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Published: August 6th 2007
Our hosts in HCMC kindly arranged for their driver to take us to the airport. We took off from Saigon, via Pacific Airlines back to Hanoi. This was a great, efficient, cheap airline and they had some very good deals when they first launched their website back in early February, so we got our tickets for under $50.
Beer Hoi & a BBQ
We finally caught up with our mate Mike who we had been trying to contact when we were first in Hanoi. We could not get him on his mobile and found out that he had been away in Thailand at a meditation retreat for a week or so. A good excuse to have your mobile turned off I guess.
We caught up in Hanoi that evening and shared some glasses of Beer Hoi together. I guess the best way to describe Beer Hoi is that is something like homebrew and is sold at small shops on the street side where you can sit on plastic chairs on the roadside drinking to your hearts content. After downing a fair number of glasses of this cold draught beer your wallet is lightened to the tune of about
Back in Hanoi
Panorama - hope it looks ok on here?$1. It’s cold, it’s cheap, you get to watch the world go by and enjoy the company of friends - highly recommended.
We were joined by a friend of Mike’s and took a taxi in search of a Korean BBQ restaurant that Mike’s friend wanted to find. She is a journalist for some magazine and had to come up with some regular reviews of eateries in Hanoi. So, why shouldn’t we tag along.
Our review - cheap, tasty, filling and a nice airy atmosphere, plus more good beer! Please clean the toilets.
Chua Huong - Perfume Pagoda & plastic phones
With Mike and his friend Yen, we visited the Perfume Pergoda. This was a bit like the Vietnamese version of the Haj in Mecca. Our trip to the pergoda was via a small boat, which stopped at various smaller temples along the river and then deposited us at the foot of a mountain.
It had started raining and we trudged from the river up a well worn, very slippery and rocky path, passing by more smaller temples and stalls selling all manner of goods to be used as offerings at the temples. On sale were
Back in Hanoi
wanna buy a book madam? among other things, plastic mobile phones, fake American currency, plus lots of fake plastic gold items and charms. The idea was that these items were then burnt as offerings to long dead ancestors at the temples. Supposedly, once burnt they made it to the other world so that your deceased relatives then had a comfortable after life, complete with US currency and a mobile phone! We wondered if they ever thought to burn a fake instruction manual so those on the other side could learn how to use these items.
The climb to the main temple took us a few hours, slipping on big rocks and mud, doing our best to avoid colliding with the huge crowd of people heading up and down the slope. Again, I suffered from the leg hair pulling of some of the locals. Yen told me that a lot of the people walking close to us also commented in Vietnamese how impressed they were at how “strongly the westerners walk”, meaning we took big strides compared to those around us I guess.
Once on the mountain top, we came to the gate leading down to the main temple, which is situated inside a
cave. So, down the many stairs we went and then inside this huge cave, complete with many altars for making offerings and prayers for luck and also for the well being of their ancestors. The scene amazed us, some of the altars had flashing and spinning lights shows - in the middle of a cave!?!
The crowd inside was huge and queuing patiently in an orderly line is definitely not a Vietnamese trait - pushing and shoving is definitely the Vietnamese way to go in such circumstances. It did not seem to trouble some people that they were shoving 80 year old women, causing them to loose their footing on the wet floor of the cave, in their rush to burn the mobile phone or the photocopied US dollars. We all had a turn at grabbing a few older people just before they went belly up on the rocky cave floor. It was like some kind of crowd mentality had taken over and those around you forgot they were not the only ones in the temple. Weird stuff!
Instead of walking, we took the cable car back to the bottom of the mountain near the spot the small
Perfume Pagoda
Yen, Lorenza, Rob - tried not to make her look too short! boats were waiting. Getting on the cable car was much like the experience with the crowd in the cave. An orderly line would have made sense, but no - trying to get on board was like getting caught in a ruck or a maul in a Rugby match. We four had a few advantages over the locals in this case, both Mike and I were at least 20 to 30 kilos heavier than most of the locals and we have both played Rugby at some stage - so the end result of the competition to get on the cable car the score board read ...
Aussies = 1................Pushy Vietnamese Crowd = 0.
Aside form the crowd, it was a really interesting day and an insight into a part of Vietnamese culture that we found a bit hard to fathom. Although the temples were essentially Buddhist, the statues and images were very confusing and even Yen could not really explain who or what some of them were supposed to represent.
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