Fruit bicycle

My train arrived in Hanoi about 20 minutes early! Not bad considering that it had started more than 31 hours earlier in Saigon. I slept ok but woke up in the middle of the night with a very sore throat and streaming nose. I got a taxi to the hostel. Not surprisingly, I couldn’t check in that early so I left my luggage and went to a cafe for lots of lemon juice and tea to try to sooth my throat. I had breakfast there and since I was in no rush, sat for ages trying to get shots of street vendors going past.

This is the best one. Results were limited by the amount of traffic going past and the number of motorbikes parked directly in front of me at different times! At one point I saw a flower vendor running down the street pushing her bicycle. A couple of minutes later the police drove very slowly down the street. Vendors disappeared and the cafe owners rapidly moved tables off the pavement. As soon as the police had turned to corner, the tables were replaced and the vendors came back. This happened twice that I saw.


I was feeling a lot better by the time I went back to the hostel and could check in. In the afternoon I went for a wander to look for more photo opportunities for street shots and to see some of the city I’d not been to before. I had a quick look in the Catholic Cathedral and went to the Imperial Citadel. There’s not much of the original structure left. They’ve done some archaeological digging in the complex. Most of it was rebuilt during the French colonial period. Part of it was turned into an underground operations room during the Vietnam war and you can see where the North Vietnamese planned various operations. There was also a photography exhibition in the grounds which had some lovely shots.

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