Hanoi
Trip Start
Sep 05, 2008
1
40
68
Trip End
Ongoing
Hanoi,
Vietnam
Friday, October 24, 2008
Not a bad city, not bad at all. Low rise, reasonably busy, but interesting and the people seem pretty friendly. Not too easy to navigate, mind. Lots of small roads and smaller alleyways, each one looks very similar to the last. There are often two roads with very similar names (Hang Bo, Hang Bac, Hang Sữ, Lỡ Sữ, and so on) so trying to find where you are by street name on our map, with its tiny typeface, is also fraught with errors. But we're in no rush. We reckon we'll be here for a little while, taking it easy,
Lots and lots and lots of humans on all manner of scooters, like a constant river of vehicles
Hanoi local
. When trying to cross the road, there's no point in waiting for a gap in the traffic; it's not coming any time soon, and you'll be there til the early hours. The only way to cross is to pick your moment then walk out into the traffic keeping a slow, steady pace and with your eyes firmly fixed on the oncoming scooters. They part for you and you make your way across. It's pretty easy once you realise that's the only way of crossing and you've seen a few of the locals doing it. We're still tired from our nightmare bus-a-thon, so we were never going to do much today. We walked around the lake in the old town, quite a pretty lake with a central island reached by a bridge. There were lots of tourists and Vietnamese people walking around here, but we barely got hassled once.
