Hanoi & Ha Long Bay 13/4/12 - 17/4/12

After five months of travelling, I think we've both finally reached the point where we've had enough of sitting on buses for anywhere between 6 and 10 hours every third day or so! We still love to arrive at a new town, but the journeys in between are starting to feel longer, hotter and bumpier! Therefore we decided to spend a bit more and get the overnight train from Nha Trang to Hanoi. It was a 15 hour journey, but it was pretty comfy as some of the carriages have beds. In our 4 berth carriage were a couple of blokes from London and they made the trip go a bit quicker. We arrived into Hanoi at 6am and made our way into the old quarter to find some accommodation.

Hanoi is the capital of Vietnam, although Ho Chi Minh City is probably on a larger scale. We spent our first two days walking around the narrow streets of the old quarter. For some reason each street in the old quarter concentrated on selling a particular product. One street sold only coffee, another sold just sweets and another just baby products etc. There aren't really any supermarkets or shopping centres in Vietnam, so a weekly shop might send you from one side of the city to another! There was a large lake in the centre of town which we spent a bit of time walking around. We took a walk along there on a Saturday evening and it soon became apparent that this was the place to be! Teenagers and families use the lake as a meeting place and spend the whole evening there. I suppose it's the equivalent of meeting your friends down the pub or at the cinema. Everyone was walking around eating ice cream, literally thousands of people and they were all having a good time.

I checked on the internet and saw that Hanoi FC were playing at home on the Saturday evening. Just for something different to do, we decided to take a look. We walked to the stadium and tried finding the ticket office as we'd just missed the kick off. A local came up to us and tried selling us some tickets! I've seen plenty of ticket touts at England matches before, but  I wasn't expecting there to be such a demand for Hanoi FC in the Vietnamese V League! We couldn't be bothered trying to find the office so we bought the tickets and even though they probably cost more, they were still less than a pound each. There was probably only 2,000 fans in a stadium that held 25,000, but the locals were pretty up for it waving their flags and banging their drums. The quality of football was awful. Jenna thought it was on par with Bournemouth, I said it was non league standard at best! Hanoi won 4-2 I think but it was comical at times! Hanoi were defending a 2-1 lead with ten minutes to go. Most teams would sit back and try to defend their lead for the remainder of the match, but not this lot! Hanoi would bomb forward into the opposition half and then lose the ball. But rather than sprinting back, 5 or 6 of the players would just stroll around in the oppositions half and wait for the ball to come back! After the match the players walked off the pitch and walked through the same exits as we were and out onto the streets to walk home!

On our other evening in Hanoi we went to watch a water puppet show. These are really popular in Vietnam, although I don't think they'd ever catch on back home! It was pretty clever how they did it and quite funny to watch. The singing wasn't the best though! We paid for VIP seats which it turns out were the same as the non-VIP seats, the phrase 'Same same, but different' applies to most things you pay for in Asia!

When we walked back to our hotel one night a woman selling pineapples insisted that we have a photo with her 'pineapple store' on our shoulders. We thought why not, when we tried returning it to her she said we must buy pineapple as we'd had a photo and quoted about 10 dollars for a pineapple! Some of the Vietnamese woman are pretty scary and she was definitely one of them! We managed to get away unscathed and without losing 10 dollars for a pineapple!

The reason we travelled so far North in Vietnam was so that we could visit Ha Long Bay. This is a very popular tourist trip with junk boats exploring the hundreds of islands just off the coast. We opted for the cheaper two day / one night trip as we guessed it was going to be fairly similar to some of the trips we've done previously. Despite there not being much sunshine, the islands were beautiful. It looked very similar to the limestone cliffs we saw in Southern Thailand. Our boat wasn't bad at all and the group on there were friendly, although it wasn't quite as fun as our Whitsunday boat in Australia! We were able to go on a small Vietnamese boat and paddle our way around a floating market which was good. We also visited some caves which were probably even better than the ones we saw in New Zealand. You were able to go for a swim, but the water didn't look very inviting!