Advertisement
Published: December 18th 2007
Chinese train food
On the way from HK to Hanoi, as usual we stocked up with the local giant pot noodle...(N)
"The railroad is the chief of many mechanical devices enabling us to get away from where we are to where we are no better off". So said Ambrose Bierce, the American newspaper columnist, satirist, short-story writer and novelist, who disappeared in the early 20th century Mexican Revolution, in his book
The Devils Dictionary.
Anyway, the reason for including that quote is that I would still have been happy, after our own railroad journey between Hong Kong and Vietnam, if I was no better off in Hanoi than I had been in Hong Kong, where we had eaten, drank and sightseen to our hearts' content.
(Incidentally, the same author defined marriage as "a community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two." Congratulations on your recent engagement, future Mr & Mrs Holbrook!!)
FROM HONG KONG TO HANOI So we left HK after a week, having been amazed by the skyscrapers and the energy of the place, by how new and old collide (e.g. the small incense shrines in the doorways of modern shops), and how English and Chinese both manage to be the official language. Of course we didn't fit in everything we
wanted to, and are already looking forward to next time!
The journey to Vietnam was long but fairly uneventful. A bus outside our hotel in Causeway Bay took us over the water from Hong Kong Island to Kowloon; a high-speed train carried us over the Chinese border to Guangzhou, from where we took an overnight train west to Nanning, arriving before 06h00. A couple of hours later, we took the day's first local train for 3 hours to Ping Xiang, and from there a motorised rickshaw took me, Paula and another gringo, plus bags, to the Chinese border with Vietnam. By the time we reahed our hostel in Hanoi, the trip had taken 30 hours door to door.
From the journey, a couple of things stick in my mind: at Guangzhou, there had been the typical scene outside a Chinese railway station: hundreds of people waiting in the concourse, long queues to get inside to have luggage x-rayed (but there are no monitors so nobody knows what's inside!), then us going off to wait in the large waiting room that corresponded with the particular train we were taking. There were few foreigners at this point, and Paula &
On the border between China and Vietnam
Paula with the driver, who wouldn't be photographed on his own! This is how we travelled from Ping Xian bus station in China to the Vietnamese border. I really stood out with our rucksacks, drawing stares from all angles as we looked to find a space to wait. It reminded me of being the only white face amongst a thousand black ones in Malawi, and scaring young children who called out
mazangu ("white man") at my pale face! Anyway, back in China, about 20 mins before scheduled departure, passengers began to mass at the barrier that separated them from the corridor and bridge to the platform. Soon there were a couple of hundred of them. A nervous platform guard unlocked the gate and shouted from his megaphone something that was probably "Walk don't run!", but in reality he should just have been grateful that he didn't get mown down, cartoon-style, by the charging hordes. Infants on shoulders clinging for their lives, huge boxes & trolleys, a few backpackers and a couple of thousand Chinese (one of whom carried a bamboo pole over his shoulder, a suitcase suspended behind him and a medium-sized television in front) poured forth to make themselves comfortable on their bunk for the night. Thankfully, we all had reserved places, otherwise there would surely have been bloodshed.
On the local train the following
Backpacking: Not all it's cracked down to be!
Our room in The Ritz - you could see Hoan Kiem Lake from the window morning, we saw a sales pitch from a young Chinese woman for a torch that is powered by dynamo(?), basically you repeatedly squeeze the spring-mounted handle to charge it up, and it lights up LEDs (I think, not a bulb anyway, so it should last for ages)
and it was waterproof. We thought to ourselves that we would get us one of those darn critters and, costing less than $1, it has served us well since.
The motorised rickshaw driver spotted us as soon as we emerged from Ping Xiang station, long before we saw him, beating others to secure us with his services. After the 15-min ride to the Vietnamese border, as we got down from the rickshaw into the beating sun, he offered us a money exchange service (Vietnamese
dong are not easily available outside of the country) and after some negotiation on our part we disposed of our remaining Chinese cash. Numerically we were much better off, as there are 32,000
dong to the pound, but only 15
renminbi...
