Hanoi
Trip Start
May 15, 2007
1
4
19
Trip End
Jun 15, 2007
Hanoi,
Vietnam
Sunday, May 20, 2007
We get woken up at 9 am to have breakfast together and clean up most of the mess caused by yesterday's party. Thankfully there's quite a few of us, so it's done pretty quickly. After a while everyone goes their separate ways and we go back to the airport to catch our flight to Vietnam. We're pretty early again, but with no place to put our big backpacks for an hour or two there's not much else we can do except wait at the airport, so that's what we do. We get something to eat and e-mail home and eventually it's time for our flight to Hanoi. The flight is three hours and by the time we get there and through customs it's 8 pm already and completely dark. We get ushered into a cab and drive into the city centre and when we get to the hotel we wanted to go to someone tells us it's full while we're still in the cab and they insist on driving us to another place
Random street scene in Hanoi
. It's probably a scam, but it all happens very quickly and it doesn't really matter in the end as the place we get driven to is perfectly fine. The hotel guy wants to sell us a bunch of tours straight away, but we manage to fob him off and promise to talk to him in the morning. Then we finally get to go up to our room, where we quickly dump our bags and then turn back to hit the streets. I must say that Hanoi is a bit of a shock to the system. It's busy. There are mopeds literally everywhere (few people can afford a car) and everyone's honking their horns and there's people everywhere - it's pretty crazy. I quite enjoy it, it's an experience to say the least. :D I don't think I could stand it too long though! After a while we go back to our hotel and encounter a huge cockroach in our bathroom. Both Selmer and I are too sissy to squash it or put it outside. Selmer tries and as soon as the cockroach moves he starts jumping around and screaming like a girl, which is pretty hilarious, but not very helpful. Eventually we decide to just leave it where it is, give it a name (Gregor) and shower with our sandals on. :D Day 7: Hanoi - Vietnam
We sleep in a bit, enjoying the fact we can actually do that for the first time in a week. When we get downstairs eventually we immediately get ushered into the office to have breakfast and discussing tours we want to book
Me having lunch
. They're really keen on selling you stuff here! Anyway, we book a 3 day trip to Ha Long Bay and Cat Ba Island for the next day, and while we're at it we also get our trainticket to Hue and a visa for Laos sorted. We probably pay more to have it all arranged by the hotel like this, but in the end it's not all that expensive and we really can't be arsed to walk around the city looking for the best deal. After having sorted all that out we get back into the craziness of Hanoi to have a look around in daylight. We don't have any specific things we want to see so we just wander around the lake, the Old Quarter and the French Quarter and are still completely flabbergasted by the amount of mopeds and people everywhere. Everyone is out on the streets selling something or sitting at a street kitchen or just going about their daily business. People have stuff piled on their bikes and mopeds in a way that's not even possible according to gravity. The centre of Hanoi is surprisingly Vietnamese, there are no big Western chains at all, and entire streets are still dedicated to one particular type of business. There's a silk street, a greeting card street, a silverware street, etc. People still walk around wearing those conical hats. There are quite a few souvenir shops as well, but not as in your face as other places I've been to. Selmer and I both wonder what this place will look like if tourism really takes off.
We have lunch at a restaurant that sets us back a whopping 70,000 Vietnamese dong (3,5 euros/US$). The food's great too, I love Asia! :D
After a few hours the sun comes out (it's been cloudy all day) and it gets really hot, so we retreat to our hotel for a few hours. We go back out for dinner and wander around for a while until we settle on a random food place. It's a pretty typical restaurant (well, that's probably too fancy a name; it's one step up from a street kitchen) with tiny chairs that us tall Westerners look pretty silly on. :D
