Hanoi

Firstly, OTC valium is a godsend. I was literally conscious for about four hours during the whole 24 it took to get to Hanoi from Vientiane much to the envy of my fellow travelers. So I'm staying now for the second night in a cheap hotel in the old quarter of Hanoi with two British and one Belgium guy I met on the bus ride over. We all get along quite well and together the room only comes to $3 a person...sweet.

This morning, we basically just figured out how to get out of Hanoi. This city is madness. Not as big, dirty and polluted as Bangkok but the racket that is day-to-day life here is already grating at my nerves. There's maybe one car to every 100 motorbikes zipping around the narrow streets and it seems like the horn is used nearly as much as the accelerator. If bats use echolocation to maneuver around unseen objects, the Vietnamese do the functional inverse--honking copiously at anything that appears in their line of vision. It's a total mystery why they even bother because everyone here is completely inured to the sound of horns anyway.

So as I was saying, today we booked an overnight trip to Halong Bay leaving tomorrow morning. We'll stay in a junk overnight and have some time to swim around or kayak amongst the limestone karsts...looking forward to it. I also bought a get-on-get-off sleeper bus ticket that gets me all the way to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) by way of Hue, Hoi An, and Na Trang. It breaks my heart, but I decided I didn't have time to get to Sapa in the north (quite near the Chinese border) since it looks absolutely stunning:



Plus to get anywhere so picturesque requires a good bit of trekking which I'm frankly not really up for anymore. I'm not sure how long I'll hang out in Hue and Hoi An, but Nha Trang is a beach town so it'll be nice to get some sun and snorkeling in since after nearly a month in SEA, I haven't yet been to a single beach!

So today I taxied around Hanoi and took in the sights. Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum pictured below was unfortunately closed by the time we got there so I couldn't see Mr. Minh's embalmed carcass, but I remember Mr. Taylor mentioning a long time ago that it's not in very good shape compared to Lenin's which I saw way back in 2001 so maybe that's ok.

From Vietnam

It's in there somewhere


A view from the former residence

After that we took a look at the Temple of Literature and some other sights--none all too picturesque.

The highlight of the day was a water puppet performance I just got back from. There was live music which was awesome since I even recognized the look and sound of a few from my "Music of Asia and Oceania" music class in college and the performance was pretty whimsical. Basically the stage is water and there's some reeds towards the bag that hide the puppeteers with their puppets affixed to long bamboo poles. Here's a shot of the performance poached from some random person's blog...I'm almost positive this is the same theater though:



Right then, time to pack up and get to bed. Another UNESCO world heritage sight is on the horizon tomorrow so look for some awesome pictures soon!