North of the 'Nam we reach!!

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As we were preparing to leave Hue we arranged to meet up with our fellow travelling Scots Claire and James (friends from back home) and shared all our travelling stories so far (and Paul got some much needed fitba chat). By luck we were all already booked onto the same sleeper bus to take us on the long road to Hanoi. Although our luck ran out when the bus turned into the ‘party bus’ that played loud rave tunes until around midnight, in case we were enjoying our much needed sleep the driver started belting out the tunes again at 5am!! What did we expect really booking onto a “sleeper’s bus”

When we arrived in Hanoi the four of us got booked into a shared room for around $10 between us, bargain! We stayed in the old quarter which is filled with bustling streets filled with people selling everything you could need on every corner. We witnessed a couple of brutal chicken stories – if you’re a vegetarian I would turn away now! One morning at the crack of dawn, we were strolling along half-asleep, minding our own business, when out of nowhere this local woman grabbed a live chicken by its legs to hack it’s head off (beside her was a cage filled with more of the poor guys chicken friends wondering what the commotion was!). Another time we saw a local man hang a chicken upside down by its feet, dunk the chickens head in freezing cold water to drown it then went onto put the chickens head in a basin on boiling water. It was horrific to say the least and it definitely made us think twice about where our meat comes from and becoming vegetarians!

Hanoi is one of the busiest city’s we have been to so far, like Ho Chi Minh it has bikes everywhere – the traffic and pollution is unavoidable! In the background of all this though is lots of historic streets and communist architecture. One of the things that we found a bit obvious about Hanoi is that the people are a little less friendly to tourists than in southern Vietnam.

We tried to do a bit of sight-seeing by visiting Uncle Ho’s body (Ho Chi Minh – he was the original leader of Communist Vietnam) that is reserved in the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum (his actual body is on display for people to pay their respects and gets sent to Russia once a year for 3 months to get ‘touched up’!!). Unfortunately this wasn’t to be as it was closed the day we went.

On our last night we all booked tickets for a Water Puppet Show – one of the ‘must-dos’ when in Hanoi. We didn’t have a clue what to expect but we both surprisingly enjoyed ourselves, it made no sense whatsoever and had no logical story but still entertaining all the same!

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Comments

[rose]

these are great photo's guys!!
lovely to get an update and pics on yer travels... hope your both keeping well xxx