(Not so) Good Morning Vietnam!

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After a pleasant 10 hour flight from Gatwick, our time in Vietnam got off to a shaky start. With all the Hanoi cab driver scam horror stories we'd heard about, we opted to pay for an airport pickup with our hotel, Hanoi Rendezvous. Only it seemed as though they forgot about this. As much as I scanned the smattering of cards held by drivers in the arrivals lounge, I couldn't find one adorned with our names. After about an hour of waiting, a little bit of panic started to set in. Phoning the hotel didn't seem to work out (in our jet lagged state we forgot about adding the country code...), and our great plan of briefly using data roaming to email them didn't go well either after we racked up a £40 (!) charge by the time the message was sent. We gave up and just jumped in the nearest cab. If we were ripped off, we thought, so what? We just wanted to get there.

Our ride in provided our first impressions of Vietnam. On the outer main roads a thick layer of dust and smog hung in the air. Impossibly tall and thin buildings dominated the view from the windows, with most looking a little dilapidated. Legions of weaving, hooting scooters swarmed onto the roads, their riders wearing flimsy looking plastic helmets and face masks to escape the worst of the smog. This was like no place we'd been before, and the thought of the two weeks that laid before us was both daunting and exciting.

In the end the cab cost no more than the hotel's airport transfer, so we may as well have gotten a taxi from the off. We could forgive the hotel the indiscretion of forgetting to pick us up, as the staff were incredibly helpful and friendly, and the rooms weren't bad for the money. We quickly fell asleep, awaking a few hours later for our first exploration of Vietnam's bustling capital.

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