I arrived in Hanoi having spent most of the night crossing the border into Vietnam. The border crossing consisted of two checks; a Chinese one and a Vietnamese one. These took place in or around Pingxiang and meant that I was up until about 02:00 having my bags scanned and passport checked.

Once I was in Hanoi, I left the train station to find that it was a lot smaller than I was anticipating and that I had to navigate the maze of taxis and taxi drivers in order to get to my hostel. It was about 05:30 and after asking the Vietnamese girl I had shared a compartment with what a reasonable price was, I got in one taxi with another customer. We arrived at the hostel and instead of using the meter (like we had agreed), the driver wanted another 20,000 VND, i.e.: about 1 US dollar. I had heard a lot of stories about taxi drivers attempting to rip you off, so I got him to wait whilst I got one of the hostel staff to sort the problem out. Eventually he agreed to go by the amount on the meter and I got into the hostel un-scathed. Apparently, according to the person who had sorted the problem out, it had not been an official taxi and could have quite easily driven me around for about an hour and expected 1,000,000 VND. This had happened to someone else and they had paid it.

Instead of waiting for my hostel to check me in, I decided to go any try and get my Vietnamese visa extended. As I had been about 2 weeks late entering the country, I only had about 2 weeks left on the visa before it expired. In the interests of staying independent, I tried to do this myself. The address the bloke the in the hostel had given me was wrong and I spent most of the morning wandering around trying to find the right place. After asking a lot of different people, I eventually found it and they had gone to lunch. After getting lunch myself (and trying Bia Hoi!), I went back and was told that I could only extend the visa if I came back to the same office in Hanoi on the date that the original visa expired. Then I would get 2 more weeks, or I could pay an agency to do it and get what I wanted, which was an extra month. This I did and 40 US Dollars later I had my extension applied for.

I changed hostel whilst I was in Hanoi, as the first one was far too loud and was meant more as a nightclub than somewhere where you could talk to people and make travel plans. In moving hostel, I met Sebastian, who I had played at pool in Nanning. We agreed to go to Cat Ba a few days later and amused ourselves individually in the meantime.

Things I got up to:

• going to the Vietnamese revolution museum
• going to the Vietnamese women’s museum
• going to Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum and museum
• going to Hoa Lo prison museum
• watching the water puppets (very good)
• watching an arty film in an independent cinema-type club
• other bits and pieces.

I enjoyed Hanoi but was ready to move on after about 4 days. This I did with Sebastian, to Cat Ba.