Good morning Vietnam (and wild hanoi)

11/27 Flew from Luang Prabang, Laos to Hanoi Vietnam, a city that turns 1000 in 2010. Checked into a really sweet hostel in the Old Quarter and then walked around Hanoi. Hanoi is a crazy and awesome city. Perhaps my favorite in Asia thus far. It's very alive and happening and has felt the most "asian" of the places I've been. Maybe b/c hollywood is always doing vietnam or chinese (n. vietnam has a large chinese influence) movies so that's what we think of. But all the ladies in the street are walking around wearing the conical hats and carrying their wares over their shoulder on bamboo poles with straw baskets. There are locals out on all the steet courners eating noodles (pho) and bia hoi (pints of on tap beer hanoi for the huge sum of 15 cents). The streets were filled with people walking, cyclos (the 3 wheeled push bikes used to cart people around), old chinese bicycles, and of course hordes of motorbikes. One of the things I really liked about the city was that there was not a so-called tourist ghetto like khao san in bangkok. Here the tourist stuff was intermingled with the everyday lives of the local vietnamese. Whereas in bangkok you had to walk a bit to get to a place that wasn't entirely there b/c of tourists, in Hanoi it was right outside your hostel. And the city was so alive and happening and abuzz, which was a huge contrast from Cambodia and Laos. And it wasn't some giant nasty city either, it was sort of cute with nice boulevards, lots of lakes and parks, and tree-lined narrow streets.
The traffic in the city was purely insane. They say saigon is worse, though I didn't have much time to experience it there. But anyways, there are about 7 million people in Hanoi and somewhere around 5 million motorbikes. As someone said, hanoians eat, sleep, and dream on motorbikes. There's not really any road rules and the roads are so packed with motorbikes, people, and bicycles that it's a wonder that the traffic moves, but it does of course. Traffic supposedly drives on the right side of the road in vietnam, but in the city, it doesn't matter what side you drive on. Motorbikes are on the right side, in the middle, on the left side, using the sidewalk, anywhere. At 4-way intersections, there's really no stopping or traffic lights. Instead all 4 sides just go into it. They dodge, swerve, and ultimately find their way through to the other side. You've seen those movies that show the mess of pedestrians on sidewalks in downtown NYC where they are bumping into each other, swerving out of the way, etc. Well this was how the roads in hanoi were except with motorbikes, bicycles, and pedestrians (lots of sidewalks are so crammed with motorbike parking that you just have to walk in the road). The amazing thing though is that the motorbike drivers are so skilled and adept at swerving around and through traffic that I never once witnessed an accident. Some near misses, well everything appeared to be a near miss, but no accidents. The other thing that's interesting is that they seem to have unlimited patience with each other. They never get upset if they have to do a hard swerve or sudden break, or at anyone going the wrong direction. The only time that they get angry is that if they are at a rare stoplight that is obeyed and someone isn't already moving into the intersection before the light turns green. In hanoi they have the stoplights with the countdowns that tell you how long until the next green or red light. So when it's a red light and the countdown is down to 4, you better be going, which means of course, the other side still has about 3 seconds left of green. But again no accidents.
Another fun, and at first scary experience is crossing the roads in hanoi. There are crosswalks, but they are just a waste of paint. You can't wait until there is a break in traffic b/c that definitely won't happen until perhaps at 3 in the morning. So what you do is just start walking into the street, sort of blindly. Taylor the canadian I had travelled with in burma told me that you just have to go and if you hesitate, then that is when you'll be hit b/c they are trying to predict your moves. Now I had a leg up on most tourists here b/c I had been dealing with asian traffic and street crossing for a year now. It is usually does involved walking into the road with the traffic going, just going one lane at time. When one lane clears, you cross it, then stand on the divider line as traffic whizzes by until the next lane clears up, and then you go across. But hanoi was even more intense b/c instead of 4 lanes with 4 lines of traffic to cross, you had 4 lanes with 20 motorbikes across, swerving, going the wrong direction, etc. But it's true, you just walk out there slowly and keep moving, and they swerve around you. It's crazy to see the little kids (like 5 years old) doing this, or the women with the long bamboo poles taking up a much greater width doing it, or the old grannies that can hardly walk in the first place. I loved watching the traffic there. It was so crazy. When I was eating noodles at an intersection ones, I watched a western couple attempt to cross the street. It took them 20 minutes to attempt to cross the street before they ended up hiring a motorbike to take them across. But you just got to go and they'll miss you.

11/28 With my shortened time left before my trip ended and in an attempt to see as much as possible I would be doing a couple of tours out of hanoi. I usually try to avoid these, b/c they are never as good as doing it by yourself on your own time, but I was short on time, so I needed the quick day type tours instead of arranging going to the place myself, sleeping there and then touring it. So instead of going to Ninh Bin to visit Tom Coc I would just do the day trip, and instead of going to Cat Ba island to tour halong bay from there, I would be doing a 3 day trip out of hanoi that made a stop there.
So today I took a day trip to Tom Coc, known as Halong Bay on rice paddies. On the way we stopped at a few temples back from the time when China controlled vietnam. Once we arrived in the Tom Coc area we took a couple hour bike through a cool canyon. Then we boarded a little boat that fits two people rowed by a vietnamese woman and were rowed for several hours through a cool limestone canyon on a little river that included going through 4 cave tunnels. Very gorgeous and serene ride.