Vietnam - Hanoi area

Entering Hanoi and seeing the roads, I learned the true nature of bad driving and how Nash's Equilibrium theory does not always hold up when applied to traffic. They are crazy drivers in Vietnam. More crazy than any other country in the world I have visited (which is about 30). It is a mad house out there, and walking in the street can be quite harrowing. As my friend Janel described it, you don't just observe Vietnam, it actually comes out at you. In between being incessantly propositioned by tuk tuk drivers, and walking between densely packed crowds of people on a road filled with speeding scooters, it really drains you.

We spent a coupe of days in Hanoi, and walking around the lake in the old city is the nicest part of it, and feels like Vietnamese/French colonial fusion. Its the only place we saw that didn't put us in traffic fight-or-flight, and had some decent eateries and coffee shops. We saw a mediocre water puppet show, and checked out a couple of historical sights.

From Hanoi we checked out Halong bay and Thamkok, which were pretty awesome. In Thamkok we saw a couple of impressive historical buildings and went on a 2 hour boat ride, powered by 2 old ladies who paddled. The tranquil water was nice and we paddled under some impressive caves an past some cool looking karsts. In Halong bay we went on a two-day junk ride to check out some more natural cave formations and just enjoy the amazing scenery of the sea with hundreds of beautiful karsts rizing from them. There were about 10 other people on the junk with us, and it was nice to talk to some other people for a change. One of them was a geek from Austrailia, so that was nice. We both had books written by Greg Bear in our bags, which was a pretty cool coincidence. Geeks are the same the world over. Even though our mini-van played chicken several times with heavy trucks on the way back to town, after some relaxation breathing techniques we were mostly fine.