After our SARS scare we spent the next four days trading up hotels in Hanoi in search of a bearable decibel level out on the streets. The motorbikes were the worst offenders. If it wasn’t a motorbike it was the &@*#$ with the chisel at 7:30 AM deciding to do some remodeling in the room below us. Ironically we found a favorite right across the street from the SOS med-evac clinic where I had my blood tested for all those nasty tropical diseases. To read our SARS Story.

Not much good to say about Hanoi. The dark misty skies soured our moods to match my diminished physical state. No doubt by now I had lost 25 pounds since leaving Northern Thailand five weeks previously. The fever had broken but I was left with a consolation prize of a brutal dry cough, at times doubling me over in bronchial spasms. The doctor prescribed some pills to relax my brachia muscles and they worked quite well. Fortunately for us SARS was still new in the media and my cough had improved before I could be labeled a SARS symptom poster child by the locals and thrown into a cage.

As I gained strength by the day we decided little movement was important to my health. Days turned to weeks as we holed up in Hanoi. We ventured out for a visit to the War museum on the day America began its bombing of Iraq. I cannot tell you how surreal it was to watch scenes from CNN and BBC playing on banks of televisions in the electronic stores lining the streets of downtown Hanoi with soldiers in their neon green uniforms stoically watching history repeat itself on TV. But the reality is that people here just don't have the luxury of being able to care much. They're too busy trying to eek out an existence with the fierce competition from their seventy-seven million countrymen.

After a week in Hanoi we decided to brave an overnight tour to a National Park. Maybe the monkeys would cheer me up. Guess again. It seems that they’ve eaten most of the monkeys here and that really upset us. We just couldn’t win in Vietnam. And just in case you were wondering, most household pets are also on the menu in Hanoi: dog, cat and even squirrels.

Our tour of Halong Bay became a textbook case study of how to make a bad situation worse. Read more: No Sorry! You Pay!

The day of zero hour had arrived but our shuttle to the airport did not leave until the driver had decided we had enough passengers regardless of what was printed on the schedule poster. He swerved through the morning traffic moving us slowly out of the center of Hanoi as we passed under the masses of knitted electrical wiring overhead. We counted the minutes until our airplane would take us out of what had become hell. Up until the last minutes before our flight we couldn’t escape the diabolical schemes to separate us from our money.

We did manage to exchange some money for Iraqi dinars before leaving Vietnam. But they turned out to be counterfeits too.

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