Hanoi

We made it!!! We endured our longest night bus and arrived the next day with no sleep and smelling rather stinky.  We checked into our hotel and had a sleep before venturing out for lunch.  We booked ourselves onto a street food tour (on a recommendation from a guy we met on our cooking course in Hoi An) for that night and spent some time looking at travel agencies to arrange a Halong Bay tour.  In the afternoon we did some research on Halong Bay tours and they all seemed like we were set to be ripped off unless we paid huge amounts of money to go on an expensive tour.  We also wanted to spend some time in Cat Ba but none of the tours could leave us in Cat Ba.  We read that it is easy to tour Halong Bay from Cat Ba so the decision was made to go to a Cat Ba which is easy to get to from Hanoi.  After this monumental decision was made I had another nap in preparation for our street food tour.  

The tour had seven stops and we tried nine different dishes/drinks.  My favourite stop was the spring rolls - we had three different types! And I don't mean three different fillings, but three different styles.  I also really enjoyed my egg coffee.  Vietnam has only recently begun to have dairy products in their diets so back in the day they had to use substitutes. In my egg coffee was an egg yolk that I had to mix up and it made the coffee thick and frothy. At the end of our tour we decided to pay for the water puppet show - bad mistake.  Firstly, it was not in English so we had no idea what was going on.  Secondly, the singing was like a dying cat screeching it's lungs out.  The best part of the show - the end! Luckily it was only a 50min performance.

Day two we took ourselves on a walking tour of Hanoi.  We started with the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum complex but unfortunately Ho was in Russia getting his annual touch up so we were unable to see him.  We saw the presidential palace (from a distance - we weren't able to get too close!), and Ho's stilt house and the museum.  

From here we walked to the Temple of Literature which was cool as there were loads of students graduating that day.  

We had lunch in the Old Quarter before walking past St Joesph Cathedral on our way to the Hanoi Hilton (actually called the Hoa Lo Prison). American POWs nicknamed it the Hilton as they were kept here once captured by the Viet Cong.  Originally the prison was built by the French to inprison Vietnamese that rose above the French Colonial rule.  

We had a walk around the lake before trying a street food stall recommended in Lonely Planet.  For dinner that night we decided just to wander around and we came across a BBQ style restaurant where you cook your own meat.  It was really fun and something different for us to try. 

The next morning we had an early start to catch our bus and ferry to Cat Ba.