After a lengthy travel from The Czech Republic via Vienna, Austria and Paris, France, we have finally arrived to Hanoi. Our long travels started when an offer to take us to Vienna, Austria was altered at the very last moment to an offer to take us to the nearest train station to take an international train to Vienna. If you want a little advise then don’t make any part of your plans dependent on other people who are artists. These artists, seems to me, don’t very often think like normal people. In our case they were Tanja’s acquaintances from some symposium and they reassured us several times that it was no problem to take us to Vienna. Tanja politely asked over the phone and then when we finally arrived to their house, that we could take a train, pointing out it was too early in the morning. She was reassured that it was no problem until we arrived to their home, after already dragging our baggage through two different local intercity busses… When we were finally there and to be really polite Tanja asked again if it was OK and that there should be trains going to Vienna, what we heard we could hardly believe: “Yeah, OK, maybe it is too late for us, so take the train guys.”! I could have my best friend to take us there, maybe even to pick us up so that we wouldn’t have to drag all the stuff into any busses either, but try asking such a favor at 8PM. Anyway, after two hours in train and changing trains we had to spend almost 9 hours on the Vienna airport before we could board our plain. By the time we boarded it it already felt like we’ve been on our way for 24 hours (which was really not too far off). Two hours to Paris, another four hour wait on the airport and eleven hours in the air. Then finally, full of anticipation we could set our foot on Vietnam soil.

When we landed a new year was being celebrated throughout the whole country and so we were offered a cheaper rate for a room in our first hotel as we were apparently their first customers in the new year. “Cheaper” here still meant USD10 for a room. Tanja liked the offer and I was not against staying there as the hotel advertised to belong to a chain of Sinh Café offices – a company that I only had the best experiences with during my last year’s visit. Only few days later we were to learn that this must be some kind of a scam running in Hanoi as there is apparently only one real Sinh Café booking office in each of the major tourist cities in Vietnam and we saw many hotels advertising Sinh Café somewhere on their entrance. We’ll talk about this later in some other article.

So on the day we landed we had a shower and a good sleep over the afternoon and then we went for our first stroll through central Hanoi. The streets were full of used fire cracker remains from the few days before, full of people and with most of the shops closed. We walked to a big natural lake and then to an artificial lake close to our hotel, tested our first samples of Vietnamese food, bought a 17 dollar copy of a 400 dollar brand backpack for Tanja as she needed one to replace her less travel friendly suitcase and visited a few temples on the way. So far Hanoi was not exactly the beautiful city I was expecting it to be. We would have to discover the old city the next day or I will have to do it by myself when I have more time after Tanja will leave me here alone (she has to be home earlier).

At the end of the day we agreed to buy a return open tour ticket to the south of Vietnam and back and hop on the bus the following day in the evening. So we paid USD60 each for the return way with what I thought was Sinh Café. We were looking forward to traveling with these guys, stopping at the more interesting places along the way. Well, we were about to have different type of adventure… (see “Traveling on an Open Tour” next).