27 - 29TH NOVEMBER

Our train pulled into Hanoi station at 5.00 a.m. - hmmm an early start but after a nights sleep on a hard sleeper train I was highly delighted to be getting up at such an early hour! The station was manic, even at that time of the day, their were taxi touts everywhere, you were practically fighting them off! We got a taxi which was on the outskirts of the mass crowd and unfortunately our taxi was an older model of car to the vast majority of other taxis, but we got in anyway! It was a proper dodgy cab and we happened to go the extremely long way round to our hotel. When we arrived at the hotel I went and asked how much it should be as we thought the taxi guy was trying to rip us off good and proper. Rob was having none of it and point blank refused to pay the extra from what the hotel said it should have cost. Then we checked in and went off to find our room which was on the sixth floor, (no lift!) We got to the sixth floor and realised that we had gone up the wrong set of

stairs and our room was at the back of the hotel - doh!!! Finally we got to our room which was fine, so put the telly on watched a bit of CNN then were back in the land of nod in no time at all!

After a good catch up on lost sleep we were ready to go and check out Hanoi. We were staying in the old quarter, which was mad! It was one of the most busy places I think I have ever been to, it was bonkers! The streets are really small and narrow, and filled with loads of shops, restaurants and street food sellers. Then there’s the traffic! With all the mopeds with papping horns, it really is a crazy place. It certainly does have its own kind of charm, but if you hit the streets at rush hour then it can get a little much! Unfortunately we don’t have any photos due to the fact that it took all powers of concentration to get around without getting run over. Crossing the roads were definitely a pot