Hanoi starts the day with a roar, and the best advice is to join it calmly. This is a city of millions on the Red River, with more motorbikes than anyone has bothered to count, and the Old Quarter, with its thirty-six old guild streets named after the goods once sold there, is the loud, charming core. Hoàn Kiếm lake in the middle is where people jog, practise tai chi and sit eating ice cream at dusk, and the little Ngoc Son temple on its island is joined to the shore by a red wooden bridge.
Leaving by motorcycle is a skill in itself. Traffic flows like a river, with no gaps, and the rule is to hold your line and let others work around you. Sudden stops are what cause trouble. Cross the Red River by the long steel Long Biên bridge, built by the French in the early twentieth century and now for bikes, trains and pedestrians, and you soon reach the flatter, greener country of the delta, with rice fields, duck ponds and brick kilns. Pagodas hide among trees, such as Con Sơn, a Buddhist site in the hills of Hải Dương province where the Trúc Lâm tradition has a major centre. Roads are mostly decent but busy with trucks, so go at a steady pace.
Take time for the city's culture. The Temple of Literature, founded in 1070, was Vietnam's first university and is one of the calmest places in the capital, its courtyards lined with stone tortoises carrying the names of successful scholars. The food is its own reason for being here. Breakfast pho, with clear beef broth and rice noodles, is standard, bún chả of grilled pork and noodles is the lunch of choice, and egg coffee, whisked into a thick cream and poured over strong Vietnamese coffee, is a local invention worth trying.
Hanoi has every sort of service imaginable, from petrol on almost every corner, to repair workshops that can fix a bike by the roadside in minutes. The weather is the main variable: the humid, hot summer from May to September is wet, and winter can be grey and drizzly and cooler than visitors expect. October and November, and spring, are the sweet spots.