Hanoi

We have made it to the capital! Our last nightbus drops us off in the backpacking area and we meet Chris and Jenna who are traveling around the world and volunteering with helpx.net just like us. Our couchsurfing host as well as their helpx host are busy and so we go for breakfast in the nearby street market together and exchange stories and advice. Their blog is called “19000 days” which is the amount of days we have left to live and their goal is to make each of these days count. Sounds pretty familiar, too bad i didn’t come up with a catchy URL like that myself 🙂

The beauty of travelling is, that you meet people all the time that do far crazier things than yourself and therefore we feel pretty boring and conservative at times. From the blogs I follow there is a German woman that cycles around the world (and we turned down her hosting request in Prague 😦 ), a Kiwi that cycled to Europe and returned to Japan on a skateboard, a retired German jet fighter pilot that’s cycling for two years around Europe and the Middle East among people hitch-hiking Mongolia, proving overland passage possibilities from Australia to Europe or Lael who we met in Albania last summer and who cycled-raced the Great Divide from Canada to Mexico across the Rockies this year and won despite sickness and having cycled across Alaska right before. We have a lot to learn!

Hanoi is our last stop in Vietnam and we traced down a few culinary specialties here as well. The coffee with whisked egg yolk left a lasting impression and so did the beer with egg yolk we tried afterwards. Our host and his girlfriend work as English teachers while finishing university at the same time. We had a chance of joining their lessons and chat with the students. The heat during daytime made walking around difficult, so we left the house early and in the evening to escape the almost 40ºC. With our last 30000 Vietnamese dongs we hopped on the city bus and 90 min later we arrived at the (wrong) airport terminal. It’s all North from here, bye bye tropical heat.