Vietnam Travels

It has been quite a few days of travel since I left Seoul and traveled to Vietnam. My first stop was Hanoi. I arrived there late on Friday night and met Lindsay at the airport. Given that she's a tall blonde, it wasn't hard to find her.

Saturday, Lindsay and I walked around Hanoi's old quarter, which was cool to see, but crowded sometimes a bit difficult to walk around in. I tried to take some pics to capture the essence, but none really came out well. Hopefully these will give you some sense of the controlled chaos that is Hanoi. I liked the old quarter, but even there, where walking around is more of the norm, it was still a bit scary. In general though, Lindsay and I had a good time. The most cultural thing we did was to go to the water puppet show, which apparently has been going on for several hundred years. It was very pretty and impressive, and fortunately only an hour so you never really get bored.

One somewhat tense moment occurred when Lindsay and I took a cab back from the Temple of Literature and noticed that the cab fare was reaching astronomical proportions. We thought maybe a decimal was wrong or something, but it was clear we were going to have problems when the driver stopped on a busy street half a block from our hotel instead of taking us in. He then tried to get us to pay 800 Vietnamese dollars even though it only cost us 75 to get there. I flatly refused and told him that was ridiculous, at which point he snarled (that is the only word to describe his weird attempt at an angry face) and then said Mafioso! several times. Lindsay helped me understand he was trying to tell us he was in the mafia, but there was something clearly untrue about that. So, I dropped 100 in his front sea t, told him that was more than enough, and we got out before he could do any more than yell 200! at us in a vain attempt to negotiate. Predictably, he didn't try to follow us onto the hotel grounds and crisis was averted. It did help us to realize we need to keep our eyes open for that kind of stuff in the future.

Aside from that incident, however, we enjoyed Hanoi. On our second night we had a delicious Vietnamese dinner and made plans for the rest of the trip, which will include a train to the mountain town of Sapa and a trip to Halong Bay for a two-day one-night trip on a junk boat. More to come soon.