Hanoi and around

Vietnam is a nation of early risers - and I'm talking roughly 5am throughout the week, and I was surprised to discover that this trend continues in the north where it is much cooler and less humid than the south. As a result, Ben and I have been setting alarms for between 6 and 7.30am every day for at least the last week. Therefore, we took the opportunity to have a lie in in Hanoi, and a lazy day mainly involving, breakfast, lunch, a relaxed stroll around the pretty lake in the Old Quarter, dinner and beers. Fantastic! In the evening we ventured to the 'famous' water puppets.... Girls - you did not miss much!

In line with our recent excursions, we decided to rent (yet another) motorbike to explore the area around Hanoi, in particular the small handicraft villages in the nearby countryside. We visited a ceramics village (Ba Trang), a silk village (Van Phuc) and a SNAKE village (Le Mat) - but cowered when offered live snake for lunch. (Gross) highlight of the day was happening upon a local village's lunchtime cock-fighting session, where about 100 men were gathered around the small ring watching the cocks fight. As the only girl there, I moonlighted as the main attraction for the first 5 minutes after our arrival, but then things carried on as normal, wagers were placed and the local kids jostled to get in my camera shot. An interesting, if distasteful, stop on our journey...

Unfortunately, our last day in Hanoi did not go as planned, largely because Ho Chi Minh does not receive visitors on a Friday and we had not spotted this in our guidebook... We toured his house on stilts (not that impressive, for the record - but apparently this shows how he was a 'man of the people') and then headed for lunch, a massage and some Bia Hoi. In the end, not a bad way to spend our last day in Vietnam!

In other news, we have had our Tibetan permits issued and they are (hopefully) winging their way to Chengdu as I type - we will hopefully be meeting them there sometime before Monday and then heading to Tibet on Tuesday for 10 days. I'll be back to blogging by email while in China, so apologies in advance for the poor formatting!