Hanoi.

Trip Start Jul 30, 2008
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41
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Trip End Ongoing


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Monday, December 1, 2008

So we entered Hanoi extremely ready to experience a new country. Being treated like a dollar sign in China had its toll on all of us. We are also looking forward to some new food. One can only eat fried rice so much. So from Hong Kong we hoped on a bus to take us to immigration (we had to leave Hong Kong and enter  mainland China again before continuing to Hanoi, don't ask me why). From the Hong Kong/China border we headed to Nanning. Thankfully, Nanning only proved as a stopover (we had not heard great things about the city) as we were able to hop on a bus headed for Hanoi within 30 minutes of stopping there. This was our introduction to sleeper buses. Now just because the name includes "sleeper" does not mean you will be getting any. In fact, it was pretty hard to as the journey to Hanoi must of included some of the roughest terrain we had yet to encounter. Evren was catching so much air that he was executing some gnarly leg grabs in the back of the bus. But after a rough ride, we made it to Vietnam and caught another short bus to Hanoi Russell's new haircut
Russell's new haircut
 . We once again lucky to find a friend on the bus who worked for the very hostel we planned on staying at. Exhausted we settled for another, cheaper hotel her family owned and did our usual refueling routine of eating, Internet and then napping for the next 5 hours. Side note, I think as long as napping does not equal a full nights sleep (i.e. 8 hours) it is a nap and can be classified as such.
Just wanted to clarify that we weren't sleeping all day. As for Hanoi, we were treated to a wonderfully helpful staff at the Blue Sky Hotel who arranged our onward transportation, as well as helped us with our Vietnamese (thank you is pronounced very similar to come on in English. It is also fun to yell "Come on!" at somebody after they hand you a plate of food. Is that my steak? Come On!). Anyway, Hanoi offered beautiful lakes and thousands of motorbikes jetting around them. To say Vietnam has a lot of motorbikes is like saying Yoa Ming is tall. Doesn't really do either of them justice. We also were able to take a 2-day, 1 night trip through the World Heritage UNESCO, Gold-Star rated, et. al. Halong Bay. We didn't have the best weather, but it was great to see none the less and we did meet some interesting people including an Australian couple that (the guy at least) new something about Denver Nuggets basketball. This is stuff you need to know. So all told, we liked Vietnam better than China after only a few days. I don't really know why, but that's the way it is sometimes. Maybe we will figure it out by the end of the trip. On to Hoi An.
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