I apologise for posting about the weather but every year I intend to keep a record for future reference and forget. My blog seems a sensible place to store the information but feel free to ignore it entirely. Winter in Hanoi is not generally a pleasant time of year to be here. As I wrote in my Travelfish wire a few years ago, it really does get cold in Hanoi. Or maybe I should re-phrase that: it really does feel cold in Hanoi. The temperature rarely drops below 10C — not cold in the English sense of the word — but the damp air, lack of insulation in buildings and windchill, especially when on a motorbike, makes it feel a lot colder than the thermometer may suggest. This winter, however, we thought we’d got off lightly. We were still seeing blue skies and reasonably mild weather in early December, and during Tet, at the end of January, the weather was glorious: blue skies, dry air, a bit chilly but who cares when it’s sunny! Unfortunately it then went downhill: it started raining. For the end of February and most of March we had grey skies and drizzle…every day. It was miserable. So miserable that I had to run away to the beach in Hoi An to get some sunshine. Thankfully I brought the sunshine with me back to Hanoi, and we had a week or so of good weather before it got a bit wet again. Fortunately it’s not been raining too much in the day, but it’s pretty damp. Very warm though — with the damp and humidity it’s starting to get uncomfortable to walk in. And there’s mould everywhere! Now we just need the rain to stop and the blue skies to appear and we may still manage a brief spell of spring before summer kicks...
