The year of the snake: Perspective on Hanoi

In the middle of a thousand-year-old city humming with seven million souls, I am awoken at four o'clock every morning by a crowing rooster. His strangled squawk ululates across the jumble of corrugated tin rooftops, comforting in their proximity to the narrow hotel window. Given there is no way a vehicle as large as a fire engine could penetrate the traffic in the Old Quarter, I take solace in the fact I could, in the event of a conflagration, escape across this flimsy roofing, running and leaping to safety like some pale, slightly arthritic version of Jason Bourne.