Good Morning Vietnam...Hanoi & Sapa

We arrived into Hanoi airport after a surprisingly smooth and straightforward Lao Airlines flight from Vientiene. Maybe flying is the way to get about in Laos....but it's not as much fun as the buses! Anyway, we finally met up with Caroline (a friend of Louise's from London) at the airport after she flew from Bangkok to meet us. So the twosome has now turned into a threesome! Taxied our way to the guesthouse and Hanoi appeared to be bedlam....lots and lots of mopeds and motorbikes. We went for a wander and soon discovered that the Vietnam pace of life was as hectic (if not worse) than London, Bangkok or any other big city. When you try to cross the street literally 100's of bikes can be carrerring towards you, constantly beep beeping but you just have to walk slowly so they can drive around you (it even says so in Lonely Planet!). This is easier said than done and all of us nealry got driven into on more than one occassion. Another thing about Hanoi, which is quite funny, is that every street sells something different....so you have the card street, lock street, bath cabinet street, headstone street (complete with peoples name and pictures..), flower street, chinese herb street, sunglasses street, shoe street, bag street......and the list goes on! But, much to our dissappointment the people here just didn't seem near as nice as those in Laos. Infact, most of them were very rude and not very nice at all. Everything seemed like a struggle, even doing something as simple as buying fruit turned into a 10 minute haggle, ususlly resulting in us walking off without anything as they wouldn't budge on price. It appears that Vietnamese are very used to tourists and all of them have agreed on extortionate prices to charge. I mean we don't mind paying over the odds but one street seller tried to charge us $1 for 2 bananas, to put this in context we later got a huge bunch of bananas for 3000 dong which is about 20 cents and that would still be double compared to local prices (which we don't mind). During our wander we got chatting to an Aussie guy who lives and has set up a youth hostel in Hanoi, he told us where to go for good Vietnamese food so knowing what we're like we found the place that night. It was a pretty cool restaurant, a bit trendy where lots of Hanoi workers go for post work food. Even though it was trendy it was really cheap and the way it works is like a kind of buffett - all of the food is laid out around the restaurant and you can go around and point at what you want, or order off the menu (which we opted to do as we hadn't a clue what half the food was!) then it's all eaten in tapas style with everyone sharing. It seems, unsurprisingly, that the Vietnamese love meat, more so than anywhere else we've been. Niamh's beef soup turned up with a pigs trotter in it! Lovely. Saying that the whole meal was really nice but our first day in Hanoi with Caroline hadn't turned out as imagined and Vietnam was a completely different world from either Thailand or Laos. Day 2 and things didn't get any better. The weather started to drizzle and it was very cold. For the first time we had to wear a jumper and jacket during the day.....it doesn't take long to get used to sunshine and forget the wind and rain at home so we were a bit pissed with the weather. By the third day we decided enough was enough and booked ourselves on the overnight train to Sapa that night but not before we had a chance to see the water puppet show, a traditional show consisting of an hour of music and singing with lots of Vietnamese folk tales acted out on water...enthralling stuff! But it kept us in from the cold. The overnight train was fun. We were in a hard sleeper cabin which consists of a room which is about 3 meters wide and has 3 beds on either side. We had all 3 on one side. Only one of the other beds was taken by a poor Vietnamese man who had the unfortunate pleasure of sharing with us. Two minutes ino the journey the beers came out and bless him, he tried to go straight to sleep! He seemed happy enough and the night passed quickly enough thanks to the beers and snacks. However, trying to use a squat toilet on a moving train after several beers is another story altogether! But we didn't feel the best getting into Lao Cai at 6am the following morning...we were cursing the beers then. Sapa was another hour by bus from Lao Cai so we got there at about 7am. On the bus journey, as we went higher and higher up the mounatains the mist appeared and this was to be something we saw a lot of over the next few days... We got a nice guesthouse (with a balcony) and settled in, nfotunately we couldn't see anything from our balcony due to the mist. After a few hours rest, we got up ready for off but the mist was still there! It really is like nothing we've ever seen before, you can literally watch it rolling past you. It was so thick that it was difficult to see 3 foot infront of you. We explored the town as best we could and finally figured the only option was to find a bar with a lovely fire, realx and drink lots of local wine for several hours. It was great! The next morning there was still no sign of the mist clearing so we decided just to head back to Hanoi on that nights train. It was a real shame because we'd heard so many good things about Sapa and any of the pictures we'd seen looked amazing but it just wasn't meant to be. We arrived back into Hanoi at 4.30am and spent the day doing some cultural sighseeing - Ho Chin Minh's house on Stilts and the Literature museum and finshed the day with a nice cup of tea (tea and coffee over here comes with condensed milk and is delicious!) and an early night!