Monkey's ahoy!

Thursday 4th November

Having slept for about 16 hours when we arrived I was feeling pretty good again! I had cleverly left one of our backpacks in the restaurant that we ate in when we arrived, I blame sleep deprivation but its more likely to be my general abscent mindedness if I am honest. Luckily they still had it the next day so yet another disaster averted for now, I just need to find them a little gift to say thank you!

Hanoi is a sprawling metropolis, slightly more touristy than the cities that we visited in China but with a great atmosphere to boot.

If Beijing is the city of bicycles then Hanoi can definately claim to be the city of mopeds, they are quite literally everywhere and they seem to be used in all facets of life, from transporting goods ranging from large crates to dead cows and for ferrying whole famalies around. There doesnt seem to be a limit to what you can fit on them and as health and safety seems to rank pretty low in all of asia they try to push the boundries of their capability as much as possible.

In order to cross any street you literally just have to take a very deep breath and plunge forward, the traffic instantly seperates around you so that you become your very own island. However, as everyone knows, mopeds have a tendancy of crashing into islands so its definately not a good idea to hang about and you can see signs of accidents everywhere you go.

When we had booked our hotel the facilities included a free big breakfast which as we have now discovered translates into two slices of small bread and a splodge of unidentifiable jam substance. Still elsewhere the food has been exceptional, we ate in one of the street cafes on seats that were too small for Tyler and tables that all of us had to stoop down towards in order of having a hope of getting food near our mouths.
The whole bill came to less than 4 pounds and that included 4 beers and a couple of cokes!

As I am writing this we are nestled up in a wooden hut on Monkey Island a small beach resort carved into one of the 3000 Cat Ba islands within Ha Long bay. The place is the permanent residence of 16 people and offers accomodation that caters for about 20 - 30 tourists.

The island has everything you could need, from volley ball and football right through to vietmanese Karaoke and old vietmanese gentlemen offering you a share of their bongs, which although I politely declined still seemed mighty nice of them.

Pauline and a few of the other guests took a kayak out to an adjacent island yesterday and watched the monkeys stealing all of the tourists valuables. Tyler and I had been there earlier in the day and the place was deserted so we were gutted to have missed it, however we have extended our stay by a day so hopefully will catch them later.

Prior to this we had spent our first night on a junk sailing through the bay, visiting the caves and kayaking which was great fun. Unfortunately we still havent run into any other families as yet to keep Tyler amused. By now his repatuare of jokes is wearing pretty thin but everyone seems to humour him and his delivery is definately improving somewhat.