Vietnam North West: Hanoi & Halong Bay 13-18 Apr 12

Arriving at Ha Noi airport I was instantly struck with how different it was to Bangkok. It was small and cold with clinical decor and with everyone in a straight line. The people coming off the planes and standing in the queues all looked exactly the same which I know can’t be possible but somehow was true. The same dark coloured trousers or jeans, with the same white tops, screaming formality. Bangkok airport was warm, colourful, and vibrant with a spectrum of people never before seen. The flight on Vietnam Airways was only an hour and a half unbelievably. I missed Thailand already. But, what a country awaits me in Vietnam! A new and totally foreign place for me to get my head around always makes me happy. I was also glad to have a travelling buddy in Stu for some time in Vietnam, who I met up with at Bangkok airport for the flight over. It makes sharing transport and other bits cheaper, easier and safer in a county like Vietnam if you have a companion too.

Enquiring at tourist information revealed that the only foreign currency exchange place was closed (change it in the city she said, its much cheaper) even though it was only around 9.30pm. A taxi to the Old Quarter would be $30. But when we asked outside at the taxi stand it was $16 and waiting were an Australian couple ready to share with us. The legitimate taxi’s here run on meters, so sometimes it’s better to just go with what the meter says before agreeing on an over inflated price beforehand which happened regularly to me. They metered taxis seem to be cheaper than what you’d expect.

Everything is quoted in USD here, but you can pay in VND Vietnamese Dong which is around $1 = VND 21,000. When taking out $50 you’re getting around VND 1m. Get your head around that.

The driver took us on a (unusually for Vietnam) leisurely drive through the streets of Ha Noi while cars, trucks, motorbikes and bicycles whizzed frantically within inches of us to get by. The busy roads were lined each side with crumbling, tall and thin French colonial buildings and then some newer ones squashed in amongst them. Hotels, karaoke bars with crazy disco lights and signs, restaurants, houses, all jostling and tumbling and vying for space along the main road. We had no idea where to go other than the Old Quarter, so eventually the driver stopped the taxi after much confused and frantic gesturing and set us down smack bang in the middle of it all.

Hanoi Old Quarter is an architectural and cultural mashup. It’s all old crumbling French and Indochinese architecture covered in thousands of electric wires haphazardly gathered together around poles, sometimes layers and layers of old and new wires being weighed down by vines and all sorts.  Every doorway, archway and street facing building is a shop of some description selling cosmetics, shoes, snacks, tourist niknaks, clothes, every plastic toy every mass produced, musical instruments, jewellery, stamps, paintings, tools, you name it! All spilling out over the pavement on to the street. Squeezed inbetween these shops are restaurants but not as we know them. Every man, granny and their dog has their cart out with a pot and a fryer, making Pho noodle soup or some other kind of fishy and fragrant dish. Around the little cart or stand or box where the cooking is going on there is a ring of tiny plastic chairs and tables, the kind you would have out for a two year old tea party, and tons people sitting with their knees around their ears slurping and gurgling whatever happens to be on offer. 

Lady on the street selling tea with a chat

People relaxing (?) at a cafe on the corner watching the world go by

Pic by Stu Bishop

Some food places are actual restaurants with a kitchen, but what goes on there or what is on the menu you have no clue. You walk in, hold up your fingers to indicate how many bowls you want of the stuff and they bring you whatever it is that happens to be cooking that day. It’s tasty and weird and surprising. Two people can eat for around $1.50 (USD) Although I wouldn’t recommend going this menu-less route if you’re a vegetarian or have any food allergies, as you have literally no way of knowing what it is unless you can speak Vietnamese. If you’re lucky you’ll find a Bia Hoi place (Bia Hoi is home brewed beer with no preservatives or chemicals, made to be drunk instantly. Quality and strength may vary but usually it’s pretty darn good) that does food too. In which case you hold up two fingers for two glasses which cost around $0.25 each, and then point to whatever food looks tasty from another table. You can drink Bia (Beer) Hoi and eat to your heart’s content and it could cost around $3! 

Hundreds of tiny plastic chairs and tables pile all over the pavements and streets, and this coupled with the shop wares and thousands of motorbikes parked means you have to walk in the street, where you’ll probably have to play dodgems with the traffic in the minute and windy roads. And that brings me on to... the traffic.  The traffic is like giving some hormonal teenagers a dose of crack in their morning coffee and asking them to play bumper cars with some scooters. Add to this some taxis, rickshaw, bicycles, ladies with baskets laden with fruit, sweet breads or hats balanced on their push bikes,  the odd rich person’s car, pedestrians, dogs, children, shop wares and eating punters spilling out of every corner and you have a bit of a hot, intense circus. Although, somehow, it works and the traffic just keeps on flowing. Some people find all this exhilarating and exciting, and others hot and stressful. I was in the former camp for about half a day, and then I needed to go inside somewhere cool and quiet and close my eyes to stop myself from spinning.

