Hanoi’s Weekend Vibes

The blend of traditional Vietnamese vibes and modernity was even more noticeable at the weekend. Large parts of the surrounding roads are closed off which made space for a rock concert that overlaid the scene below. I bet you didn’t imagine that music with this picture..

Part of the Temple of Literature – Vietnam’s first national university and founded in 1070. It features on the 100k Dong note and is a real cultural symbol. No shortage of students getting their graduation photos here!

Space is at a premium here. It seems pretty common for the locals to wheel their scooters into their living room. This car parked up in a clock store tickled me.

I never thought that badminton and football could be merged, however…

Hanoi’s ‘Beer Street’ is supposed to be a lively and social experience where seating is brought into the road, and you can sample some of the local craft beers. We thought it might be a little like an Eastern Oktoberfest.

‘Lively’ and ‘social’ it certainly was, but these adjectives aren’t quite enough – it’s also really quite a visceral experience. We even started to wonder if we’d wandered into a red light district (second video).

These are both long videos, but it gives a great feel as to what Saturday night life is like just a few minutes from our hotel in the Old Quarter.

On our first walk through this street, after Emma had passed through, a chap whispered into my ear ‘I got ladies ready for you’. On our return walk, the same chap again whispered into my ear ‘good weed follow me’.

Cheers boss. You clearly have a diverse business. I’ll give both of your offers a miss.

Keep those legs tucked in

The streets of Hanoi are absolute carnage. Traffic lights are just a recommendation. Driving on the correct side of the road is optional. Scooters stick to the road – but only if there isn’t traffic. Its chaos. Thing is, like I’ve experienced in the past, when everyone just expects chaos – it actually kinda works. Nobody ever gets cross or upset, they just find a way to keep on scootin’.

Our next experience of Hanoi was a little different. Probably not one for any health and safety officials.

It’s a piece of train line that runs tightly between rows of houses just south of Hanoi train station. The city has become famous for its cafes along this stretch. It’s a unique view because the train passes within 1.5m of the doors of these houses. Seems like the perfect place to stick a plastic chair and have a cup of coffee right?

Well yes, as it turns out. This stretch is a instagram influencer smash hit – the view of a train coming down this bit of track is really quite famous. We arrived nice and early for a quiet experience, and our (absolutely wonderful) cafe owner really showed off her social media props and photography skills with us…

You really don’t want to stick your legs out when this is coming past.

I did my best to influencify Emma

The coffee was also stunning. The place was called ‘The House Coffee’ in case you happen to go there. Amusingly, when we ordered our Egg/Coconut coffees and crossiants, we were a little bit puzzled when she legged it northbound up the tracks away from us. Turns out she’d run out of croissants and ran to the shops to get us some more in time for the train to pass through. An amusing and wonderful experience.

Accidentally made an M&S advert with the egg coffee:

Exercise them senses

Welcome to Hanoi! It doesn’t matter which direction you look, some sort of action is afoot. This really is a place to max out those human senses.

Small side streets feature scooters beeping, locals preparing and selling food, friends socialising, coffee based business meetings, tourists exploring and goodness knows what else.

My Dad was an expert at packing luggage into a car. Each summer holiday, it never ceased to amaze me how we managed to fit half the contents of our house into the boot of our family car. As it turns out, that was rather unimpressive. The Vietnamese could have packed more onto a Honda Super cub.

For the British readers: remember the Green Cross Code hedgehog adverts to push road safety? Those hedgehogs don’t stand a chance here.

For a reminder (and for the non-Brits), here is a link for your amusement: https://youtu.be/KnwxN24E2yY?feature=shared

This used to be way harder

In 2011, I made my first travel blogging website. I spent months working on it. I told myself that learning HTML and CSS (the core coding languages for a website) would be a smart thing to do. I guess it was; but by Jove it was frustrating. I spent hours trying to do simple stuff: like getting a button to appear in the right place. Travel blogging updates required a laptop, some (hacked) WiFi and a dollop of patience as the HTML site was re-edited. It wasn’t a great solution.

In 2016, I made a new travel blogging website. I was particularly pleased with the rather catchy and alliterative domain name I’d procured – alexaway.co.uk. Now a far wiser man and with the lessons of the past still ringing in the mind, this time, there was to be no code editing on the move. I told myself that learning AWS and self-hosting my WordPress site there would be a smart thing to do. It definitely was, but I’d still made it difficult for myself. It took weeks of googling to write up scripts to keep the site up to date, secure and backed up.

The year of 2026 started as a dire year for alexaway. It was already a bot-infested, out-of-date dinosaur, but just to add salt to the wounds, AWS sent me an email to let me know their server it was running on had died and that maybe I should take a look. Cheers boys.

In case you’re wondering, resurrecting a bot-infested dinosaur website that got shut off unexpectedly is not a time-efficient exercise, or at least, it never used to be. Today however…

In just one evening, my new best friend AI-Claude had flushed out the 400,000 bots, updated everything and got it all redeployed into a fresh AWS service. I didn’t even stop watching TV as it did it.

