Our first day in Ha Noi - We got up abit late today but once up we headed straight for some food. We started heading towards the lake and found a little Mexican place so stopped and had there lunch time meal deal, bargain. Kara had Fajitas & James had an Australian Steak. After replenishing ourselves we had a walk to the lake which was bigger than I expected for the middle of a city.

We then just so happened to stumble across a M.A.C shop so I had to go in! It made my day… :-)

Around the corner was a big posh shopping mall - I didn't even want to go in, I have no room in my bag this is very sad :-( it sold Louis Vuitton, Cartier, basically anything expensive and designer.

After walking around the centre we decided to walked up to the old quarters to the market. It was crazy, the roads in Vietnam are the busiest we've seen 99% mopeds, with cars and buses trying to squeeze there way through the pack of bikes. Crossing the road is nearly impossible, I feared for my life on several occasions and kind of come to the realisation that I am most likely going to get run over at some point in Vietnam.

After almost 1/2 hour of trying to stay alive and pushing our way past locals just sat in the middle of the pavement we made it to the market, which was 10 times busier. Needless to say we were in & out of there in just a couple of minutes! The locals seem to deal with the chaos by just stepping out and going for it, whereas in the market they just push past with no care in the world.

We then had to face another death defying walk back. We decided to stop at Ha Noi prison on the way to take a look around (it is of course no longer in use, so no prisoners inside!) but it was still pretty creepy. It was used in the Vietnam war and it probably didn't help they were playing eery music.

We were almost done looking around and they started to lock up, fearing we would get locked in over night (as I very much doubt they would check the place is empty, it strikes me as that kind of place). We dashed into the souvenir shop then made a run for it. It was dark by the time we finally came out so headed back to the Bluebell to freshen up.

I had looked up a Gastro pub called Moose & Roo so we decided to go here to eat, Everything is pretty close so we just walked. Wasn't hard to find luckily. I managed to have another lovely glass of wine, I am definitely on a roll with this.

The food was awesome, James finally had pork belly for the first time since we have been away, this made him happy. After food it was still quite early but we went to a bar just down the road called Rock store. We ordered 2 tiger beers and didn't realise that they were 2 4 1 for the next hour, absolute winner! We we ended up having about 8 beers for like £4. Happy days.

We stayed here for quite a while then I remembered there was a bar we saw on the way that I wanted to try. It was on the walk back to the hotel so we popped in. It was on the 5th floor and over looked the main square so we managed to take some awesome go pro pics! It is however very cold in Ha Noi and as we only packed for heat we got very cold! After 1 beer we headed back to the hotel for our first nights kip in Vietnam, the beds in Vietnam are all very hard from what I have heard and our hotels was no exception to this. We have got a day planned of exploring tomorrow so check out for our latest update tomorrow.

J&K over and out!