Ko Phanang to Hanoi

So lesson learned: pay the extra $140 and fly from small, obscure island to bangkok if you only have 3 weeks to travel. Here is my advice to anyone thinking of traveling to this area of the world: first, do it. It is incredible. Second, either take one month and make it all you do or give yourself at least 3 month because it turns out that the infastructure of the country is not all that fantastic so it takes a wee bit of time to get from here to there.

Anyway, the highlights from Ko Phanang were certainly the nightly layouts on the beach where we pulled our mat and pillows down on the sand and chatted about nothing and listened to the gentle waves break and also our last night where we were invited by two older couples to finish the evening off with them at this little restaurant on the beach...it turns out that the two women were best friends from their modeling days in the early 80s and now both run model agencies: one in capetown and the other london. One of the husbands was a composer and had worked on the english patient music which was pretty interesting. We had an interesting conversation about what it used to be like to be a model and the difference to now including the fact that they used to bring 10 models to a shoot and you never knew whether your shot would be used and now they take one girl, work her to death and then photoshop the picture to get it right. Supposedly, a recent shot of Kate Moss took 68 hours of photoshop to produce. Interesting...

Anyway, we woke up the next day, went to our little breakfast place ate the Thai version of an omelette and then finished up with some massages before loading into the taxi for the next 24 hour journey...it would come as no suprise that our train was 4 hours late and so we waited at a small station until 3am until our finally got our train (this was following a 1 hour taxi ride, 3 hour ferry ride and one hour bus ride). Needless to say when we finally made it to the airport the next day for our flight to Hanoi we were a bit of grumpy bears...we have decided to now do as little traveling as possible for the rest of the trip so we are just exploring the towns around Hanoi on this end...

We arrived late last night and found our hotel, only to be shuffled to another hotel due to some questionable reasoning but the hotel is very nice and with A/C which is great due to the heat and humidity here...we woke up today, had breakfast in the hotel which consisted of some noodles with a few spices, delicious coffee and some little not-very sweet cakes. We headed out and wandered the windy, shop filled streets of the old quarter and was dumbfounded at the amount of commerce happening...everyone was selling everything...in Hanoi all of the streets are themed with different products: the silk street, the nic nack street, the toy street, the spice street, the lantern and gold paraphanalia street and within each are people on millions of motorbikes...if Amsterdam was the town of bikes, Hanoi must be the town of motorbikes....everywhere - even on small paths in the middle of a market...too much fun...