Hanoi Madness

Dodging the traffic
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We arrived in Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam after flying from Vientiane, the capital of Loas.  3 words...oh my god!!!  This place is absolutely crazy!  Never in mylife i have seen so many mopeds and motorbikes!! There are 3.5 million people in Hanoi and about 3 million mopeds!!  To top that off, there are not many traffic lights and nopbody has right of way...everyone has right of way!!  They use their horns as a warning mechanism to fellow scooters and pedestrians, so you can imagine the noise!  One person joked that if the horn breaks on the bike, they buy a new bike!  About one third of all bikers wear a helmet!  It is not the law in the city to wear a helmet but as of 15th December it will be made law. They are so blase!

Oh god the traffic!!!
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You don't just see one person on a scooter, quite often they will carry a passenger or 3 people (usually a child sandwiched between their parents!).  Coming in from the airport, i saw 5 people on one moped!  I even saw a woman carrying a young baby in her arms on the back of another!  No one blinks an eye..it's insanly different to what we know.  I saw numerous riders talking on their mobile phones and listening to I-pods! Instead of carrying passengers, some bikers carry goods.  I saw the following tied to backs of mopeds...huge sacks containing rice, a ladder, a huge flat screen TV, crates piled up containing fruit.  It really is insane what you see!

Coming in from the airport, i saw 5 people on 1 moped!!!!

Schackled in the prison
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Now when it comes to crossing a road, this is a whole new ballgame.When tyring to corss the road, there are hundreds of bikes, mopeds,rickshaws, not to mention cars heading your way!  The key is to walk across the road very slowly,looking them in the eye, so they have time to dodge you, basically!!  This worked...although we had a few near misses!!!  To make things more difficult, when the mopeds weren't on the road, they were parked on the pavement, forcing pedestrains to walk on the road!  Mad city!

A traditional street vendor
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Hanoi isn't the cleanest city in the world. In fact, after visitng Bangkok, i think it's worse!  All the Vietnamese gather in front of their shops and sit and cook and eat and leave their mess there!  The litter is disgusting!  I saw one woman sweeping her mess up and leaving it in the gutter!  It all stays in the gutter....nice!!!  I even saw one woman throw litter out of her shop window, onto the pavement outside!  Outside is the rubbish bin!

Our 1st day in Hanoi was spent wandering the city, well avoiding the rubbish really! We visited the Hanoi Hilton (prison used to house the Vietnamese and American soldiers during the war).  We decided to escape the city and booked ourselves onto a 2 day/1 night cruise around Halong Bay ( a wolrs UNESCO heritage site) made up of 3000 limestone islands.  It was quite a sight.  We visited a huge cave covered in limestone which was beautiful.  The boat was comfortable until we saw a rat running across the kitchen floor!  We got into bed and could hear scratching coming from under our bed so we were convinced a rat was trying to knaw its way through!!!  All in all it was a welcome getaway from the stress of Hanoi.

Our boat!
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Next stop...Hoi An.