Immigration formalities completed on both sides, we were in Vietnam - Good Morning! Well, early afternoon. This is where the mafia element kicked in: the bus
driver at the border said he definitely
wasn't going to Hanoi (although he seemed to say that he was, before a taxi driver said something in Vietnamese to change his mind), so we were obliged to take the said taxi to the nearest town, from where we could catch a bus to the capital. Except the taxi took us to his friend's minibus service, not the bus station! We haggled down the fare, with 4 other gringos at this point, for the 3 hour journey from $12 per person to $7, and sat back to enjoy the scenery: lots of greenery, banana trees, conical-hatted workers reaping rice in green paddies, and water buffalo being put through their paces. Instead of dropping us off where we agreed, however, we were deposited at the driver's friend's guesthouse, who unsuccessfully tried to divert us away from our pre-booked hostel - called The Ritz! - which was a good job as it turned out to be very comfortable.
A brief intro to Vietnam Vietnam has suffered more than its fair share of invaders, starting with the Chinese for 1000 years (There is a Chinese-style gate called "Friendship Gate" at the border point,
which is a touch ironic given that the two countries are reputed to still distrust each other!) and, more recently, with the French and Americans. The French took power in 1847, relinquishing it to the Japanese after the fall of Paris during WWII, but when they tried to reassert authority after their own liberation, they encountered fierce resistance from the Vietnamese, led by Ho Chi Minh ("Bringer of Light") and the communists. The 1954 French defeat at the fortress of Dien Bien Phu, in the northwest of Vietnam, spelled the beginning of the end of their Indochina empire. Vietnam was divided into two states, communist in the north and democratic in the south. When the communists later invaded the south, the Americans jumped in, ostensibly to prevent communism becoming dominant in the country. However, 20 years, 58,000 casualties and circa 15 MILLION tonnes of bombs later they withdrew. Shortly after, the communists had routed the abandoned south Vietnamese army, then unified the country and changed the name of the capital of the south, Saigon, to Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC).
Communism has been dominant in Vietnam for a generation, but the authorities have been forced to give the population
the chance to make money on their own, as there has been widespread discontent with a system that was keeping the people mired in poverty. The state has allowed this freedom while not allowing any political dissent and keeping other communist elements, which is going to be difficult for them to maintain.
On a linguistic note, there are very few multi-syllable words in Vietnamese, in fact the country is called Viet Nam, and the capital is not Hanoi, it's Ha Noi. And Ha Noi translates as "City in a bend of the river", which is not as exciting as its former name of Thanh Long, meaning "City of the Soaring Dragon".
HANOI Hanoi can be, and often is, an attractive city: leafy avenues are lined with tamarind trees and many buildings are French colonial in design. The guidebook sells Vietnam's capital as a place that is "pulsating with life, bubbling with commerce and rich in exotic scents", and it's right. Old Hanoi, the historic heart of the city, has 1000 years of history and straddles the modern and the medieval. On the modern side, traffic in the form of scooters heaves through the streets, and internet cafes
Fruit vendors, Hanoi
Paula had one of these pineapples, cut into the shape of an ice-cream (see below) are dotted everywhere. Bright signs advertise everything from tours and silk shops to bars and restaurants. More interesting is the old side of the city: temples are wedged between shops, caged song birds tweet from trees, clothes and art shops spill onto pavements, where vendors sell food, drink, cut nails and dislodge nits!
There is the meeting of the French colonial (baguettes, berets and building style) with the fast-paced Asian (narrow bustling streets, mopeds and exotic foods). Although, in truth, we saw only a few old men in berets and had only one unprompted exchange in French, so these features are bound to die out in the next generation. Many buildings have elegant facades but are narrow and long, a result of a former tax that was based upon the width of street frontage! They are known as
tube houses. There are very few high rises in central Hanoi.
Street vendors trade both at pavement stalls and by walking around with fruit and other cheap eats in their baskets. Some of them have found a ruse to coax more money out of the visitors by almost forcing them to wear their traditional conical hat and carry the bamboo
pole over the shoulder while a friend takes a photo. The foreigner then feels obliged to buy something, which then costs significantly more than it should. Foreigner then sheepishly pays the inflated price (tends to be older tourist) or gets into an argument with the vendor who acts all aggrieved (tends to be backpacker watching the pennies) - I watched this scenario play out several times in town and from our hotel balcony!
