1 Cam Chi, Hoan Kiem, Hanoi

Vampires in Hanoi

I once read that Bohemian peasants with a congenital blood disease which causes severe iron deficiency may have inspired much of vampire mythology prior to ol' Count Vlad. Symptoms include pallor, an aversion to sunlight (which causes skin lesions and rashes in sufferers) and the skin being drawn up around the mouth exposing the teeth. Drinking iron-rich blood alleviates the symptoms and garlic (which activates a haem-destroying enzyme) makes them much worse.

We haven't noticed any excessively protruding incisors or a lust for blood yet, but we are becoming increasingly nocturnal and are probably developing a bit of an iron deficiency.

That's life in Hanoi for vegetarian internet addicts who are missing their passports.

You see, it took us a while, but we finally decided on a longer term travel plan. We've signed up for a five month journey along the silk road. Starting in Tunisia in March we'll venture through Libya, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan, across the Caspian to Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, along the north of Tibet and into western China, reaching Beijing just in time for the Olympics. It's going to be one hell of a journey.

"Signed up". Heh. Putting it that way that makes it sound so simple. In reality, obtaining the visas we'll need for that little jaunt is quite the organisational nightmare. It takes a minimum 6 weeks to obtain all the necessary documents, stamps and embassy approvals for the four countries that don't issue visas on arrival. It also costs around AUD2000 to get them and there's only 2 countries on earth where they can all be issued – the United States and the United Kingdom - both of which are a wee ways from Hanoi, Vietnam.

Staying in London for 6 weeks in the style we've become accustomed to in Asia would cost about 30 times as much as it will cost us in Vietnam, so the passports are taking a little holiday in the UK and we are staying here. However, when we arrived in this great nation from the backwaters of Laos, the lovely people of Vietnam only extended their hospitality to us until January 28. We got the feeling they might not be impressed if we shacked up here for another 6 weeks without asking, so we had to extend our Vietnamese visas first. I won't even get into the adventures surrounding that little mission, but 11 days later with much lighter pockets we are ready to send our passports, 18 little photographic portraits of ourselves and 24 forms (50 pages) of personal data off to the UK.

We can't go very far at all without those passports. You need to provide passports for hotel registration, tour bookings and the like here. Vampires must have haunts and we have selected an excellent one for ourselves for our 2 month Hanoi stay. For $25/night (I can't help plugging these guys) we have a big, new, nicely furnished room with cable TV, free fast wireless internet, mini-bar, comfy bed and the best damn shower in the country. Hanoi Street Hotel – if you want to stay in this city you could do a lot worse and probably not much better.

Did I mention that Hanoi (lovely as it is) is colder than London at this time of year? It's 4^oC here today. Open a window and the room will cloud up from your breath and body heat. Did I mention that there are probably more motorbikes on the street here than hairs on the head of all the people who will read this combined? That stop signs, traffic lights and other mechanisms designed to control the flow of all those moto-swarms are about as effective as waving your hands to stop a herd of charging water buffalo? What about the fact that there are more commercial enterprises per block in the old quarter than you could probably find in the entire CBD of most western capital cities? Many of them consist of a person sitting on the "footpath" (an area Doug says probably translates as "side-drive" from the Vietnamese) with anything from pomeloes to piles of foreign currency between their legs.

There are lots of factors that determine the ease of finding a decent vegetarian meal in a foreign city. These include, but are not limited to: ease of getting around without being run down, the number of street signs, the degree to which street layout dissolves into a maze of crazy alleys, the number of hazards to your health per square foot of pavement, the level of English generally spoken, cultural tendency towards vegetarianism, how much of the local economy is geared towards providing for tourists, the type of tourist the region generally attracts (including their average income), the amount of fresh produce available on the street and whether it is being sold by old ladies who bargain harder than the devil himself with hides thick enough to request your first-born in payment for 6 small mandarins.

Hanoi is a mazey, crazy city where you can put your life on the line (and in the path of traffic) by moving out of your hotel lobby. It caters largely to wealthy Americans, not shiftless hippies and vegetarian students. Most of the local restaurants here keep a cage full of cats on the roof (no kidding, I can see a cage containing 7 persians and tabbies from the window in this room) and a pile of contorted barbecued wildlife for advertising out the front. Our hotel is located on Cam Chi, a specialty "pedestrian" (i.e. You can't fit a truck down it) food mall at the edge of the old quarter. Wealthy Vietnamese crowd in here every night to sample delicacies ranging from king cobra to giant tortoise. There are several "western" restaurants with English menus and staff who can greet you with hello and answer yes to any question you can think of, but please don't request any alterations to a dish on the menu – they'll tell you "OK!" but you never know what you might end up eating.

We've managed to eke out an existence regardless. There is an imported goods supermarket we can get to when we are willing to risk a few limbs. They supply us with a few nibblies like nuts and chocolate. We can also fall back on the ubiquitous Singapore noodles and vegetable fried rice at places with English menus. If we are feeling particularly brave we can engage the iron grandmas with their baskets of rambutans and mangoes. They are infinitely scarier than the traffic, grinning broadly while we crouch beside them in the cold (iron grandmas could squat for days in Siberia without noticing any discomfort) and displaying a cheek that not even adorable golden-haired children get away with at home.

Our hotel room is a cozy haven and the broadband internet is a pleasure we're eagerly indulging in. Our sleep cycles are adjusting according to convenience. I am working on an internet project with a friend in a European time zone, the best movies on HBO Asia are late night (by best, I'm referring to B-grade classics the likes of War Lord, Defenders of the Galaxy) and the streets below don't stop resounding with the singing of drunken revelers, blaring horns and yowling cats until around 3am. Tet, the Chinese New Year, approaches. Vietnamese who are lucky enough to be allowed holidays are enjoying them and our hotel room has been supplied with a miniature fruit-laden mandarin tree for the occasion ("NO eat until TET!"). Flower exhibitions and the figures of smiling arhats can be seen everywhere in Hoan Kiem, the old quarter district surrounding Hanoi's famous lake.

We haven't seen many of Hanoi's most popular tourist locations yet. Doug has decided to take the plunge and buy himself a new Nikon D300 and relevant accessories. We are waiting until February to do all the shopping for the next step of our journey, then we'll start seeing a bit more of what this city has to offer. We still don't know when our passports will return to us and until they do we're frozen – unable to book onward flights and hotels. Getting from Hanoi to Tunis takes a while but its surprisingly cheap. Australians will cringe, but flying from Vietnam to Tunisia is cheaper than a cross-country domestic flight during the Australian holidays.

It's 6pm and I've been up for less than 6 hours so it must be time for a lunch break now. I hope you've all had a wonderful January, stay tuned for pics from Doug's new camera!