On the road again

The haste to which we had to leave Bangkok after our quarter final location and opponent were confirmed on Monday left little time to organise everything we needed to get to Hanoi.

Tuesday was spent traipsing around Bangkok, trying to re-organise flights and hotels, while Wednesday was departure day. I hadn't even really considered Hanoi as a possible destination on this trip. I thought it was a simple matter of topping the group and following on from there.

I had heard a few horror stories about the visa procedure in Vietnam, and while we had faxed a letter off to the Vietnam Football Federation a couple of days earlier just in case, we weren't assured of anything when we got here.

We flew Air Asia, their version of Jetstar, and had spent up all our money to the baht (Goughy had indulged a quiche at the airport, while I'd had one last crack at the Thai take on the sausage roll), so couldn't afford a drink of water on the plane. Pity, all this fretting was thirsty work.

As the plane landed around 9pm, Hanoi was lit up with sheet lightning, rolling its way around in the northern sky. Ominous.

It took the regulation amount of perplexed looks before the big man and I were able to communicate our needs to immigration staff. A nervous 15 minutes passed as they took our accreditation and passports. The big man was seriously worried for a minute there but after exchanging $US50, all was good. At least it was easy to find our bags, they carousel had stopped and they were the only ones left.

It appeared customs had gone home for the night, so there were no issues there, and after stocking up on the local currency the Dong (about 14,000 to the dollar), we headed to the taxi rank for our 'educational ride to the hotel.

It's a mad city this. But a completely different type of mad to Bangkok. A much more European mad. The French influence in undoubted, and if it wasn't for the 100,000 motorbikes we saw, I could have thought for a minute I was back in Strasbourg.

The drive in wasn't harrowing but it certainly wasn't uneventful. The driver had predilection for weaving between lanes, beeping his horn and flashing his lights. Combined with the fact they drive on the European side of the road over here, it was all very interesting. As we scraped past motorbikes with four or more people on them, we started to get a real impression of the place, and an appreciation of the fatigue we had for Bangkok.

As anyone who has been there knows, everything is over your head in Bangkok. Trains and freeways clog your headspace, and you tend to be in a perpetual fog. While Hanoi is hardly a Sunday in a sleepy town, the perspective is different and after two weeks in the concrete jungle, the change has done us wonders.

An excellent hotel with free reliable internet helps, as does a ripping view across the terrace houses and out across the river. I was told to expect the unexpected over here. Arriving in Hanoi I was expecting the worst, but now have a much different perspective.