Vietnam, well what can I say. It's been a turbulent ride so far – we've been scammed, lied to, cheated and pickpocketed... and that was just Hanoi. But we're surviving thanks to our savvy traveller hats which we are always wearing and enjoying ourselves in the process.
Let me start with our first experience on setting foot upon Vietnamese soil. The hostess on the bus kindly offered to help us with our taxis to our hotel. She even offered us accommodation at her great hotel should we need it – how kind of her. The bus from the border dropped us off, not at the bus station as one may suppose, but several kilometres outside of the town centre in a carpark – full of taxis. 'Well that's lucky!' you might think... you would be the same as our other fellow passengers in that case, spending $12 on a taxi which should cost $4. We tried to bargain down to this price but the drivers they weren't interested – so we made our way out onto the street to find a taxi, with the hostesses' yells echoing after us 'Why you not want my taxi? You want hotel, I have hotel!'
Our hotel, in the Old Quarter, was really nice – huge room, two beds, huge balcony with a view of the cathedral (Especen Hotel) at a reasonable price.
We spent the rest of the day exploring the nooks and crannies of the old quarter, dodging the masses of motorbikes on the road and declining offers of food, photos, moto hire and copied books (you can buy your lonely planets around the country - they cottoned onto a good one there).
Crossing the road is one of the greatest delights of Hanoi... the hundreds of motorbikes, mixed with taxis, cyclists, men with carts, whizzing past you from every direction seems at first like an impassable obstacle. However we discovered that the best way to tackle this is by simply walking slowly straight into the traffic, one foot in front of the other, watching the traffic dodge around you. This is the closest you will ever come to feeling like Moses when he parted the Red Sea.
We had our first taste of Vietnamese food, which is delicious, at the Little Hanoi restaurant. It's pretty hard to find restaurants here as there are many impostor restaurants which name themselves after the more successful ones – so while we were searching for Little Hanoi we came across about 4 others with the same name.
Even better... the beer costs only 30p here for a glass! It's craaazy, it really is cheaper than a small bottle of water! Needless to say our evenings were spent relaxing in rooftop bars:
and checking out the mayhem below! 
We took time to visit the Hanoi Hilton – the prison where John McCain and other American POWs were imprisoned and tortured during the Vietnam war. There were exhibitions detailing the history of the prison under French rule and punishments administered to the Vietnamese revolutionaries.
However when it came to reading about the treatment of the American prisoners it was a very different story – photos showing the Americans receiving letters from family, eating a hearty Christmas dinner, receiving attentive medical treatment and socialising and relaxing.
Captions read: “You can see how well they were fed”, “they didn't want for anything”, “a home away from home”... we looked at the internet that night to see what it had really been like and read a comment from John McCain on revisiting the prison: “that's entertainment”...
We wondered the streets getting lost in the old French alleyways and marvelling at how many electric cables can fit on one pylon:
We also went to the Temple of Literature where ancient scriptures chiselled into stone were stored next to giant stone turtles. 
There was also some kind of graduation ceremony going on, girls in bright dresses posing for their boyfriends, which was fun to watch:
After a couple of days we decided to head to Halong Bay and Cat Ba island, the bay contains 3,000 islands and Cat Ba offers a national park and trekking. We decided to go on our own instead of with a tour group and jumped in a taxi to the bus station. The taxi driver told us that his cab had a meter so we sat back and relaxed... He kept telling Al how cool his hat was – alarm bells began to ring (people only show interest in things like that or ask you where you are from when they want to distract you from something). It didn't take long to realise that we'd gone on a little detour... still nothing major... but it was the meter that didn't make sense, it was displaying the price at about 3 times what it should have been. Al began questioning the driver who seemed to panic and dropped us off in the middle of nowhere with no bus station in sight – bastard! We paid him what we thought he was due and stormed off in search of the station. We eventually found it and jumped on a bus to Haiphong. We paid on the bus, the correct price, and then we were told we would have to pay to bring our bags on the bus... we began to wonder what we might have done to piss off the people of Vietnam so much. After a couple of hours we arrived at a bus station in the middle of nowhere and told that this was Haiphong – great. We were greeted by a group of motorcyclists, keen to rip us off. We headed in search of the town centre, cursing our Lonely Planet for not providing us with a map or some idea of what a taxi should cost. After an hour of wondering the wrong way and turning many Vietnamese heads, we bumped into a German who told us where we should be going and how much a taxi should cost. Lucky! We jumped into a taxi and were taken to the town centre, the driver practising his English on us along the way.
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