Good Morning Vietnam

---

After a short flight out of Vientiane we were once again moving through border control.....which seemed a lot easier than i thought it would seeing how we were now in a Communist country, and within 10 minutes of landing we were in a taxi heading for the bustling Old Quarter of Hanoi.

So far we thought we were getting it too easy, with the Vietnamese visa being a lot easier to get than we thought and then getting through the airport with no problems what so ever we thought Vietnam was going to be an easy place to travel through......that soon changed as soon as we had our first meeting with the North Vietnamese people! Before coming here we had been told by so many people that the people in the North were not very friendly at all but we just put this down to them having bad experiences and being in the wrong place at the wrong time, but we soon learned that this is just the way they are.

As we came out of the airport we were taken by a taxi driver to his cab as we were quite far out of the city so had decided to go with him, who at first spoke pretty good English....as soon as the doors were shut and we were moving however it was the old "i don't speak English" phrase coming out every time we asked a question. We knew the airport was a little bit of a distance from the main city but still we didn't think it would take too long to get there, which it probably doesn't, but as neither of us had been here before, he must have sensed it and it ended up taking us a lot longer than planned for the journey, after he seemed to take us for a little tour of the Old Quarter, which is full of tiny little streets and i'm sure we went along the same few streets a couple of times but there was so much going on it was hard to tell if we had just been here a few moments earlier. Soon however we finally arrived at our hostel and were paying the driver. We had found out that the fair should be no more than around 200,000 Dong maximum but the meter in this taxi had obviously been tampered with slightly and we were paying closer to 400,000, and then he sped off with our change! In the end we ended up paying just over £16 as we felt we had no choice really (It was our first evening in a place neither of us had ever been to before, didn't know our surroundings or who, if he had any, mates in the crowds of people outside the taxi). Even though it's not a lot of money to us normally it was more the principle of him trying to get as much out of us as possible. So we won't be doing taxis again anytime soon.

Then it was the turn of the hostel to see how much they could get out of us! (This would be the second time within just a matter of hours of being in Vietnam!) We had made, yet again the mistake of not booking our hostel the day before, as we didn't actually know if we would even be in Hanoi that evening as we didn't have a flight booked for that day, but we had found a pretty decent guest house which was really cheap aswel, the rooms which were on the internet were around $4 a night but because we hadn't booked, this price soon jumped up to about $30, as she said she didn’t have any of the cheaper room available, and with that being way more than what we had planned to pay for the room she soon went down to 25 and we then got her down to 20, which was still a lot we thought! But again we didn't know where other guest houses were and with the time now getting on and it getting later in the evening we didn't think we would be able to find anywhere else as hostels normally get booked up by the early afternoon, if not earlier, and so she must have seen us coming, as when we got to our room it looked very much exactly like the one we had just showed her on the internet which was $4.........

This would be just a taste of what we would get in the very near future but we were now ready for them!! All said though it was a pretty nice room we ended up in even though we had just been made to pay a lot more than we had earlier thought the room would be, plus we were right in amongst the Old Quarter, a maze of tiny streets with there always something going on. With hundreds of small stalls and shops lining the streets, selling nearly everything you could need. It seems that everyone here owns a motorbike or scooter too, so at almost every point of the day the small roads would be crammed with as many bikes as could get through alongside the many silos and so every time we went out there would be us and others who were walking, competing with space on the sides of the roads with the bikes.....which turned out to be an experience in itself.

There's quite a lot to do in Hanoi with everything easily accessible by foot......which was good for us as we didn't exactly feel like paying for someone to take us around just yet.

As with pretty much everywhere in Vietnam, there's lots to see which relates to their past history and the war with the USA and so we felt we had to visit a few of the museums and other places while we were here. First up was Hoa Lo Prison in the center of Hanoi, an old former prison built by the French when they colonized the country and which was then used to hold American POW's throughout the Vietnam war, it was a nice change to see a place that wasn't colonized by the British and so we didn't feel as bad this time as with a lot of other country’s we've been to while taking a look around the place! We visited this alongside the Military History Museum, which was ok, but not much was in English it seemed and the bits that were, were just propaganda. We've noticed that a lot here, that all the museums are just propaganda pretty much, it was still worth going to however, there were plenty of American tanks and aircraft on show alongside a huge monument made out of pieces of bombers that had been shot down and were obviously very proud of this fact. You can really see just how recent the war was however as we were walking through some small streets in the city and came across a part of a B-52 bomber which had been shot down and still remained where it landed in the middle of a lake.

We did get to see a few other places in the city while we were here including an old cathedral which just looked completely out of place after we've been seeing so many temples over the last few months, but it turns out a lot of Vietnamese locals are actually catholic so it did feel a little bit weird as we then seemed to be finding more and more church's scattered around. We had heard before we came here that everyone has a scooter or bike and on the main roads it's all you can see, and it definitely lived up to its reputation......they also seems to carry everything on the back of these bikes, from whole family’s to fridge freezers! I'm not sure how they quite manage it but they do.

While here we've certainly had some experiences with food aswel.....9 times out of 10 the food has been amazing, with what seems like hundreds of Vietnamese dishes to choose from you will always find something you like. After travelling in Asia for almost 4 months now however there’s only so much Asian food you can eat before you feel you need some home comforts, this is what we thought one evening and so we set out to find a good restaurant to see if we could get some good western food. After walking around for a short while we came across one such place and the food we could see looked amazing! We soon changed our minds after we had both ordered beef burgers......that would turn out to be the biggest mistake we've made with food, i'm not sure what it was but it certainly was not beef! We think we found our answer as the biggest rat either of us had ever seen (and you see a lot in Asia) came hoping past our table, at first i saw it out of the corner of my eye and for some reason thought it was a big rabbit, i wish it had been aswel.....we were on the second floor in this restaurant aswel, needless to say we decided not to finish our meal. The day before we had sat outside this same place on some tables placed out on the street, we were quite happy here aswel until a flatbed truck of what looked like Communist Police turned up......for some reason they began to shout at me and Jade, with neither of us able to speak Vietnamese and everyone in the street looking at us we thought it best to get up and move inside, as we did so the street vendors who had been staring at us 2 seconds before got up, grabbed her stuff and made a run for it, as the staff from our restaurant grabbing their mopeds and dragging them inside, still none the wiser as to what was happening we decided to pay and leave. We should have taken that as a warning of stay away from this place or you'll eat rat burgers.

The north is also well known for its coffee which is where it is all produced......if around this way the weasel coffee is definitely worth a try, apparently they feed the coffee beans to weasels and then they come out the other end eventually which gives the coffee beans a much stronger a taste......and that it definitely does!

So far, after the first day or so we began to have a better time in Vietnam with no one else trying to rip us off......so far, just the usual dirty look when we didn't want to buy something from a street vendor or shop which is fine you get used to it pretty quick as it happens continuously! But now we're headed off to the north to do some trekking with the tribes in the hills of Sapa.

---

Photos

The Donut Lady
This Vietnamese woman was determined to have Jade take a picture of her.

One of the narrow streets in the Old Quatre

Street life Vietnam
Me with a woman geting a street corner foot pedicure behind

Our room in Hanoi
Not quit sure about the leapord print