This morning we were
awoken at 5am by a knock on the compartment door and arrived soon
after in Hanoi. We had read a lot of terrible stories about the taxi
drivers in Vietnam and all of the scams that they try, so we were
very cautious as we left the station. We didn't have a lot of
options, however, and ended up just haggling with the guy who first
approached us. He was driving a proper, marked taxi, which was a
plus, and once we had agreed on the price, he drove us to our hostel
with no fuss or bother.
When we got there,
the door was locked and a guy was asleep on the couch inside, but as
we stood around wondering what to do, a woman opened the door and let
us in, and checked us in, and then let us leave our bags in the
corner. As it was still fairly early, Hanoi was still waking up
(although it was still pretty busy), which gave us (and the girls in
particular) a chance to ease ourselves into the chaos. The old part of
Hanoi, where our hostel is, is a maze of quite narrow streets filled
with shops and restaurants. There's a footpath, but it's completely
clogged with parked motorbikes and street vendors, forcing you to
walk on the street, which is teeming with more motorbikes and the odd
car.
We bought some
lychees and walked down to Hoan Kiem Lake, which takes up a big chunk
of downtown Hanoi. The park around the lake was alive with people
doing exercises of various kinds and there was a steady stream of
people walking and jogging around the periphery – almost
exclusively in an anti-clockwise direction. We walked the other way,
eating our lychees as the sun climbed higher in the sky and the
temperature started its inexorable rise.
After we had
circumnavigated the lake, we went looking for a cafe to get some
breakfast. The woman in the hostel had marked on the map a street
that was full of cafes, but they only did drinks and it took us some
time to find somewhere that served food. As we walked we came across numerous fallen trees and later learnt that a powerful storm had hit a few days ago, uprooting about 1,000 trees and killing two people. We couldn't help thinking that it might have been somehow related to the squall that we experienced in Nanning. We eventually we came across
a French-style bakery that did eggs and so on and we sat in there for
a while and fuelled ourselves up in peace.
We then stopped by
the hostel to put our bags in our room and then went to Dong Xuan
Market. Located over two floors in a big old building, the market,
which mostly sells clothing, is a crazy, stifling labyrinth of
stalls, all with more stock than they could sell in a lifetime, piled
up in huge stacks that threatened to topple over and crush the
somnambulant stall holders lying back in the breeze emanating from
their small electric fans. You've never seen so many awful clothes in
one place and it was no big surprise that we didn't find anything we
liked. Back out on the street, we came across a sweet-looking
restaurant called the Little Black Duck, and as it was hot and
lunchtime and we had no idea where we were going to eat, we went in
and had a slightly expensive but perfectly nice lunch. Then it was
back to the hostel and then out for some beer and spring rolls and
cards at a place just up the road called the Lantern Bar – which
was, surprise, surprise, full if lanterns – and some dinner in the
restaurant downstairs.
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