Vietnam - April 19 Singapore to Hanoi

Day 1 - Hanoi

Today was day one of what was going to be a fantastic experience of Vietnam. My brother David and myself had both booked to take part in Intrepid's "Scenic Vietnam" trip (http://www.intrepidtravel.com/trips/TVSR) which is 15 day tour from Hanoi all the way down to Ho Chi Minh City. The trip started the next day so today we had to get from Singapore to Hanoi then had a full day to explore.

After only getting 4 hours sleep both Dave and myself got to the airport for our 8am flight from Singapore to Hanoi. Since I now class myself as a local of Singapore we took the MRT to the airport which arrives at terminal 2. From terminal 2 we took the skytrain to terminal 3 where I thought our flight departed from.....

Upon reaching terminal 3 and noticing there was no Tiger Airways flights on the screens we decided to do what every man dreads and asked the information counter for directions. Probably a good thing we did because it turns out Changi Airport has a budget terminal / shed that our flight would be departing from. After a mad rush back to Terminal 2 and to the basement to catch a bus we finally made it to the budget terminal with plenty of time left before our flight.

Since it was David's first trip to Singapore we had a traditional Singapore breakfast of Kaya Toast, eggs and Kopi. For those who don't know Kaya is a spread made with eggs, sugar and coconut milk. To eat the eggs you dip the toast into it (similar to Soldiers). Kopi is the coffee here in Singapore which is coffee with condensed milk.

You can order coffee with evaporated milk (Kopi-C), coffee without milk (Kopi-O) but it can just get all to confusing with the C's and O's. After a great breakfast we got called up ready to board our 3 hour Tiger Airways flight to Hanoi.

We arrived in Hanoi airport and after waiting 30 minutes for them to process my Visa on arrival we were out the door. We straight away got a taxi which the sign said cost 300,000 dong to get into Hanoi (300,000 dong is about $15 AUD). The taxi trip took about an hour to get to our destination where the dodgy taxi driver then demanded a tip. So being the nice guys we are we gave him a 100,000 dong tip ($5 aud) he then proceeded to ask for more. So another 100,000 dong later and we had our luggage from the boot of the taxi and we were at the hotel.

After checking into the hotel we decided to walk around Hanoi to get to know the area. It was then we came face to face with the excitement of crossing the road. For those that have never experienced Vietnam traffic does not really obey the pedestrian crossings. Instead you have to pray to your god, ensure your bladder is drained, close your eyes and slowly walk across the road. Somehow after doing this we managed to get to the other side without being hit by hundreds of scooters.

About 4pm we decided that our breakfast of Kaya Toast wasn't enough so we found a restaurant that sold Beef Pho (Rice noodles with Beef). After the waiter laughing at our order of Beef Pho, Vietnamese Coffee and a beer we had lunch in front of us. The Pho didn't have much flavour and as we found out later you are meant to add chilli to it. The beer however was great and out of Saigon and Hanoi we determined Hanoi was our favourite local beer.

After lunch we hit the town to do a small pub crawl. The first stop was a little cafe that had free Wifi which was probably the only good thing going for it. After waiting 20 minutes for 2 beers I did the fake walkout where I pretended to grab my bag and stand up. That finally got the staff moving to bring us the beers we ordered. Our next stop after that was a bar that served Shisha that Dave had found on a website.

We eventually found this bar with the help of Google Maps on the iPhone. The bar was pretty empty but after examining the menu we ordered beer and Shisha. I was wanting to order a non-alcoholic cocktail but to my suprise the Vietnamese think that Blue Curacao is non-alcoholic

We spent the rest of the night there eventually migrating from beers to bourbons (Dave's idea).