Vietnam part 1 (K) - Hanoi and surrounds

First stop the capital city, Hanoi. I'm a fan, although it's pretty busy so you have to work up to crossing the road. Once you go, the traffic - mostly motorbikes as there's a 200% tax on cars - just swarms round you. My top tip is to use a local as a kind of human shield. Food is good - ranging from the fancy places aimed at tourists, expats and the better-off locals: like Brothers cafe with their all you can eat for $11 buffet - they didn't make much profit the day I showed up; or Fanny's ice cream parlour - with so many delicious flavours, where we ate by candlelight as the electricity was off - I offered to help eat their melting stock -but I think they had a back-up for the freezers - to the street vendors of spring rolls and pho noodle soup with their tiny plastic chairs on the road side, and cheap and cheerful beer hoi at 10p a glass. It was at one of the latter that we bumped into friends I hadn't seen for years (Dan and Sarah) - it truly is a small world out there.

After checking out the lakes and temples of old Hanoi, as well as the striking yet strangely uninformative Ho Chi Minh museum (it wasn't all about the food), we took a trip out to Halong Bay on a wooden junk. Us and about 10 thousand other tourists judging by the chaos on the dockside and the hundreds of boats around. The bay is full of strangely shaped limestone stacks and rocks and one large island , Cat Ba, where we stayed one night plus a night on our boat. We visited monkeys, who will steal anything vaguely foodlike about your person; went to the Surprising Cave (I still don't know what the surprise was, but it's pretty big and has lots of rocks that look like dragons, birds, Buddha, etc. if you squint and use a lot of imagination); passed the brightly painted floating houses of the local fishermen, some of whom row with their feet; did some kayaking in the calm waters, and learned a new party game: "penny up the bum". I'll leave you to guess what the rules are, but we were relieved to find that you keep your clothes on for it.

Before we headed south, I managed another day trip out - to the perfume pagoda. This is actually a cave in which a buddhist temple has been set up. You get there by a restful (expect for the woman rowing) hour-long boat trip down the river and then walk or cable-car up a hill. We saw some local fisherman. Their favoured technique is to insert electrodes into the water and electrocute the fish en masse. I assume they wear rubber-soled shoes for this.