Northern Vietnam

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The border crossing into Vietnam was an experience! We climbed off the bus and walked up the road to Laos customs. Inside the building we joined a scrummage of people, the ones from our bus were all scrabbling to give their passports to the bus conductor who threw them over the counter to get stamped. We then waited in the crowd til they were returned one by one and passed through the crowd of people. We walked back to the bus where we were told not to get back on but to walk to Vietnam immigration. So, along with one or two other lost tourists, we set off in search of Vietnam - quite tricky with no signs or officials to ask. It turned out to be about a kilometre walk in rural no-mans land, over a bridge and up a hill along the road. Vietnamese immigration was not only no less shambolic, but also corrupt! We filled out the usual arrival card and the now standard quarantine questionnaire about swine flu. The twist was that lots of the tourists in front of us were being charged money when handing in their health form - we hung back to watch and the man was doing nothing but tear off the form the form from an advice slip and demand cash, so we simply tore the form off ourselves and handed it over. The other cheeky charge was impossible to avoid - the officials refused to take tourist passports to stamp unless we paid up - a foolproof scam! The next step was to go and get all of our bags off the bus and pass them through the security scanner, but our passports were among the very last to be returned and in fear of being left behind, Phil waited in the queue and Elly went to bring the bags (almost collapsing with 20kg on her front and 20kg on her back! Through security, we piled back on the bus, then 2 minutes later everyone had to get back off to have their passports checked (again!), then wait at the side of the road in Vietnam for the bus to pass through the border and pick us up. After all that early morning excitement, we settled in to enjoy a lovely 11 hour bus journey to Hanoi! We arrived in Hanoi at around 7pm as it was just going dark, and caught a taxi to the Old Quarter to find a hotel. Then we headed straight to a restaurant for a long overdue square meal!

The next morning we ate breakfast at a cafe in a beautiful spot overlooking the lake - a pain au chocolat and our first Vietnamese coffee in Vietnam which was very strong and sweet from the condensed milk. We walked to the market in the Old Quarter which was brilliantly chaotic, selling all manner of items to the hoards of locals. Amongst the more unusual things were huge sacks of dried shrimps and little bags of dried sea horses. We weaved our way through the Old Quarter streets, each taking on its own character, in that along one you would see only metal workshops and on the next, rows of florists. We went for a look at Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum (from the outside as it was closed!) It's a big, grey imposing Communist style building. We ate some great Vietnamese food at a cafe with a terrace upstairs which was a perfect vantage point for watching the bustling street scene below, and sampled our first Bia Hoi (literally "fresh beer" but it just means draft that's brewed on the premises).

The impact of the 24hour bus journey caught up with us, so we slept in til after 9am then walked down to the lake for breakfast in the sunshine. The leisurely start to the day came to an abrupt end when we realised that Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum was to close at 10.30am and, knowing what a long walk it was the previous day, we jumped in a metered taxi (which was surprisingly pricey!) Outside the mausoleum, we had to go through airport-like security and Phil had to hand in his camera, before we joined the long slow single file procession to the entrance, all the time ushered by guards in pristine crisp white uniforms. The long line was made up entirely of Vietnamese people and even outside everyone was silent - it seemed not just out of respect but more in a sense of awe, it felt like they treated Ho Chi Minh more as a God (or certainly a hero) than as a former political leader. Inside you follow in line up the stairs and into the dimly likt room where Ho Chi Minh's embalmed body lies in a glass casket surrounded by more white uniformed armed guards. You walk in one side of the room, walk around the body and out the other side, not slowing down or stopping and as a deterrent against this, yet more guards are on hand grabbing at everyone, especially children and hauling them forwards! Not just seeing the dead body, but the whole experience feels very odd - it seems almost designed to make you feel very insignificant. Odd also, in knowing that being worshiped in this way is so contrary to "Uncle Ho's" ideals. He was an egalitarian communist and wanted to be cremated and have his ashes divided into 3 and spread equally between North, Central and South Vietnam.

After the Mausoleum we popped to the next door Ho Chi Minh Museum, which taught us nothing more about the man as it was either written in Vietnamese or were just unfathomable abstract installations symbolising aspects of socialism! From there we walked past the presidential palace to the huge West Lake where locals were sitting along the shore in the shade, so we joined them and bought a young coconut to drink (it was horrible!). We walked along the shore passing people doing Saturday morning fishing to a pagoda that reflected in the water. On the way back to the hotel we stopped at the botanic gardens which are a calming respite from the frenzy of the traffic - the roads are teeming with scooters and motorbikes and you literally have to walk out in front of 4 lanes of traffic to cross the road hoping they drive round you! The gardens' primary use seemed to be as a setting for wedding photography, with countless women in white dresses scattered everywhere. We also came across a horrible cage full of monkeys kept in a horrible condition, being fed rice and one eating out of a crisp packet!

