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Published: October 16th 2006
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Hanoi
The band fires up I must say arriving in Hanoi after a 12 hour bus trip left me a little frazzled and unappreciative of a city that has now grown on me quite considerably.
Despite some initial setbacks trying to get hold of our Chinese Visas and a comedy of errors you can only put down to blatant incompetence. Everything is now sorted and we are breathing a collective sigh of relief - except for Nunny's Visa card...
Hanoi is a maze of streets - enter at your own risk - they snake around and disorientate you very quickly. Venturing out into the chaos of markets, traffic and hawkers is a challenge that we embraced on the first morning noting each subsequent landmark (roadside beer stalls for me, tour companies for Nunny), as if we were laying out white stones in the forest for our return leg home. The old quarter of the city is broken up into narrow laneways that specialise in a certain type of commodity, ie. motorbike parts street, silk shop street, cleaning products street and of course my favorite beer street... The latter consists of a litter of roadside beer stalls that sell the local brew - Beer Hoi
Hanoi
The bright city lights of Hanoi around the lake - at ridiculously cheap prices (2000VND a schooner ie. 20 c) The locals seem to be a little reserved at first but soon warm to you if you make the effort to smile and attempt communication, they seem to be a little tubbier than most of the Vietnamese we've met so far on our trip and I can only attribute this to a diet of amber liquid and alot of sitting around on the footpath.
We met up with Jusin and Leanne (Canada) on our first night here, their last, and went to a cool little restaurant that overlooked the lake which seems to be the centrepiece of Hanoi. Nunny delighted in the fact that Smirnoff Ice was on the menu. Ricko and Justin meanwhile delighted in the fact that the waitress promoting the stuff was dressed in a skimpy little number with knee high boots. It was great catching up with J & L and we had a good laugh all night.
The next day the heat drove us out to yet another deserted amusement park but this time it was a waterpark with a wave pool (that they'd only turn on if everybody there was in
Hanoi
Ricko hits the bottom of the speed slide the pool) some speed slides, a pitch black waterslide that you could go down in a blow up lilo, a flying fox and 5m diving platform. Needless to say it was a fast reversion back to the heady days of childhood. Aided by the fact that we ran into a group of Vietnamese kids that we mucked around with all afternoon. They were dazzled by a swimming display that Ricko put on - "you can swim??" (with amazement), "OK show me" (1 freestyle lap of the pool later) "OK Breaststroke?" (1 breaststroke lap of the pool later) "OK butterfly"... Suffice to say Ricko was therefore dubbed Thorpey for the rest of the day. Nunny was in her zone on the lazy river (a 'river' where you floated around in tubes on a big loop with no effort reqired at all) - actually coming close to setting the record for the most number of laps completed in one day. We even exchanged local songs (seemingly a recurring theme) offering them a version of 'Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree' (sung in the round - I don't think they quite understood the reason why we were singing over the top of
Hanoi
Ricko gets fresh with Olive while Popeye and Bruno sulk one another?) in exchange for a Vietnamese song about a duck, which came complete with hand actions.
We were sad to say goodbye to our new friends but a hot dinner date with Georgie and Nat called. Amazingly enough they were even staying in the same hotel as us and had just returned from Halong Bay. Naturally Georgie was keen to join me in the compulsory sampling of the local brew and so we hopped between roadside bar and restaurant before they had to depart for Sapa later that night.
Meanwhile Nunny and I decided to get a little bit of culture into us (just for you Heather) and we went to the local performance of the Water Puppets theatre which was fantastic! We'd heard that Hanoi was the place to see the best of the best and they certainly didn't disappoint. Despite being unable to understand a word the whole way through we were giggling like children as skillful puppeteers manipulated their characters across a pond at the front of the theatre, complete with firecrackers and a live Vietnamese band it was quite a show.
Back to bed through the now deserted streets (quite surreal really
Hanoi
On the slides considering the daily rush) and we caught up on some beauty sleep before our trip to Halong Bay the next morning.
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Uncle Chop Chop
Monty King
Ahhh waterslides....
What O/S holiday would be complete without a trip to a waterslide park?...... looks like a carbon copy of the one i went to in greece...top work monkeys!!!