The Vietnamese are total snackers, whether at dawn or midnight there are always people tucking into noodles or barbecued meat. Our favourite incarnations of street sustenance are the
bia hoy ('fresh beer") and
pho (traditional Vietnamese noodle soup) stalls, the former requiring a whole paragraph to itself:
Bia Hoy - literally meaning 'fresh beer',
bia hoy is Vietnam's own microbrew, a pilsener-type of lager served from kegs on street corners, delivered from breweries on a regular basis and not using preservatives, which gives it a fresh taste. It is a social place, where locals and foreigners sit at small tables, perched on even smaller stools, and drink for 7p a half-pint glass - it's reputed to be the cheapest beer in the world! We had
Bia hoi ahoy!
Street corner, Hanoi. several
bia hoy stops during our time in Hanoi, and also repaired a couple of times to a bar called 'Half Man Half Noodle', which we liked and still only charged $1 for a beer.
We didn't know before we went that Vietnamese coffee is well-regarded around the world, and there are street cafes where you can drink coffee in the same style as the
bia hoy places, on diddy chairs at umpa-lumpa sized-tables. Interestingly, white coffee in Vietnam is normally served with a splash of
condensed milk instead of normal milk - try it, you might like it!
Crossing the road in Old Hanoi is like nothing I have done before. The stream of scooters is never-ending and so the pedestrian has to simply walk out into the road - slowly! - and allow them to drive around. It's a bit daunting the first time, but soon you are walking into rush hour traffic as if any vehicle would just bounce off you.
It is amazing to see that there are few cars in Hanoi, and almost none if you don't count the taxis. Everyone gets around by scooter, half-way between a moped and a motorbike.
Street scene, Hanoi
This photo doesn't even begin to convey the scooter-induced chaos... The scooters drive on both sides of the road, don't stop at lights and then park on the pavements, basically forcing pedestrians to walk in the road. Many Vietnamese make a living by driving locals and tourists from A to B, and it was not possible to walk for 5 minutes in central Hanoi before being spotted and asked if we wanted a
moto somewhere. The
motos carry everything and everyone everywhere in Vietnam, not just Hanoi: we're talking a whole family squashed together on the seat; also, another time, a passenger carrying sheets of glass; a passenger carrying a large wooden cabinet; 25 bags of pet goldfish attached to a pole; and a similar number of inflatable 12" Father Christmas figures! There are also plenty of
cyclo-taxis, consisting of a double seat on wheels propelled forwards by a man (they are always men) on a bike behind.
A number of middle-aged men wore green military-style helmets with a red star on the front in Hanoi, and I wondered why. Speaking later to a veteran from the south about this, he told me through gritted teeth that they would have been northern communist
Viet Cong fighters during the war
Ho Chi Minh's stilt house
The dwelling of a modest man. - his old enemy.
The man himself Ho Chi Minh is regarded as communist ideologue and the great liberator from French colonialism, whose wishes on death were for a simple burial, but this was not granted to him. However, to our chagrin, the
Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum did not contain the embalmed corpse of the man himself, as he spends September to November on holiday, I mean getting re-waxed, in Russia. It would have made a nice triple to catch a glimpse of him, as with with Lenin and Mao, but at least we were able to walk around outside the complex and saw the modest
Presidential Palace, more like a large colonial mansion, and HCM's
stilt house while we were there, which also had a small garage of his old cars (I could just imagine it, American used-car-style: "Buy a reliable motor from Honest HoChi!). A famously modest man, he didn't even have a tasteful personalised registration such as "HCM 123". (HCM is supposed to have lived in the stilt house on and off between 1958 and 1969, but there is some skepticism about this, it would have been a very tempting place for the Americans to bomb
it if so). HCM's image adorns all Vietnam's notes, there is a large portrait of him in the main post office in Ho Chi Minh City, and the policemen laugh and smoke under his image while attending to business in stations across Hanoi.
We caught the other sights in Hanoi that interested us the most, such as:
One Pillar Pagoda, the best way to describe it is a small wooden shrine, originally built on a single stone pillar in 1049, designed to resemble a lotus blossom, and which lasted until the 1950's, when French decided to destroy it in a wantonly malicious act just before they fled. The current one is a modern reconstruction, near to which is also another pagoda called
Dien Huu, which was also attractively set out around a courtyard.
