Vietnam - Hanoi

Today has been a very full and busy day. We had a delicious breakfast in our hotel, the service here has been first class and the staff cannot do enough to make our stay excellent. 

We met our guide at 8.30am and headed off to visit Train Street. This is a very narrow street where the people live right next to the train tracks. There are many coffee bars lining the tracks and when the train comes through about 8 times a day they have to make space for the train to pass through! You would never believe that a train passes through here, I cannot imagine this happening in the UK!!

After that we wandered around the food sellers lining the pavements of the old quarter. Our guide explained that the Vietnamese eat every part of an animal, and will eat anything - snakes, worms, snails, insects....There are chicken vendors where live chickens are contained in a wire basket, and you can select the chicken you want and the seller will kill it, feather it and cut it up and give you all the parts as they eat everything! I don't think I can eat chicken again for some time after seeing this....The fresh meat lying on the side of the road was very unappealing to me, tongue, offal, tails.... There were fried silk worms, live wriggly worms from the paddy fields and awful looking pig's intestines too.To be fair, there is plenty of food here and it seems everyone eats well and very healthily too. You do not see obese people here as they don't eat sugar, refined foods, wheat and everything they do eat is very fresh as they don't have refrigeration. If it is not sold it is given to the farmers for their livestock. The selection of fresh fruit and vegetables is wonderful and it all looks so green and of good quality. 

We went to look at the street that is full of Christmas decorations, I have never seen so many. Despite being a Buddhist country they celebrate Christmas here (only the non religious aspect of it) and there are decorations and Christmas trees on display in hotels and shops and Christmas carols being played - bizarre! 

We then went to a cafe that looks over the bridge built in 1902 by the French colonialists that spans the Red River. This area we are in falls within the Red River Delta, and in the south there is the Mekong River Delta. We were driven to a train station on the other side of the river and then caught the train back over the bridge, it was a fun experience. 

We did not have lunch today as we had no time as we wanted to go visit Quang Phu Cau, where they make the incense sticks. It was about 40km outside the city and took about an hour to get there. The greater metropolitan area of Hanoi has a population of about 20 million people! (although the city itself contains about 8 million people) Vietnam is one of the fastest growing economies in the world. We were impressed how everywhere you look people are working at some small industry, whether it is making hats from fan palm fronds, or incense sticks from bamboo, or farming their small piece of land. The family making incense showed us the process from cutting the larger bamboo sticks into thinner pieces (by hand with a sharp knife), then dyeing the sticks different colours and then dipping them in a blend of spices, mainly cinnamon. In extras I have some images of the undipped incense sticks on display.

We got back to the city about 4.30pm after a long day out. Tomorrow morning we leave very early for our flight to Cambodia. We are flying from Hanoi to Phonm Penh, and were surprised to find there is no direct flight between these two capital cities so we have to fly from Hanoi to Vientiane in Laos, and then connect on to Cambodia.

Apologies for the lack of comments on journals but it has been very busy over the past few days.