Hanoi in December: the lake at six, egg coffee, and a thousand motorbikes that never hit me

The flight landed at Haiphong, not Hanoi, which I had not expected, and the coach into the city took two hours through flat green fields and towns of narrow houses five storeys high and one room wide, each with a different coloured balcony. By the time it dropped me at the edge of the Old Quarter it was dark and drizzling and cool, properly cool, a cardigan and a scarf, which is December in the north and not what anyone at home pictures when you say Vietnam.

The lake

I went to Hoan Kiem Lake at six the first morning because the guide said to, and then every morning after that because I could not stop. In the grey light before the city wakes, the paths around the lake belong to the old people: tai chi in rows, a woman leading aerobics with a speaker the size of a suitcase, badminton on the pavement, two men doing a kind of slow boxing, and one gentleman walking backwards, deliberately, for the whole circuit. I counted the laps. He did three. At the weekend the streets round the lake are closed to traffic and the children come out on small electric cars. The red wooden bridge leads to Ngoc Son temple on its island, where in a glass case is a preserved giant turtle, the last of the lake's own, and people leave fruit for it.

The quarter

The Old Quarter is thirty-six streets, each once named for the trade sold on it, and some still are: silver on Hang Bac, paper offerings on Hang Ma, red and gold for the New Year even in December. The pavements are for parking motorbikes, cooking, eating on plastic stools eleven inches high, and sometimes, briefly, walking. I learned the crossing on the second day: you step off the kerb at a steady pace and the river of motorbikes parts around you, as long as you never stop and never run. I counted the bikes at one junction for a minute. I got to a hundred and forty and gave up. Not one touched me in eight days.

The food tour on the fourth night was the best money I have spent in any city. Bun cha, grilled pork patties in a bowl of sweet broth with a heap of herbs and cold noodles, at a place with a photograph of a former American president on the wall, who ate there too. Banh cuon, rice sheets steamed on a cloth over a pot and rolled by a woman who did not look up. And egg coffee, which sounds wrong and is not: strong coffee under a thick foam of whipped egg yolk and condensed milk, like drinking a tiramisu, in a cafe up a corridor behind a shop that you would never find alone. I went back twice. Hanoi Train Street was the other thing I would not have found: a residential lane where the trains pass a metre from the front doors, now with cafes on both sides and a man with a whistle who clears the chairs off the line two minutes before.

Out on the water

Three days out of the city, all on boats. The Perfume Pagoda is south: an hour by road, then an hour in a metal rowing boat up the Yen river, rowed by a woman in a conical hat who did not break her rhythm once, between limestone hills with the mist sitting on them, then a cable car up to the cave temple, where the stalactites are named for the things people pray for, rice, children, money. Trang An the next day is the famous one: boats through a landscape of karst towers and rice paddies, rowed through caves so low you lie back flat in the boat with the rock a hand's width above your face, and our rower, like all of them, rowed with her feet, leaning back, arms folded. Tam Coc, the third day, is the smaller version of the same thing, three caves and a river, plus Hoa Lu, the capital of Vietnam a thousand years ago, now two temples and a lot of water buffalo.

The jeep tour was pure theatre and I loved it: a Soviet-era army jeep, open sides, through the city and out to the countryside and back by Train Street, the driver pointing at things with a cigarette. Tam Dao, the hill station north of the city, was the one grey day, clouds on the road up and a French stone church in the fog, and I sat in a cafe over the valley and saw nothing and did not mind.

The quiet rooms

The Temple of Literature is the country's first university, a thousand years old, five courtyards deep, with the names of the graduates carved on stone stelae that stand on the backs of stone turtles, eighty-two of them, and students used to rub the turtle heads for luck until the heads wore smooth and the turtles were fenced. Hoa Lo prison is the hard afternoon: built by the French, with the guillotine still there, and later the place the American pilots called the Hanoi Hilton. I walked round it slowly and came out into the motorbikes and the noise and was glad of them. The cooking class on the seventh day was the gentle one: a market in the morning, then spring rolls, and the cook laughing at my rolling, which was fair.

What I know now

Go to the lake at six. Fly into Haiphong if that is the flight you get, and take the coach; it is a good coach. Learn the crossing and never run. Take a scarf in December, and an umbrella you will use every day for ten minutes. And drink the coffee with the egg in it, because you will not believe me otherwise.