Dong Xuan Market, sprawling over 3 floors and selling the usual stuff: vegetables, clothing & cloth, meat & dried fish; some women were peeling dried prawns which seemed a particularly arduous task given the temperature and the generally pungent smell in the fish area.
Hoan Kiem Lake ("Lake of the Restored Sword") is a picturesque body of water in the centre of Hanoi,
Mural detail, outside Ngoc Son Temple, Hanoi
Depicts the sword being restored to its heavenly owners on the back of the giant tortoise. apparently named after the curious incident of the giant tortoise. As legend goes, the said reptile took the sword from the incumbent king as he sailed on the lake, but this was ok by him because the sword had come down from the heavens anyway, and he'd already used it to drive out the Chinese from his country. As well as being a pleasant place, the lake is home to a small leafy island that bears the peaceful 18th Century
Ngoc Son Temple, dedicated to the eponymous scholar and warrior who drove out the Mongols from present-day Vietnam in the 13th Century. Giant 250kg tortoises still live in the lake, and all Hanoi residents want to catch a rare sight of one, believed to augur good luck.
The Temple of Literature was founded in 1070 and dedicated to Confucius, its objective was to honour scholars of literature, and was built on the site of Vietnam's first university, which was founded as far back as 1076. Until the 15th century, their achievements were recorded on stone stelae, which themselves were mounted on the backs of tortoises, which are revered animals. There are 5 separate courtyards, some containing trees, ponds &
lotus flowers, others containing a temple or gallery. The central path was for the king only, while the mandarins had to use the side pathways. Interestingly, there is an inscription on 2 old stelae outside the main gate that requests that all visitors dismount from their horses!
Bach Ma Temple was our favourite in the city, difficult to say why, only that it was a real oasis inside the small building and courtyard compared to the chaos and noise outside, and the guys inside offered us traditional tiny cups of tea unprompted and without expecting anything in return, and smiled when we took a picture of them painting temple characters.
St John's Cathedral, inaugurated by the French in 1886, has seen better days, like when the French where still here. Christianity is small in Vietnam, and the cathedral was dark inside and almost empty,a contrast to the lively temples where people are always milling around and lighting incense sticks.
The streets of Hanoi's Old Quarter are known as the "36 Streets", each one named after a specific profession, a system dating from the 13th century, for example 'Silk St', 'Pickled Fish St' etc. Although the names remain,
Money burning, Bach Ma Temple, Hanoi
People believe that their dead can use it in Hell, before they go to Heaven (it's not real money). there is no such discipline today; clusters still exist, however, such as the place where artisans carve intricate gravestones (often with treated photos of the deceased at the top), and where blacksmiths hammered on anvils, sending sparks flying, spice sellers, a row of shops selling Buddhist altars (one of which is present in almost every shop and home, adorned with photos and offerings such as flowers, fruit and drinks),
Hong Ma (
Counterfeit Street) where fake "ghost" money is sold for burning in Buddhist ceremonies, as well as plenty of clothes (including Ho Chi Minh t-shirts!), silks, lacquer, ceramics and sunglasses. There is also a restored Chinese merchant's house, which is now a museum.
We also wandered along the street known for its galleries, near the lake, some paintings were impressive, such as saffron-robed monks walking in the desert, but others were not up to much.
A famous north-Vietnamese form of entertainment revolves around
Water Puppets. This art form is around 1000 years old, with its origins outdoors in the wet rice paddies. Nowadays, various scenes and events are performed inside, in a small theatre, where the puppets are manipulated in and on a watery stage. There were 16
short performances in the 45 minutes, including a mini boat race between the puppets, a home-coming, fire-breathing dragons and children playing together. The puppeteers stand waist-high in water, behind a bamboo screen, and skillfully manipulate the characters, while a small orchestra located to the upper left of the 'stage' provide the sound on traditional instruments. Water puppetry is a bit like a cartoon, designed for kids but enjoyed by adults too.
Link to more info on Water Puppets Vietnamese food is very good - as well as the noodles, the main dishes are rice-based and revolve around chicken, pork, beef or vegetarian. Due to the long, thin nature of the buildings, the toilet is almost always reached by walking through to, or next to, the kitchen (please tell me that I didn't just see the cook clean her ears with a chopstick...). One night we ate in a wooden restored Old Hanoi house, other times in what appeared to be converted tube houses, the heavy wooden furniture and old patterned floor tiles making me think that they used to be French colonial. Another time we had
Cha Ca at a restaurant which serves nothing else.
