On the highway to hell

Hanoi
Mãy 4-10
After the most horriblest bus journey to Hanoi, that had us arriving at midnight, our hotel was heaven, clean crispwhite sheets, a proper bath and shower. Not a bucket and a tap. A/C. A mini bar (not that we brought any of it, we went a brought our own cheaper beers and chucked them in) and a TV with 40 cable channels!!!! It rained torrentially while we were there so that was very handy. And free brekky and free internet.
Hanoi is....millions of motorbikes....and vespas... stylish helmets that look like jockey hats and are probably useless....tiny streets, mini plastic chairs and tables on the sidewalk for makeshift cafes, amazing art deco buildings, cute french cafes..... green trees lining every street...... girls with hanging fruit baskets selling pineapple and bananas...taxis with mini TVs where the rearview mirror should be, hundreds of thousands of business phone numbers stencil sprayed on every available wall surface, car horns, motorbike horns, truck horns day and night, everyone wanting to know where you're going, everyone having a good price for you. Streets with shops that all sell the one thing the whole street -a toy street, coffin street, baby milk formula, coffee beans, shoes, drills, underwear, clothing material.

We got used to the traffic, for the most part if you walk across the road everyone on the motorbikes zoom around you.. anything bigger has right of way, traffic lights for anyone are optional.

While we were there we visited the Temple of Literature and other smaller temples in between, resting from the heat with thirst quenching ''fresh' beer, for like 30 cents a mug!


Everyone on the road had given us horror stories about unfriendly people in Hanoi, but we liked it, everyone was friendly and talked to us. Everyone running the restaraunts and hotels were young in their twenties and wanted to talk to us, without any hidden agenda, which made a nice change from other parts of our trip.

The only bad thing was fruit seller girls who liked to grab me by the arm to buy their pineapple, they didn't grab Jon's. Jon got harrassed by tuktuk drivers trying to sell other wares when a tuktuk ride was turned down.

On the last day I was taking a picture of a street, when 2 pineapple seller girls ambushed us. They grabbed my camera and flung their pineapple baskets at us (You know the ones that dangle off a long piece of wood, one basket at each end?) ''We make good photo for you, nice picture!'' It all happened so fast we didn't get a chance to react. The next thing we know they're screaming at us ''YOU PAY YOU PAYEEE'' they wanted us to pay them for taking a photo of us, so I said we'd buy some fruit and pulled out some money to pay, when I asked how much, one of them grabbed everything I had, then the other one was screaming for me to pay the same to her and then a third one wanted to get in on the act and was trying to offload her basket on to Jon.
They were all screaming and everything had happened in 30 seconds ''YOU PAYEE MEE TOOO'' the third one was demanding hopefully. The first one had taken the equivalent of $20 US off me and we knew there wasnt going to be any change, and all we got were 2 bags of pineapple (it was pretty good pineapple, but still) . So I just said ''you share between all 3'' and walked off to them still screaming at us.

And the photo wasn't even any good.