Arrival to Hanoi

Day 109

Hanoi

After the whole night trip without sleeping, we were droped as usual, in the middle of nowhere, at 5 am in the morning and with 10C outside. After Hue, flip flops and the pretty pleasant weather, around +25C we got to this freezing cold, wet and unfriendly capital city :-D

Soon couple of taxi drivers came to pick us up and take to some hotel, they knew. They asked for 200,000 dong (around 9 euros) for the ride and we were not sure to take it or not (not because of money, because taxi drivers have bad reputation in Hanoi). Finally we agreed to go, when the taxi driver said it will be 100,000 dong. We told him some hotel from Lonely planet and he took us there, for around 15 minutes ride the taxi meter was showing 45,000 dong. No doubt, when we tried to pay him according to taxi meter, he went mad, started to screem and tell that we have agreed for 100,000 dong. We paid 100,000 just to avoid the mess....Welcome to Ha Noi!.

Since at 6 am all hotels and bars in the area were closed, we went to some street local bar, which is so common in Vietnam for it's one and only popular dish - Pho. It is a soup, that contains meat and vegetables, which you chose yourself. It wasn't bad! :-D


It was a cold cloudy day in Hanoi. We checked couple of hotels and finally took one which was looking OK, a triple room for us and Luciano. Zoe, Amy and the rest of the group were taken to other hotel, which apparently wasn't so bad after all :-D

Next thing we needed to do is to book a trip to Halong Bay. There couple of options all tourist agencies offer you:

• 2 days 1 night trip - the night on the board of the boat
• 3 days, 2 nights - both nights on board
• 3 days 2 nights - one night on board in Halong Bay and one night on the Catba island, with trecking included
• and all of these trips are divided on Standard, VIP, super VIP, DELUX etc
  

The prices we got started from 35 USD/2 days 1 night trip to 100 USD for DELUX 2 night trip. We chose one VIP option, for 2 days 1 night and bargained from 65 USD/trip to 45USD/trip + free beer and breakfast in our hotel haha

After that, with Lonely planet, we did a walking tour and of course did not lose the opportunity to have a BIA Hoi :-))



Finally we needed to book a ticket to Sapa. Train tickets were already sold, so we bought night bus tickets and it wasn't a sleeper (sleeper buses don't go to Sapa, due to bad road :-((

Later this evening we went around city center (the pic below is not a whore house, it's actually a bridge to the temple :-)