Hello Hanoi

A Forward to Today's Blog Post
from Ianto Ware

Hello,
The Baron has asked me to post today's blog post for her because she was unable to do so from the computers accessible to her in Vietnam. Let me take this opportunity to provide a brief synopsis of the following text;

In today's post she depicts her arrival in Vietnam, which involved a somewhat tumultuous taxi trip before moving onto the quintessential themes contained in earlier posts - Laura going out and getting drunk and having adventures whilst Ashley goes home and has a nap. Notably, she does not provide any pictures of her wearing her much talked about Credit Agricole cycling cap, despite large scale public pressure. There are two probable reasons for this. Firstly, she is ashamed of showing herself wearing a pro-cycling promotional garment after giving me so much shit over the years for wearing bike clothes. Secondly, she is building the suspense before finally producing a mass of pictures. Let's hope it's the second.
Also, there are a number of typographical and spelling errors in the below post. I include these so as to retain the original sense of 'character' behind Ashley's writing.

Oh, also. Today is Ashley's birthday. Happy Birthday Baron!
yours,
Ianto Ware


so after a leisurely half a day of sitting outsidereading our books and sipping on chocolate shakes, weheaded to phnom penh airport - some of the craziestairport security i've seen in that you're not allowedinside the airport without a ticket... anyway, foundme some australian cadbury chocolate in the duty freeshop, which was awesome before our flight to hanoi,stopping briefly at the airport in laos.. which isnext on my list of places i want to go, although notjust because of the quality of the airport shops...landed in hanoi, where once again someone was waitingwith a sign with my name on it. piled into the vanwith one other guy who i think was vietnamese. thedriver had a mobile call so apologised to us beforetaking the call, and actually sat in the carpark whileon the phone without starting the car. "wow" i'mthinking "what a sensible driver" fatal lastthoughts.the traffic system of cambodia ie everyone do what youwant and try not to hit anyone else, has just aboutreached breaking point with the far higher levels oftraffic in hanoi. plus the ratio of car to bike hasgone back in favour of the cars, which seems to makethe critical difference, from goodwilled workabletraffic to horn blasting nightmare traffic.it appears that there is a special language of trafficin hanoi. on the highway in from the airport, theleft lane was largely reserved for the motorbikes andslow trucks, while the right hand lane was for thecars, fourwheeldrives etc. therefore when our driverwanted to overtake someone he would indicate (inspiteof the fact that there was a barrier stopping him fromactually changing lanes into the oncoming traffic) hewould then tailgate the car in front, whilst honkinghis horn repeatedly and flashing his lights -presumambly the car in front is supposed to find a gapin the endless trail of motorbikes and swap into thatlane, allowing our driver to progress one more carspace and do it to the next car...once in a while, just to mix things up a bit, ourdriver would overtake someone using the other lane...naturally no indicators were required for this pieceof manouvering...the honking of horns appears to be used to mean"you're in my way" as well as "you're not in my way atthe moment so just stay over there while i take youover" and "i'm about to enter an intersection withoutlooking to see if theres any traffic coming so stayout of my way" and "i'm about to break a road rule" aswell as "hey look at me i'm going real fast" and just"hey look at me". basically what this means is thatthere is so much continuous honking that no oneactually pays any attention to any of it. its a lotscarier crossing the road here than it was incambodia. anyway, we made it to the hotel, and up the manyflights of stairs to our 5th floor room, beforeheading out to a nearby cafe where we'd told somefriends of lauras we would be in they were free - itwas their last night after spending about a monthtravelling through cambodia, vietnam and laos.i'll leave it laura to give you the details of thatnight, except to say that when they were all startingtheir third cocktail, i bailed and went home to bedNYE all over again...lets just say that when laura came home she wasntoverly well... maybe its the food... anyway, she spenta portion of yesterday resting close to the bathroom,while i went for a wander around the old quarter...its a pretty amazing place - a street of shoes shops,shops just everywhere really... and specialising inthe stragest things. anyway, i went back and gotlaura for a late lunch, before we continued to wanderthe old quarter... we were trying to make it to amuseum, but that kind of failed... something whichlooks increasingly likely to repeat itself today.we attempted to find the main market last night,having read that it was open to 10, but this doesntseem to be the case, nevertheless the streets remainpretty fascinating on their own... we found a lovelyplace for dinner,with some delicious desserts (ah thefrench) before staying up far too late watching badamerican tv on cable...anyway, we really should get today under way - themuseums here also do this crazy shutting for two hoursover lunch thing, which really impinges on our plans,when we dont get going until right about the time theyshut.we dont seem to be able to access the blog at themoment, so i will get ianto* to post this, but we mightnot be able to read your comments for a while...


*I have entrusted Ianto with our blog password because he really is a top fellow. I'd just like to thank him for being trustworthy enough to post this for us. I know he won't misuse our password because amongst his many virtues perhaps the second most notable is his trustworthiness. His most notable virtue is, of course, his immense humility. He is, without doubt, the single most humble person I have ever met, and indeed I do not believe I will ever meet anyone more humble. He's just outrageously humble. It really is most alarming.