Cha Ca is a Vietnamese speciality where the fish
comes to the table raw, along with sliced onion and a number of different greens (mostly consisting of chopped spring onion, mint, coriander and dill; I have a healthy distrust of too much green, which this time looked like a wild hedgerow). The fish is fried in a frying pan on a charcoal burner on the table, then all of the above is added briefly for a flash-fry, before being removed and put in your little bowl to be eaten along with
bun (cold vermicelli noodles) and peanuts, with the pungent and very Vietnamese fish sauce called
nuoc mam. The waiter did it the first time for us and then off we went and had a few more portions. Yum.
An in-depth look at Cha Ca by a big fan called Noodle Pie There is also a good jazz club in town, run by a man who teaches sax at the Hanoi Conservatory.
SAPA From Hanoi, it was fairly straightforward to visit the hills of northwest Vietnam around the former colonial hill-station town of Sapa, at 1,650m altitude, built by the French in 1922. We took a night train on a rickety old chugger, sharing a compartment with 4 Vietnamese passengers, which gave us a great chance to talk
about life and weddings in Vietnam. We arrived at 05h30 (too many early mornings...) and took a 1-hour bus to Sapa. Day broke on the bus as we drove through the mountain mist, and a red ball of sun appeared on the horizon. We were here for a couple of days trekking in the Lower Sapa Valley, close to the Chinese border, drawn by promises of near-vertical, cascading rice terraces and towering peaks.
After breakfast we headed downhill in a reasonable-sized group of about 10 people. In the distance we could see the misty peak of Fansipan, the highest mountain in Indochina (3,143m). We were walking in Autumn/Winter, but it was still a warm 20 degrees, even at the altitude! Over the course of the next couple of days, we climbed up and down picturesque rice fields in the valley, hopped over bamboo irrigation poles, and saw more water buffalo, as well as a couple of abandoned French farmhouses, a couple of marijuana plants, lots of taro vegetables, plenty of bamboo, and plants that could be used to make the colour indigo. We walked over a couple of very rickety bridges that were straight out of Indiana Jones.
Accompanying us were a couple of girls and women from local hillside villages, they made bouquets and headdresses for the women in our group from flowers and plants that we walked past. Their minority group is known as
Black H'mong, and what they got out of accompanying us was the chance to sell a few pieces of craft at the end of the day - and to practise their English of course.
The streams that wove through the hills and green trees often provided a pleasant melodic rippling water soundtrack, and the villagers siphon off water from them to irrigate their rice paddies, which were greener than they had been in China, and their curves were more defined than they had been in Long Ji, which made them all the more attractive for it.
Water is also siphoned along bamboo tube channels to a contraption which consists of a bucket at one end and a large wooden hammer at the other. The water flows into the bucket, which tips over when full, raising the hammer into the air as it does so. Gravity brings that hammer back down, and it pummels a bucket of unhusked rice underneath it.
On observation, it is so ineffective that it doesn't even seem worth going to the trouble of building one, for the little it seemed to achieve!
We stopped for a drink at a shack in a tiny village called something like Y Lin Ho, where Paula got a canned tamarind fruit drink, but it was not really possible to taste the fruit as there was heaps of sugar in too! Lunch was in an equally small place called Lao Chai He. Later in the afternoon, we saw people making their own incense sticks, before arriving at the homestay where we would spend the night, the group of us on mattresses in the loft of the owners' house. The village, called Ta Van, was populated by a minority group called
Red Dzao, due to the red headgear that some of the women sport. In common with the Black H'mong, they have intricate, sometimes geometrical, embroidered patterns on dyed cloth.
I wanted a shower, and our guide Dai said either to use the little outside shack that the owners use, with the coldwater tap, or I could go bathe in the river, but "I recommend the shack because people pee
in the river" he kindly informed me! Our hosts prepared a wonderful stir-fry of pork, beef and greens for us, with garlic chips beforehand, and kept making us drink glasses of the local rice wine firewater - it was all very social. Dai also taught us a chopstick game which I will try to demonstrate when home, although the fug of the rice wine and my general lack of dexterity may impede this.
