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1) The Vietnamese are extremely afraid of the sun. Tanned skin is not only considered ugly but a sign of poverty so everyone tries to attain the perfect hue of bluish, sickly white skin. That means that peasant women trod around the rice paddies in long-sleeved shirts, the mandatory conical hats, ski masks and white gloves that reach the shoulders. It doesn't look very practical but we probably look equally ridiculous to them when we sweat away on the beach drenched in sun cream.
2) The Vietnamese love to keep things clean. You could use most bathroom floors as a mirror. The lively fish market held next to our hotel was left in such a disinfected state overnight that only the smell hanging in the air gave away the street's daytime activity.
3) When the Vietnamese get older they start exercising obsessively. Following the western world's obsession with feng shui we recommend that the next fad we import from the East be non-stop t'ai chi for the elderly.
4) The young seem to have two main interests: motorbikes and light romance. Seemingly all Vietnamese boys have a motorbike which they ride carelessly, running nine out of ten red lights, but in perfect harmony with the rest of traffic. If the boy has a girlfriend she is usually balancing on the back of the bike, platform shoes dangling nonchalantly close to the heat of the exhaust pipe. Sometimes the girlfriend leans over to hug the boyfriend and whisper something sweet in his ear. We could only guess at the tone of those words by stealing a glance at our neighbor's screens at the internet cafe. As soon as the boys and girls get off their motorbikes they run to the closest cyber connection where they chat for hours, logging on as No Love, No Miss and Sweet Girl or similar romantic nickname. The girls giggle (always with a hand covering their mouth) and mail pics of themselves in Sunday dresses, frontal view and profile, posing in front of cherry blossom backdrops. It is very important to be married in Vietnam. Single people are looked on as sad and unfulfilled.

On our first excursion from Hanoi we went to the world famous limestone landscape in Halong Bay, straight out of a Chinese ink drawing. On a boat with twelve other travelers we explored islands with gigantic caves and took turns being on jellyfish watch as we dove into the sea. At night, after many Tiger beers, we weren�t so scared of the gigantic jellyfish anymore. Instead we marveled at the phosphorous as we swam around like angels leaving psychedelic trails in the water. On a beach, Guillaume adopted a baby monkey but made the mistake of ignoring its vicious relatives in the bushes. To make a long story short: the playing got out of hand and he ended up being chased into the water by a herd of hungry primates after being bit in the hand by the baby monkey. We were very grateful that we had gotten our rabies shots before leaving home.
We seem to bring rain with us wherever we go on this journey. A low pressure zone had a violent confrontation with a cyclone in Central and Southern Vietnam right as we were about to start moving south down the coast. It rained over two meters in three days. So instead of heading to Saigon we decided to stay in the north. We went trekking in Sapa on the Chinese border where several ethnic minority hill tribes live. Our lovely guide So from the H'mong tribe was only 15 years old and less than five feet tall, but knew how to cheat in cards, hold her rice whiskey and laugh like an entire tribe of H'mong girls. Similar to our trek in Ladakh, we overnighted in farmhouses which means going to bed at 8 o�clock. The flooding on the coast didn�t reach the mountains but it rained quite a bit so the trails around the rice paddies became ideal locations for surfing and wrestling in slippery mud. A special thanks to those on our trek who fell and slid down. Comic relief is very healthy.
Back from the trek, the weather situation was still bad so we made arrangements to fly out directly from Hanoi. With still a few days to spare we scheduled our last excursion. This time we went to Tam Coc in the Ninh Binh province where the scenery is reminiscent of that of Halong Bay. Instead of being on the coast, the limestone rocks jut out of rice paddies next to the Ngo Dong River. It was impressive and grand, it was yellow and green, there were buffaloes and kingfishers and banana trees and...of course there was rice. The landscape was the most beautiful we saw in all of Northern Vietnam and that is quite an accomplishment because in no other country did we take as many photos as we did in Vietnam.