Hanoi-ing Chinese Torture.

 

Hanoi! Pronounced Han OI! is the capital of Vietnam and with a population of over 3 million it's a bustling place full of street hawkers, motorbikes, cyclos, and all the sights and smells you could imagine. It also was home to one Chinese Embassy where we had to get our Chinese visa before our next leg of the journey - more on that later - put it this way, it was a major pain in the wotsits. Here's an example of what you can expect walking down a street in Hanoi:

You wouldn't want to be in a rush anywhere. One thing you learn early on in Vietnam is that the footpaths aren't used for walking - their used for selling goods, parking motorbikes, drinking beer, or even burning fake money (if business has been bad recently), but not walking. That's what the roads are for - so you weave in and out of trucks, cars, motorbikes, and cyclos (bicycle propelled carriages) to get to your destination.

You also share the streets with the street vendors (usually women) who carry around weighing-scale type baskets on their shoulder selling fruit, veg, and all types of assortments (from chestnuts to snails!). It's very handy - you could sit around all day and people would come up to you selling stuff. Anybody for a hat?

 

They didn't have my size.

Now I must mention the food. I wouldn't really be one for making a pig of myself but when you see the likes of this you can't help yourself...

Well done Pig. There's a few ducks there aswell. The food in Vietnam is absolutely fantastic. I quickly became addicted to a beef noodle soup called Pho Bo (Bo being the Vietnamese for beef - same as home!). It's so good!! Hot bowls of soupy noodles with tender beef, coriander, chopped chili, and bean sprouts. All for about a 2 dollars - needless to say, happy days. However, you do need an open mind some of the time. Check out the items you can find on a Vietnamese menu:

If you can't make it out you can find Fried Tortoise with Salt, along with Oyster roasted with grease and onion. I'm sure you'll have no problem figuring out what's wrong with this picture:

And we're not talking about the crab.

The only real downside to Hanoi was something that had been on our minds for a while. Namely getting in to China. We knew when we were organising our trip that the Olympics would be held in Beijing near the end of August so we purposely held off visiting China until the end of them. However, we didn't foresee the Chinese government changing the laws to make it extremely hard for people to get visas to visit their country from outside their own country. We did a lot of research about getting our visa all the way through Vietnam and basically it was all doom and gloom. Unless you were in your home country, there was no way a visa was being issued. The most you could do was get stamped confirmation from your hotel or hotels for every day you plan to stay in China, as well as your flight info and present it to the embassy. If they didn't like the look of you or you were improperly dressed, then tough luck. If you weren't at the embassy at least an hour before it opened, then there was no chance. People running businesses out of China were being refused visas so we were disheartened. Still, no guts no glory. We got to the embassy in Hanoi with every stamp and piece of documentation we could think of. We got there over an hour before it opened to see a queue of people waiting. Luckily an English couple at the top of the queue told us that we wouldn't be let in with flip flops so I left Su in the queue to hold our place while I grabbed the nearest motorbike taxi back to our hotel to get appropriate footwear. 20 minutes later we had our runners on an over three hours later (in stifling heat) we got in to make our application. All very nerve racking as we were supposed to be leaving on the Monday and the soonest we could find out about our visa was the Friday (the embassy being closed at the weekend). We got to the embassy even earlier on the Friday morning and....

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Yayyyy! We got it! No surprise really as I'm sure most of ye know that we've been in China for a while. As you can see we celebrated with a bowl of Pho and a beer. Breakfast of champions!

Well, that's it - we checked out of our hotel on the Monday and splashed out on a cyclo to get our bus to the airport:

Gotta say, we'll miss Vietnam and will be back at some stage. Such a great place!!! Look at the poor fella having to push me and my bag along in the cyclo. That's all leg power as well. Well done that man!