It was also Friday night, so half the group decided on a foray to the local bar/bottleshop to join in what sounded like a karaoke night as bad as we have back home. However, they seemed to not want to sing Vietnamese pop while we were there, so we murdered a few western songs and then they picked up again when we'd had enough. Another success of cultural interaction!
The following morning, after a brekkie of banana pancakes and local tea, we moved to terrain that was more slippy than the previous day; there had been heavy rain the previous week. The heat was on again, but there was a refreshing breeze. The highlight of the walk was passing through a bamboo forest and seeing
Sapa
Workers in the field near an abandoned French farmhouse a 100m waterfall just around the corner. Before getting back to Sapa, we visited a local house of 6 people in another Red Dzao village, called Giang Ta Chai, where the grandmother was cooking. The lintel of the front door was supported on glass bottles to protect it from being chewed by bugs, the floor was made of earth, and the air inside was pretty thick from the bamboo fuel she was using to cook, while in other corner of the kitchen there was a huge wok that was being used to cook pigfood. She gave us a demonstration of their large hand mill, grinding flour with more energy that most of us could have mustered up.
Paula & I headed off on our own in the afternoon to a village called Cat Cat, it was an important place to the French as they installed a hydroelectric station there, but this is now abandoned. Although it is a working village, the inhabitants have made it an attractive place for visitors to walk through, down the hillside on a path past the old hydro station and a pretty waterfall. It cost 10,000 dong (35p) to enter.
We were back
in Sapa to catch its Saturday market, which is well-known by tourists as well as locals. Apparently there was an area of it which used to be a good place for young people to meet others from different villages in the area in the evening after, but this became less possible as tourist numbers increased and began taking photos. The courtship side to the market has thus declined while the tourist-orientation side of it has increased. Nevertheless, Sapa market remains an important place for trading between local people, especially of fruit, veg, meat and cloth. We recognised some of the veg, but plenty not. The meat section was fairly tame, with interesting pieces such as trotters and buckets of chicken feet (I ate one them in Beijing (not raw) and have not looked at them the same since, either still attached to hen, or not).
I also saw the slaughter of a chicken: picked out of a bamboo cage, it flailed wildly, knowing what was coming, but the women butcher had clearly done it many times before, and there was no getting away. Its throat was cut, blood dripped out, then the body was unceremoniously dumped into a bucket
of hot water so that it could be easily plucked. A large fish that had looked decidedly unwell before my attention had been caught by the chicken was now decidedly worse-off, its lower half having been removed for descaling.
There was a gathering outside Sapa's church of a group of Red Dzao women, all their headgear making it seem like a Father Christmas convention! The women in the town carry their babies on their backs in a large shawl, as in South America.
So what was the downside? The region is accurately described by one of the guidebooks as having the problem of a "disconcerting human zoo element". Just as Sapa market now also sells "Good Morning Vietnam" t-shirts and other tat, parts of the villages we walked through had become glorified shops. I think this is good in some way, because it gives traditionally poor people the opportunity to make some extra money by selling their weavings, but for example they also sell bracelets made in China. The guidebook even comments that the older women are known for their strong arm tactics(!), and a familiar sight is a "frenzy of elderly H'mong women clamouring around hapless backpackers
to hawk their goods". Also, before setting out, we had booked to be in a walking group of max 5 people in attempt to at least try and be 'low impact' but our group was 10. Another issue was photography: we thought that it was fine to take pictures of the girls and women who spent the day with us, checking with them first, but others had their lenses in the faces of almost every villager they met, which was somewhat uncomfortable. However, we had no doubt that the organised trip (as opposed to going independently) was a great way for us to get a feeling for the place without spending a whole week there, so no complaints overall.
There was time for yet another market before heading back to Hanoi, in a village called Bac Ha, which although also attracts its fair share of tourists has loads of local business going on. You can buy everything from caps and sunglasses to piglets, dogs and water buffalo, and plenty of raw meat. Vendors carrying chickens would weigh them on small portable scales they carried with them, for immediate sale. Tourists stick to clothes, fabrics and carvings, and it was
probably no coincidence that the stallholders wearing traditional clothes were doing a brisker business than those who wore more modern western attire. The most distinctive minority in this area are known as the
Flower H'Mong, with distinctive petals embroidered on their clothing.