I only saw the Old Quarter of Hanoi so I have no idea what the rest of the city holds, and I’m sure there is much more to it than my description. I felt safe walking around but was warned of bag snatchers, scamming taxi drivers and pick-pockets. There was a definite hiking up of the price to as much as didn’t seem ridiculous of anything you’d like to buy, so haggle it all down until you think what you’re paying is worth the item. Don’t worry; it will still be four times more than the actual price so you’re more than likely not taking any shirts off backs. Vietnam is really cheap even with the overinflated prices from street vendors. Most of the back road, authentic Vietnamese eateries don’t seem to overcharge though, and if they do a tiny bit it’s still dead cheap to eat and totally worth the 80p or whatever you’re paying them.

I only saw one temple in Hanoi, Ngoc Son Temple which sits on a little island on the North part of Hoan Kiem Lake which is dedicated to a general who defeated the Mongols in the 13^th century. It’s small and cute and has a huge replica of a turtle that came from the lake. One night we went to the Water Puppet Theatre on Hoan Kiem Lake. It’s an hour long and cost $3, they have around four to five shows a day but make sure you book tickets as they sell out fast from bus loads of mammoth Chinese tour groups. The puppet show as really sweet, based on old folklore but the best part about it has to be the beautiful Eastern instruments that are hundreds of years old being played by professional musicians who have to go through quite a gruelling selection process to be able to play at the theatre. They had guzheng, sao (flute), trong (drums), dan bau (one stringed instrument). So beautiful! The women play the instruments so elegantly almost as if they’re doing a dance themselves. I ended up watching them most of the time.

Water puppet theatre orchestra - Wikipedia pic

There are a lot of expats living in Hanoi, mainly teaching English and also some NGO’s. We met a cute girl who was half Vietnamese half Cambodian, but grew up in Canada after her family was displaced when she was born in the 70’s because of all the turmoil in the area around that time. She has no idea when her birthday is as her mother used the Eastern calendar and didn’t know the Christian calendar date. But she thinks it may be in January. Imagine not knowing when you were born? We went out for some drinks with some other travellers from the May De Ville Hostel. A group of us walked for about 20 minutes to an expat bar and I had some real white wine from Chile, the first in months and it was heaven, and some chocolate cake. It was only $4 for the wine but that felt so expensive, like I was splashing out.

The main thing to do when you’re in North West Vietnam is to visit Halong Bay. It’s a really popular destination with all travellers including both Vietnamese and Chinese during their summer holidays. It’s a ‘dense cluster of over 3000 limestone monolithic islands topped with dense jungle rising from the ocean. Wiki: To assist Vietnamese in defending their country, the gods sent a family of dragons as protectors. This family of dragons began spitting out jewels and jade. These jewels turned into the islands and islets dotting the bay, linking together to form a great wall against the invaders. Numerous rock mountains abruptly appeared on the sea, ahead of invaders' ships. After winning the battle, the dragons were interested in peaceful sightseeing of the Earth, and then decided to live in this bay’. Halong translates to ‘descending dragon’. 

It is insanely mystical and beautiful, especially with its continual mist and moody light in spring. You set out on a boat or ‘junk’ and spend one or two nights out amongst the islands. The biggest island is called Ca Ba, and around it is a national park which stops the boat traffic entering sensitive areas. You can sleep on Ca Ba, it’s a tourist haven with karaoke bars and all the rest along the shore front, or you can just kayak around the national park if you stay in Halong Bay on a boat.

I booked the tour through the May De Ville hostel. There are thousands of tour options through hostels, travel agents or people approaching you on the street. You should research a good tour, apparently they can be pretty horrible if you go too cheap or with a dodgy one. Some tourists died last year after their junk sank in the bay while they were all sleeping. A Two day one night tour they had was $95 and three days two nights was $145 which is pretty much what you’d expect to pay for a decent boat with good food. I did the three days two nights though as I thought I might as well properly soak it in. The tour was ‘Halong Party Cruise, no fun no pay’ (ha) and was run by Vietnamese operators. It was pretty funny because they obviously were trying to latch on to the backpacker party style (like the Hanoi Backpacker Halong tour) but didn’t quite get it. We were taken on the ‘party bus’ for four hours to Halong City, while the Vietnamese guide ‘Lucky’ gave us a very long winded briefing about how much fun we were going to have. Everyone just wanted to snooze though as it was early in the morning. The buses all take you through the same tourist shop cattle market on the way there with overpriced snacks and curios. We got to the boat and at every opportunity Lucky would give us another briefing about what to expect from the day which you could barely understand, bless him he did try hard but just talked and briefed way too much. It was like ‘okay, 1pm lunch. 2pm cave. 3pm beach. 4pm walk up mountain. 5pm back on boat, jump off boat into water. 6pm get ready for party time. 7pm party time. 8pm dinner. 9pm more party with karaoke. Argh, seriously leave it out! We just wanted to chill and drink some beers on the deck and maybe if the mood took us we’d get a little rowdier later on.

