Sophie & Ollie´s Travels

Hey Everyone,

Hope you are all good. I'm going to try not to make this too long but I have been in Vietnam 6 days now and been up to quite a lot. I will try and leave out all the boring, useless details so you get to read the good stuff. So far I have been having a really great time.

We arrived in Hanoi from Bangkok on a boring but short 1 hour 50 minute flight. We walked straight through customs without getting x-rayed again, easy. Then, we met our airport transfer and headed out into in the heat and humidity. If I thought Bangkok is manic, Hanoi is completely insane. There are few cars, a few more trucks, even more bicycles and a million scooters. At every type of interaction you must beep your horn incessantly. When you want to go faster, you beep your horn until the vehicle in front moves out your way and if it won’t move you just drive on the other side of the road. At the intersections everyone goes at once and everyone swerves around each other to get across. The drive from the airport to the hotel was scary.

We got to our hotel in the Old Quarter of Hanoi and it was quite backpackerish so we dumped all our stuff and decided to head out. There are no real pavements and what pavement there is are lined with scooters, holes and piles of construction materials. You can’t walk in the gutter because it runs with black liquid and piles of rubbish so you're stuck walking in the road as the scooters and bicycles drive by. Every fourth Vietnamese person who passes tries to sell you a motorbike ride, a tuktuk ride, sunglasses, zippo lighters, hats, fans, Lonely Planets anything and everything including marijuana once. The ladies who carry the fruit on the long sticks with baskets on each end put their conical hats on your head and force you to take the fruit and then try and get you to take a photo and if you do they charge you. The first walk totally freaked me out and I had to sit in the hotel room for a bit to wish I wasn't here and then get over it.

After a while you get kind of use to the smell of rotting rubbish, intense heat, high humidity, stagnant water, saying no thank you (kong camon) every two minutes and crossing the road. To cross the road here you must step out into moving traffic and walk at an even pace across the road and everything will make its way around you. At first it was terrifying, now fun.

In the evening we met our tour group of 4 other kiwis, 6 Aussies, 2 Americans, 1 English and Canadian and our Vietnamese tour guide. Everyone is between 20 and 36 and there are no strange ones, all nice and normal.

The next day we got up early and took a private bus out to the Hanoi Hilton. The Hanoi Hilton is the name for the prison where the French kept all the Vietnamese political prisoners. It was a horrible place where prisoners were forced to sit with their feet shackled on a slightly tilted surface for 23 hours and 45 minutes a day. It was tilted so that they couldn’t lay flat or the blood would rush to their heads. We then went to the massive Ho Chi Minh mausoleum but couldn't see him lying embalmed as it is closed on Mondays. Though the queue is apparently usually 1 hour 45 minutes long in the sun without shade so I didn't really mind not seeing the dead guy. We also went to the One Pillar Pagoda and the Temple of Literature. We have seen quite a lot of pagodas and religious buildings and they are all interesting, influenced mainly by the Chinese with Confucianism and Buddhism and the Japanese. Lots of buddha images, incense, bonsai, bushes shaped into animals etc but all of them are similar.

After the short tour of Hanoi we had 6 hours to kill before we met up with our tour group again. We went to lunch with 2 guys from the tour, Phil and Sam. Getting food here is daunting at first. Our tour guide recommends not eating from the street vendors and as if you would. They wash all the food and plates in one bucket of grey water and cook practically in the gutter of black liquid. I would not recommend eating from the food markets from the smell alone. There are whole, head included, fried ducks, live eels and turtles in tubs ready to be slaughtered, unidentifiable meats and people gutting unknown animals on the pavement. Our guide said that people here really do have to tie their pet dogs up or else they end up as food. So far we have eaten only in restaurants including a few very local places, thanks to Sam who will eat anywhere, and have been fine. Vietnamese food is nice, like Thai but without the spice. All our breakfasts are included at the hotels and include 'normal' food which is good because I don't like fried rice for breakfast.

After 6pm on the second day we took a taxi to the railway station for the overnight train to Hue. The train was definitely an experience. Being foreign and, therefore, rich we went first class. First class consists of 2.5m x 2.5m rooms with 4 beds, 2 up top and 2 on the bottom. Everything is filthy. The mattress is stained grey and smelly with sweat, the pillow and blankets are much the same. We shared our room with another kiwi couple, Ben, 22 and Nicola, 20, from Christchurch, so that was fine. At one point we hit something pretty hard and stopped for about 10 minutes but then we were off again. I am guessing it was a scooter considering they are everywhere and would try to beat the train by honking their horns for it to get out of their way.

Oh well this is all I have time to describe now but I will let you know some more of the interesting times we have been having shortly.

Sophie and Ollie