up at ‘Handspan’ which Gemma had done some background work on, and with the very helpful assistant we book on a 3day/2night tour to Halong Bay. Admittedly it was for more money but we were sure this would get us more of an experience than what the hotel was trying to sell us (we were proven right). Conclusion: a country that until recently has been ruled in a communist fashion struggles to accept the fact that it is possible for both parties to benefit from a transaction, and stick to the approach that doind well means ripping the other person off.

We finished the day trying not to get caught in the huge thunderstorm.

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