Vietnam - Hanoi

As we got off the bus in Hanoi a tout accosted us to come to his hotel. We were pretty far from the city centre and there were no taxis around so we decided to go with him for the ease of it. There were so many motorbikes on the roads that the car could hardly fit down the streets, little food stalls where you sit on stools on the side of the road, all controlled chaos.
The hotel was ok and a cheap price but we didn't feel like we could trust any of the guys running it and didn't like to leave our stuff there, so decided to check out the next day and left at around 7am.

We checked out heaps of places but decided on the cheapest room at a pretty nice hotel so we have nice facilities even if the smallest room. It is still very good by our standards. We stayed there 3 nights before heading to Halong Bay.

Hanoi is quite a beautiful city. The old quarter where we spent our time surrounds a lake which is really nice to walk around at all times of day and has many trees and pathways. The traffic is terrible, crossing roads a little frightening - you just have to walk out into the face of many many motorbikes coming at you. But they are all used to it, that is how you cross a road here. We feel much more confident and do not fear for our lives any longer!

There are lots of women who walk around carrying baskets on either end of a pole selling fruit, many silk shops where you can get beautiful clothing for very little money.

I (Rita) got a gorgeous dress and top. There are lots of specialised areas, for example all the shoe stalls/markets are in the same block - hundreds and hundreds of shoes. We both got a pair. The areas date from the old guilds and although not as specialised as they once were you still have the plastics, leather, glass, candle, shoe etc areas.

We mainly wandered around the old quarter of Hanoi and checked it out. We went to a couple of markets, one pretty good that had a lot of jerseys and coats (that were impossible to look at in the heat) and ceramics. The ceramics were so beautiful that we wanted buy so much but unfortunatley didn't think that it would survive postage or being carted around by us for the next few months. The other big market we went to had a lot of fabric (Tess you would have loved it).

We went to lots of travel agencies looking for a good tour around Halong Bay - it is appartently quite hard to make your own way there and sort out transport and accomodation to the islands. It is quite hard to choose an agency to go with because there are so many replicas. For example, there is one agency that has a really good reputation and has been around for ages called Sinh cafe. But nearly every street you go down (and the old quarter is pretty big) there is a Sinh cafe, just a random agency which is getting a free ride on the name. This kind of thing is very common with travel agencis, hotels and restaurants in Vietnam.

In the end we went with the one our hotel was offering, through one of the Sinh cafes!
We have had some nice meals while in Hanoi.

Is is probably the most expensive place for food so far if you go to restaurants rather than eating on the street. Even if you do eat on the street though as a foreigner you get charged about 3x the going price so its not that great. There are so many restaurants that we have been the only people there quite a few times. One night Tim felt like being adventurous and ordered frog cakes (the restaurant also served crocodile and tortise), which was a mistake. The frogs had been pureed up bones and all and he could only take one bite and it was disgusting. So now we know not to order frog again...