Hanoi Rocks

And here is some wikipedia info for those who don't know the band called Hanoi Rocks.

As the most clever ones of you might have guessed from the topic I'm in Vietnam at the moment. I flew to Hanoi from Hong Kong and yes, I skipped China's mainland. Why? Well my flow didn't guide me there. It told me to haul my ass to south east Asia instead.
I haven't been quite so active on updating my blog recently so this happened already a month ago. I applied for 3 month multiple entry visa to Vietnam just to make things as easy as  possible. So If I feel like popping in to Laos or Cambodia and then return to Vietnam it is possible. And so far I have felt like it but I'm gonna tell about that later on.

"Good morning Vietnam!"

What to tell about my time in Hanoi? To be honest I was only waiting for my flow to tell me something. Basically I spent my days just by walking around the city teaching locals some English. I'm not kidding here. As soon as you sat on a bench somewhere in Hanoi it took about 2 minutes to be surrounded by local university students who wanted to practise their English with me.
Well I got no problems with that so I spent some time with these kids. Sometimes I felt like Jesus surrounded by his disciples. I also tried quite hard to find Cuban cigars but it proved to be quite a task. I thought that I would be easy since both countries are communistic but boy was I wrong. When I finally found a place which sold those fantastic cancer sticks the prices started from 35€ a stick.
I decided to be happy without 'em.

Me and some of my students.

The hostel I stayed in had a really interesting daily happy hour. Free beer for one hour as much as you feltlike drinking. There's always a catch. This time it was the beer itself. Bia Hoi is the most disgusting beer I have ever tasted but it seemed to be okay for the majority of the 20 year old backpackers :) I chose to be a big spender and to spent the whole 0,8€ for a proper half a litre beer. I know, I'm loaded!
Every now and the they served a way more interesting stuff in the hostel's bar. Snake alcohol! I'm quite glad I've tasted that Vietnamese treat.
I remember this one Canadian guy go quite heavily with Bia Hoi and after couple of hours he was trying to sleep in my dorm even though he shared a private room with his girl friend. Heheee, the guy was wasted. The biggest rip off that I've heard also happened to him. He went to gym by foot but decided to take a ride back from a local scooter dude whom are everywhere trying to offer rides. The guy ended up paying 700k Dongs which is 27€. The same ride with official taxi would have been around 1€. Well you got to make mistakes to learn...

Look at that beauty! The alcohol is from that vase. I don't
know how long the snakes have been soaking in that
alcohol and I didn't ask. 

Beer!

 So after a week or so my flow was ready to tell me what to do or some might call it destiny. The thing you do in Vietnam is to drive from south to north or vice versa with your own bike. Well I used to have my own bike back in Finland so this was like a calling to me. I met this guy called Lee and two Danish girls and they were also gonna buy bikes and head south. "Well, lets make it a convoy!"- I said and so there was a group of four people heading for bike shopping. Lee had done some research from where to buy bikes and we headed to that place and found this really friendly Vietnamese shop with four bikes, all the extra stuff like helmets, maps, luggage racks and so on but the thing that basically made the deal was the free beer! Imagine that. You buy a bike for 190€ after some haggling and you still get a free beer. (worth probably 0,2€ from the mini market).

Me, the Danes and Lee enjoying our FREE BEERS! Of course
we first needed to buy a bike but then it was FREE BEER!
(one for each)

I tested all the four bikes and there was some minor things with each of them like headlamps not working and oil to be changed and so on. The owner promised to take care of everything before we come to pick up the bikes. Me and the Danes were heading to Halong bay before leaving Hanoi on our bikes. So we had our bikes and they were gonna be fixed before the pick up so life was smiling for us. Happy days!

Next day we headed to Halong bay cruise which appeared to be a party cruise of which I had no clue what so ever when I booked the cruise. When I realised that I'm going on a party cruise I was like wtf and started to be really sarcastic about it. I mean I tried to be sarcastic because after the cruise I told one girl about how I didn't know what I had booked and she was really surprised. She had thought that I was just all the time really, I mean REALLY, excited about the cruise :D Well you can't win every time. The scenery was nice though!

Yep, it is a party cruise...

On the "cruise ship".

Halong Bay

Yay! Happy days!

It is beautiful indeed.