  • Site in 2011 – total brain focus required
  • Site in 2016 – high brain focus required
  • Site in 2026 – basically no focus required

This used to be hard. It’s not anymore.

I wonder where the IT world will be for my next bit of site engineering work.

PS: Vietnamese travel blog posts incoming! 🇻🇳

🤖

Chernobyl – Pt1

‘So Comrades, the small radiation dose you received with the amazing food you have eaten was good for your health today. You can tell all your family there is no problem.’

Yep. That’s right. On the bus home, our guide Stacey passed off a trip into the 30km Chernobyl exclusion zone as a healthy boost to your immune system. Maybe like one of those yakult drinks with a little extra glow. I’m less sure.

In April 1986, Chernobyl definitely wasn’t a good place to be. An explosion in reactor 4 represented the biggest nuclear booboo the world had ever seen. The Soviets initially tried to cover it up

20,000 years

31 deaths

khjlkk

Why you no’ there Rora?!

Every trip I do, I find some time to hit up a blog post. It’s good. It helps summarise my thoughts. I often wonder if the few hits I get are just my Mum hitting the refresh button, but you know, who cares.

This trip, however, it’s been tough. Neil and I are committed to the cause. No mucking around. Up for sunrise photos in optimum photo locations. Out late, prepped for Aurora (Northern lights) until late. Both of us have been powered by cheap petrol station pizza to cut costs. (Norway’s food is wallet damaging).

We outdid ourselves two nights ago. After finding we missed a great Aurora show the day before. We stationed ourselves at Uttakleiv beach for 4hrs – exactly where our Aurora app told us to go. It was a no show once again. Blast.

Anyway, here are some mere daytime photos with no Aurora:

Saw this. Instantly wanted it. It’s 4wd too.

Lancia Delta Integrale. Wasn’t going to miss that either. I think I may have just found my perfect 2 car Norwegian garage.

Bad light, beautiful views and ruddy deep snow.

Nope. It cannot be that cold.

-20c. That cannot be right. I’m not even sure a cup of tea could cure that kind of chill. Blimey. This trip, however, we don’t need to worry about temperatures.

This trip, we worry about Aurora. More specifically; where we can grab a good picture of it.

Anyway, welcome to Lofoten!


Damn it and damn it. Ooo Penguins!

Today did not go smoothly. I’m pretty hopeless at life when I’m hungry and tired. Today was no exception.

Wake up, check date, pack up, strip bed, put bags in locker, check out of hostel. Simple. The hostel receptionist, however, struggled with that last bit. He struck me as a character better suited to selling mobile phones – hopefully you can better picture the dude. There was payment confusion and check out confusion. While he unconfused himself, I went to grab myself a flat white (apparently invented here in Melbourne).

One sip into my coffee and oh. The date on my phone doesn’t match the date on my watch. Oh dear. I’m trying to check out a day early. It was impossible not to look like an utter moron as I went back to the guy to explain. Damn.

Keen to get myself out of the hostel immediately, I found a free walking tour around 2.5miles from where I’m staying and headed out.

System goes: check google maps, read sign stating ‘free city tram zone’, board tram. Again; simple.

Two stops in, I realise I may need a ‘Myki’ card to use trams. I hop off and a bunch of no sense of humour policeman and train officer people robustly confirm. They said my excuses for not paying could be decided in court.

It took me 15 buttock clenching minutes before I managed to talk my way out of that. Damn. Uber was the saviour in the end.

Here is some of the walking tour pics:

As a bonus, our guide mentioned about the Penguins which nest in the rocks after sunset in St Kilda at this time of year. So cute!!

Thankfully I was accompanied by my new walking tour buddy Sarah. Beer and pointing at penguins improved my day dramatically.

🐧

Beach walk error.

A morning of beach yoga. An afternoon of surfing. An evening of Mexican food. I won’t have it said that they don’t all go perfectly together.

My new yoga/surfing pal and I decided the beach walk would be the perfect way to get back to the hostel. Perhaps not.

We had around 1.5 miles to walk with no real way to get off the beach other than to go backwards. This was the only time I’ve ever been scared by a thunderstorm. It was not exactly an ideal place to be. Didn’t feel very Bear Grylls. We ended up hot footing it.

Hostel looked like it was going to flood at one stage!

 

A smattering of miscellaneous.

This, amusingly enough, is how I paid for my Cape Tribulation tour; in a lay-by. This guy even had a card machine. My fellow minibus passengers literally fell about laughing.

 

‘Fancy a walk?’, says my bunk buddy, Fiona, the other morning. ‘Sure’, I said, I could use a walk. Good to see the pretty gardens in Cairns too. 18km and one ginormous lizard later, this is all I have to show for it.

Stay still damnit!!!

Horahhh!!!

Swooping birds. Brilliant.

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