Our junk: 'Halong Party'!

View from the hill

Original fishing boat

The deck was really nice, you could see all the islands floating by like some kind of mystical sea dragon which was beautiful, and then the pumping Lady Gaga party tunes start up and you’re like, nooo. Haha. The rooms were really good though, you get your own cabin with bathroom, and the food was great, they laid on huge lunches and dinners. The group included around seven Argentinean girls who were well up for a boogie to some Spanish pop on the blue lit up dance floor in the dining room, two groups of very different to each other Canadian guys and a group of British eighteen year olds on their gap year. 

We jumped off the highest point of the boat into the water (around 15 meters) as the sun was going down which was great fun, and did end up having numerous beers into the wee hours of the morning despite having the party bone knocked out of us by Lucky.

 A little later on in the night we noticed that when something disturbed the water there was some incredibly bright luminescent plankton making glowing ripples in the water. So we started throwing drops of water overboard trying to disturb the surface from where we stood on the deck to watch this awesome site on the dark water. Eventually it all got too exciting and Stu and some others decided to dive into the water to make it light up like crazy. So, on the stroke of 12 they jumped in the water, the nutters, and gave us a luminescent light show. It was so crazy to watch, you could even see the fish making trails of light under the water. So the party boat delivered in its own weird way.

The highlights of the trip included seeing Hang Đầu Gỗ cave which is huge and beautiful (if you ignore the disco spectrum of lights) with stalagmites and stalactites, evidence of prehistoric human beings have been found here from tens of thousands of years ago. The views from the island mountain we did climb were really beautiful, and the eerie mystical magic of the thousands of islands really struck you there in the silence. Also the kayaking in the national park area was a real highlight, cool clear water where you could see the bottom, and mad caves that you could kayak through to the other side to more islands and caves.

Inside the cave

Although it’s an exquisitely beautiful part of the world, there are some downsides to the Halong Bay cruises. There are thousands of tourists and boats every day, so you’re swamped with them especially on the one day tours. With the boats come the rubbish and the pollution, and the water is practically a plastic oil slick in some corners which is really disheartening. There are some clean beaches and areas of clean water though to lift your spirits. You float past fishing villages that literally live on the water and move around with boats like on the movie ‘Water World’, which is so interesting to think about. There were even some dogs walking around on the floating houses and going for rides on the boats, it’s so strange to see people living with no land at all around them. Unfortunately though there is no proper waste disposal for these villages so everything just gets dumped in the water, and you see poor little fishermen wading through it all to catch their daily wares. You’d think they’d know better though, that the reason there is dead fish floating around is because their village is chucking everything into the water.

House in the fishing village

If you’re going on a three day two night tour, make sure there are a variety of activities lined up that you’d be into. The second day we did some kayaking in the morning around Ca Ba national park which was beautiful, clean where no boats could go with some cool caves and you can go exploring, but that only lasted for about two hours and then after that we were stuck on a smaller boat which was taking only four people out that day, from 11am to 6pm. All there was to do was sleep and ponder at the yucky water as the boat made its way painfully slowly to the pearl museum and factory which is quite sweet but is mainly set out for you to buy pearls which I wasn’t interested in. You’re basically trapped for three days in the bay and so bring a good book for sure. Also, they outrageously overcharge for drinks on the boat, even water so you end up spending a bomb. I was actually happy to get off the boat in the end, and in hindsight I would have gone for the two day one night option, if only because of the amount of money it ended up costing.

Hanoi Backpackers in the Old Quarter (the new one) is the fun standard hostel to stay at, I spent a day there hanging out with Emily on the couches in the living room and you’ll definitely meet up for it backpackers there. It’s $5 a night. I stayed in May De Ville hotel which was $6 a night for a dorm bed which was amazingly clean and comfortable with a great bathroom and a free breakfast that was fit for a much more expensive hotel. The staff there are really friendly and helpful, I’d definitely recommend it if you don’t mind there not really being a chillout area or bar to meet other travellers in.

If you need to exchange money go to a jewellery shop, their rates are so much cheaper than banks. And if you need to buy everyday stuff like shampoo go to a supermarket, you’d think they’d be cheaper from markets or little pokey stores but they way overcharge tourists, supermarkets can’t change the price tag.

We got back from Halong Bay at 5pm and then was straight on the night bus for 12 hours to Sapa in the North East mountains where we were going to meet up with my friend Emily from London and do some mountain trekking and motorbiking, good times ahead...

Here are the pics.