The next day we repacked our bags so as to have an overnight bag for the 2 day trip to Halong Bay. We went first thing to the travel agents to catch our bus to the coast, only to be told that a typhoon was about to hit so it wouldn't be safe to go. We were really disappointed - this was the first time on the trip we'd had to miss out on something that we'd planned and looked forward to - but the typhoon was predicted to last a few days and we couldn't afford to waste time sitting around waiting for it to pass. We'd got a bus South booked for the following night, so with 2 more days to kill in Hanoi, we decided having got our refund we would go on a day tour inland to the Ninh Binh Province. The first stop was at a couple of temples set in a wooded valley at Hoa Lu. They were dynastaic temples devoted to ancient kings "Dinh Bo Linh" and "Den Le Dai Hanh" - really surreal places inside, very dark and clouded by incense with Vietnamese tourists crowding into a tiny back room housing a statue of the king to worship and leaving offerings. From here we were driven to Tam Coc where we went for lunch at a restaurant with everyone from our minibus before taking a boat down the river. The two of us were rowed down in a sampan by two local ladies. It began to rain as we set off, but there was no escaping the beauty of the Tam Coc scenery - the river meandered through karst hills in a flooded landscape where the river merges into the rice paddy fields. We entered a cave and as we emerged the rain became torrential and we had to turn back. We stopped in the cave to bail water out of the boat and for the ladies to try and sell their embroidery. Having turned it down, we set off again into the torrential downpour and the thunderstorm in that had been in the distance was getting ever closer - slightly concerned that being on a river in a small metal dingy was not the best place to be! Back on dry land, we went to get changed into dry clothes, found our tour guide, but none of the rest of the group had found their way back! We sat and waited in the restaurant, had a coffee and watched the rain pounding the street outside. Eventually he rounded them up in the minibus and we headed back to Hanoi.

The next day was a write off due to the torrential rain. We got up to find the street outside was flooded by 2 ft of water! The rain was still pouring and only a few people left the shelter of shop doorways to wade down the street. We checked out of the hotel, but had limited options of where to go as to our right the road was closed and impassable, so we waded left a few hundred yards and ducked into a restaurant. they didn't do breakfast, so we sat it out till early lunch and had lovely self rolled beef and pineapple nem. We decided to make a dash for it when the rain had eased momentarily, in search of a coffee shop to while away the day in. We were out of luck as the coffee shop/bakery that we went splashing to was now just a bakery with no seats. We continued the search for a cup of coffee in the dry - up the road to what turned out to be a steamboat restaurant who had coffee on the menu but the best we could do was a coke in an empty room that looked like a school canteen. Eventually we ended up in an Australian run cafe bar where we came to rest in a soggy, grumpy heap til the sun came out. By then though, it was time to go back to the hotel to get our sleeper bus to Hue. We were picked up on an already packed minibus which we had to stand up in, stooping for the "5 minute" ride through the manic Hanoi traffic. The sleeper bus looked pretty full when we pulled up next to it and sure enough we were told we'd have to wait for the next one. However, minutes later we were ushered onto the bus to find the 2 remaining berths, on opposite sides of the bus. Elly was at the back of the bus where the 5 berths were joined, sandwiched on a sloping plank between two strangers - a Vietnamese girl and a big sweaty Spanish man.

After a less than pleasant night's sleep we arrived in Hue at about 7am and were greeted by touts to various hotels, one of which happened to be from one we intended to stay at and which we would never have found without his guidance as we didn't know where we had been dropped off! The hotel was very swish by our standards but cheap and we were given the penthouse suite (well, a big room on the top floor with a massive balcony!) After a breakfast the next morning of coffee and cake at a scruffy little restaurant round the corner, we walked over the Perfume River to the Citadel. At its centre is the walled Imperial City which you enter through a big dramatic gateway and across a moat. The layout of the Imperial City is highly symmetrical and the dynastaic temples and royal palaces are really ornate, made up of colourful tiles and mosaics. From here we walked in the intense heat along the river to Dong Ha Market - a labyrinth of stalls, from textiles to fruit and veg, basketware and key cutting - filled with locals sporting conical hats and doing their shopping.

The next day we went on an organsied tour around Hue as it was the only cost effective way of seeing the outlying Royal Mausoleums. The tour was a surprisingly painless experience - we were picked up by a bus full of tourists and driven to the Mausoleum of Emperor Tu Duc which was a series of elegant pavilions set in pine forests and reflected in serene lakes, where we were free to wander round rather than being herded by a guide wielding an umbrella! The next stop was the Mausoleum of Khai Dinh which was completely different (as each emperor designed his own mausoleum and had it built during his reign), a weird mixture of European Baroque and very ornamental Eastern styles, set up hundreds of steps on a hill. The interior is completely mosaicked in bright colours and has a life sized gold statue of the emperor sitting on his tomb. On the way to the next mausoleum, we stopped at a village where we saw the locals making incense sticks and conical hats. We were a bit templed out by the time we reached the mausoleum and it was a bit grand and stately, but it was set in lovely landscaped gardens of lily ponds and red-roofed pavilions. After a big buffet lunch at a nearby restaurant, we went to a "Garden house" - a bit of an odd "sight", as it seemed to be just the house of an old man whose pride and joy had apparently been his garden of exotic fruit trees. We next visited the Thien Mu ("Heavenly Lady") Pagoda on the bank of the Perfume River. It's quite beautiful building but was made famous when one of its monks burned himself to death in the street in Saigon in protest to President Diem's regime. From there we took a "Dragon Boat" (a big wooden boat with dragons carved into the front) down the river back to central Hue, past people living on tiny unsheltered boats and children playing in the river.

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