Hong Ha Hotel Hanoi

... there was a storm coming – great!! In order to put the storm out of our minds, we had a few drinks and did karaoke – the two of us ‘sang’ a Boyzone duet as a tribute to Stephen Gately (Lesley made me do it!), he would have hated it! The bartender decided that he was much better than us and took over by the end (to be fair he was very good at the Vietnamese stuff), but his attempt at a Westlife song was the last straw which resulted in Alex and ...

... a little strange. As expected it followed his whole life including the time he spent in Paris between the two World Wars where he developed his ideals and doctrines based on Communism. What we didn't expect from the museum was the unusual way that they depicted his life once he returned to Vietnam. Instead of the traditional words and pictures combo they went for visual symbols such as gates, flags and guns to show the revolutionary time for example. After exploring the rest ...

... Perception is reality as they often say.

First, we went to a lake ( a filthy man-made pond, really) where there are remnants of a B-52 that was shut down during the war with the fiddling Americans. Nothing more than a few pieces of metal and a tire jutting out of the dirty water, but this is a male thing so pictures had to be taken, naturally. One man on the side of the lake told me there are parts of that airplane all over the neighbourhood ...

... to airport to catch 8.25 pm flight to Kunming. 8.25 arrives and no request to board then an announcement that there would be a delay. Someone from Vietnam airlines that there would a delay as someone on the aircraft from Hanoi has been were given masks the passengers nothing so I suppose it does not matter if the passengers catch H1N1. Anyway we arrive in Hanoi 2 hrs late at 11pm. So it was about 1am before we made it to bed in the Elegance two Hotel

... more for your next pint and see how you feel. Next scam was actually more like day light robbery. We were with Suzanna’s family and were crossing the road. One of us got stuck and was helped by a local, so, we thought to be nice we’d buy some water of him. He tried to charge 40000 for 2 small bottles. No way we said and we’d worked our way down to 20000. It was at this point I got some money out to show him some notes to explain how much we wanted to pay. The seller ...

... a couple of Egyptian guys we met in Indo months ago. We drank until 6am beside the lake watching the locals do Tai Chi and stretch / exercise (seemingly to mean spinning very fast in circles until dizzy, funny as !)


Once we finally received our Visas back, we headed to Ha Long Bay. It is spectacular! Very beautiful and relaxing chilling on a junk boat amongst the limestone pinnacles.

Then it was back to Hanoi and off the China......

... It was probably the cheapest and nicest meal we had for a long while. or was it just the drink..!

The Next it just rained all day but we still managed to walk around Hanoi a little bit. I love Hanoi. Its one of my favorite cities along with Kathmandu. Its an awesome city and not like any other major city I have ever been to with its motorbike and scooters by the score, wires all over the streets, street stalls and friendly people. That night we ...

... us. In the middle of this hand the lovely driver shouted from about 20 yards away and another man appeared in a shirt....was he the border patrol?!

We just walked towards him and he pointed (in annoyance) down some stairs to some more farm buildings. As we went down we saw that it was in fact the office - we saw uniforms and computers. It seems that this was the border crossing, but it had been built in the same place as a farm - or vice-versa. We went ...

... feeling quite cold. On arrival in Hoa Binh we began the usual hunt for a hotel for the night. The guest house we tried wouldn't have anything to do with us so we assume it's simply a place for prostitutes. We tried 2 small hotels, the first one was asking 180,000 for a room worth 100,000 and the other, even worse, was asking 250,000 for a room that was worth 80,000. I tried bargaining but to no avail, they would rather I walked ...

... and utter in English, will more often than not bear absolutely no resemblance to the way you pronounce it in Vietnamese. E.g, Thank you, which is written 'Cam On' (again, covered in accents I cant display here) is pronounced 'Gaarm Ern'. When I got in to the country I noticed straight away that the tonal element is even more pronounced here, making most of what you hear just sound like guttural throaty noises, not words. more examples, words with 'ng' in them are 'mmmm' sounds, words ...