Hanoi, Vietnam, SE Asia

A short flight from Laos brought myself & Mike (my new travelling partner) to the hectic city of Hanoi - soon to be nicked named "Scam City". We didn't even leave the airport before a hot shot Vietnamese "taxi driver" was onto us for the scam of the century. In short -

• Never fall for paying a "toll fee" on the highway (they wanted 300,000 dong for this, that's 10 GBP!). Luckily we caught onto that one just in the nick of time!


• You're unlikely to be dropped off at your requested hotel. We were taken to what we thought was the Stars Hotel to realise 2 days later that we are in a completely different hotel (they have about 3 different Lonely Planet hotel names outside their building to trick tourists to think they are checking into the hotel they want).


• Finally, the 3rd scam (all this in the space of 24 hours...) the tour desk at our hotel, claimed to have booked us onto a bus to Hoi An for an extortionate price (it was a public holiday and all buses were full, so we expected to have to pay more) however, after lots of asking around other tour operators we discovered that this so called bus didn't even exist - once again we cottoned on just in time.

In the end we managed not to lose much money to these chancers, and realised that in Hanoi it was impossible to trust anyone!

Hanoi itself is a great place, crazy like Bangkok with traffic coming at you from all corners, and motorcycles galore weaving in and out of people trying to cross the road - the trick here is to look the driver in then eye and start walking across the road without hesitation. Daunting at first but you soon get used to it, and traffic coming straight at you is no longer a worry. A city full of character, history, culture, the usual manic markets found in Asian cities with all kinds of smells wafting right under your nose.

A morning of strolling around the city, taking in main sights including Ho Chi Minh's Mausoleum (Vietnam's great leader's resting place), the One Pillar Pagoda, Hoan Kiem Lake and the bustling Old Quarter. An evening of traditional Vietnamese entertainment brought us to the Principle Theatre where we watched water puppetry - a colourful display of puppets in a pool of water acting out various scenes that surround the lake with Vietnamese music telling the stories. At 40,000 dong (1.20 GBP) a pop, it's definitely worth checking out.

Due to a looonnnggg public holiday celebrating Independence Day (hence the non existent bus scam - see 1st paragraph...) we could not move South of Hanoi for a week, and so a quick change of plan saw us seeing some natural beauties in the North of Vietnam. A busy introduction to this new country and so we were pleased to leave the big city behind for a few days.