After Bac Ha, we had a brief visit to a local village can Ban Pho. Houses were made from soil, including the walls, which keeps houses warm in winter and cool in summer. Bundles of cane lay around for firewood, and loads of corn was being dried for food and to make the local 45%!c(MISSING)orn wine. Pigs, hens and ducks lazed and strutted around, and there was the touching sight of a hen trying to teach her chicks to scramble up and down a hill, clucking around them and it got com ical as it nearly attacked a tubby, middle-aged Frenchman trying to help one of the stragglers.
Bac Ha and Ban Pho are a little difficult to reach and, coming back, as on the way there, progress was impeded by a JCB involved in mountainside road-building. On both times, it manoeuvred to the side when the traffic build up was big enough and allowed
vehicles to pass, hugging the side as best as possible, and not looking the long way down over the edge.
It was a long drive back to the train station, but the scenery - consisting of small village after small village, interspersed with loads of greenery, was fascinating. I saw signs advertising a new Vietnamese beer called "Vinaken" in exactly the same font as Heineken! Before we got to the train station, we had a visit to a temple which sits on one side of a bridge, the river it spans is one of the borders Vietnam shares with China. As in other Buddhist temples, people burn fake money for their ancestors to spend in the afterlife.
While waiting to head back to Hanoi on the night train, I spotted a group that was definitely from China: there were a large number, were all wearing identical red baseball caps, and were being addressed by the guide through a megaphone!
Before we got to the station, I had my boots given a much-needed polish for 10,000 dong (65p). Another shiner came along halfway through and gave the first boot a real good shine, but both men left as
Halong Bay
The boat in the picture is similar to ours. soon as the 2nd boot was polished, so I had one boot gloss and one matt! We got to Hanoi at 06h00 the following morning, and headed to the lake to have some strong Vietnamese tea and kill time before our planned trip later that morning to Halong Bay, on the coast. Amazingly the lake was already a hive of activity, with older residents doing t'ai chi and playing badminton on the water's edge!
HALONG BAY The scenery at
Halong Bay is amazing. Literally meaning "Where the dragon descends into the bay", it is the most important natural wonder in Vietnam. It took 3 hours by bus to get there, and we had lunch onboard almost as soon as we arrived. It was a big boat, with a large top deck, underneath which was a communal/eating area, with enough cabins to sleep about 12 people. Halong Bay is famous for the 3,000 or so limestone protrusions from the green waters of the Gulf of Tonkin, in northeast Vietnam. Some of them are small, some are large enough to be sizable islands, and others are in the shape of animals if you look at them at a particular angle -
but all are impressively rugged through wind and wave erosion, and it was impossible, cruising past them on the boat, not to stare at them as they rose out as individuals from the water. There was a beautiful temperature on the boat, with a fresh breeze - it was as very relaxing. As if that wasn't enough, we also stopped at a
Hang Thien Cung ("Heaven Cave"), where stalactites and stalagmites dropped down and rose up in bulbous cauliflower and jellyfish shapes.
On our last afternoon in Hanoi, we were sure to visit a coffee stall, sitting outside on the pavement at the little table with a sweetened coffee, while karaoke was going on inside, we then had a final beer at Half Man Half Noodle, another final beer at another
bia hoi roadside den, and a final final beer at the newly-opened bar of our hostel, decorated with war memorabilia (including a 200kg hollow bomb which apparently cost $100!), before getting on the sleeper bus (and doing just that) to the Royal City of Hue, capital of Vietnam from 1802 to 1945, on the central coast. They were real beds in the bus (not just a reclining seat),
which I had never seen before. We knew the weather would be bad when we arrived, as we were going to catch the remnants of a typhoon, and sure enough when we arrived early the next morning it was lashing down, warm tropical style. At least we would have the chance to use the flimsy, $1, diesel-smelling plastic ponchos we had bought at the start of the Inca Trail in Peru but which, thankfully, we hadn't needed to use until this point. There was no chance of hoping that such furious rains would just 'blow over'!
*****
Advertisement
Tot: 0.126s; Tpl: 0.02s; cc: 8; qc: 25; dbt: 0.0301s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
