Vietnam

And so we have arrived in Vietnam. We're in Hanoi at the moment, and heading to Saigon this evening, hopefully. The trains south weren't running yesterday because of the flooding in the central coast, but apparently they're fine this evening, so all should be good.

Danny P just asked me if it's like China, the answer being no, its completely different. Hanoi, to be truthful, is not the prettiest city we've visited; it doesn't have the grandeur of, say, Shanghai or St. Petersburg. But the energy of the place is just amazing. Beijing felt sedate in comparison. People everywhere, walking, biking, selling or just eating. So much of life here is conducted on the streets, people eat breakfast, lunch and dinner on little plastic chairs and tables they drag out of their houses and shops, many buildings seem to be an odd combination of both, with offices doubling as living rooms or bed rooms just visible through a door at the back. Foot paths here pretty much don't exist. They are there,but most are either covered with the aforementioned miniature tables and chairs or with motorcycles and mopeds. Hanoi, a city of five million, has three million motorbikes, and it feels like more when you're crossing the street. This is an experience in and of itself. Its impossible to find a break in the traffic so you just have to wait for a gap on your side of the street and walk slowly across while bikes swerve around you. It was a bit nerve racking to begin with (the first time I stood next to some locals so I didn't get killed).

After two days we left Hanoi and took an organised trip down to Halong Bay for three days. The pictures on my facebook account do the grandeur of the place some justice, but not nearly enough. Halong Bay is filled with almost two thousand islands; fingers of rock, mostly over one hundred feet high, jutting almost vertically out of the ocean. On our first day we cruised around the bay for a few hours and then went to see a really impressive cave system, with one massive chamber beautifully lit. Afterwards we went kayaking for an hour. We cruised along for half an hour and then went through a small tunnel at the base of one of the cliffs, once we got through we realised we were in a fully enclosed little bay, with green covered walls of rock rising up around us in a wide circle, it was beautiful. On the second day we stayed on Cat Ba Island, the only inhabited island in Halong Bay, and spent the afternoon on a lovely beach.

The Halong trip was also lovely because we got more of an opportunity to talk to people than we've had in a while. We met a lovely couple in their fifties form the south of England, who were traveling for six months. Peter, the husband, had been a cabinet maker, a police officer, then worked in insurance,then restored antiques for a few years and is now a funeral director. We also met two American ladies who had just adopted two beautiful Vietnamese babies. It was so interesting to hear about the ordeals they had to go through and the description of being united with the baby you've been trying to adopt for the last fifteen months.

Anyway, suffice is to say, the trip is going well. In two days we'll be in Saigon and then we'll be on the beach for almost a week. Hopefully the typhoons will have cleared at that stage.