Back To Hanoi

Hanoi traffic, motor bikes everywhere
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At 4:55am we stumble bleary eyed off the train and we are back in Hanoi. The train is 10minutes early in fact. We return to our Hotel, Hang Noc 2, through the dark and strangely quiet streets of the Old Quarter where we have to wait until 10am for a room. Anybody who has been in Hanoi during the day will know what a strange thing its to have no motor bikes on the road,  normally it is motor bike bedlam.  We improvise by visiting the nearby lake to watch the thousands locals exercising and doing tai chi, some of the girls join in, then we head off to sample the "best" coffee in Hanoi according to our tour leader, and it is very good, then we have breakfast. After breakfast we head back to the hotel and take a cyclo tour for one hour around the Old Quarter. One of the interesting things about the Old Quarter is that streets are  arranged so that a particular type of goods is basic to that street, so you have a hardware street, a shoe street, a fabric street, a metal working street and so on. Eventually we end up at the theatre where the Water Puppets are performed and book tickets for the 6:30pm performance then we  head back on foot to the hotel and hooray, we have a room.

Time for a clean up, a rest then off for a wander and lunch. This is really our first look at Hanoi. We find a nice cafe for lunch and buy an original water colour of Hanoi in the 1930's straight off the wall of the cafe. In the early evening we see the Water puppets which feature traditional music and puppetry and have a good mix of humour and traditional story telling. Well worth seeing and good value. After tea we head for bed it has been a long day.

Carol and I decide to have a chill out day the next day, we have not really stopped since Luang Prahabang, our only real mission for the day is to post off as much as possible to reduce our bag weights and we get rid of nearly 8kg in total. It costs us about $US36 for some airmail and the rest seamail. Tonight we are on The Reunification Express heading south for Hue, everybody is prepared after two overnight train trips already and this is the longest being about 13 hours. The train is better than we expected from the stories we had heard and there is cabin service which provides hot and cold drinks, snacks and light meals such as soup and boiled eggs. Arrival at Hue is timed for 8:37am and is only 8 minutes as the train continues south to Ho Chi Minh City.