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Published: April 1st 2009
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The Cattle Wagon...
...comes free with air conditioning! We travelled from Hanoi to Ninh Binh on a 'hard seater' train. The train itself was very old and had metal grills over the windows making it appear like an animal pen. The seats and luggage storage areas cleverly transformed into hard sleeper beds for those on longer journeys. We walked to our seats and the our fellow passengers were very helpful in moving their luggage around to make space for ours. How lovely we thought. The journey was 2 hours long and cost $6. Not much for us, but a great deal for the Vietnamese who some were travelling the 18 hour long journey back home to Ho Chi Minh city costing over $30. With an average wage of $75 per month in Hanoi, this was approx half a months wages, hence a considerable sum of money. We used sign language and basic words from our phrase book to talk to most of our travel companions, but there was a young lady, a tour guide, who was able to understand written English and a small amount of spoken English, which was superb. We discovered that for the Vietnamese, it was a once in a lifetime pilgrimage to visit the Mausoleum
Hard Seat Option...
...for hardcore backpackers! of Ho Chi Minh and pay their respects.
Andy had bartered down some baguettes to go with our market bought banana's for our brunch. We had more than enough so shared them out demonstrating how to make a banana sandwich. After much laughter, our travelling companions took a banana in one hand and the baguette in the other and took alternative bites! They were very appreciative and we were very touched to be offered us Oreo cookies later on in the journey - a very expensive western treat for the Vietnamese. The scenery from the train was amazing - rice fields, farming villages, children playing, people working and beautiful lush green countryside stretching for miles. This took our minds off our numb bottoms for a while! As we approached Ninh Binh, we began to see the odd limestone peak jutting out of the rice fields and it was beautiful.
We walked into the town and found ourselves a hotel which we managed to negotiate down a better room with the luxury of a bath and hot water - the only drawback was that it was on the top floor (they either thought we were fit or wanted to
put us out of the way!) but we had a great view of the town. We hired some bicycles and with map in hand headed towards Tam Coc (meaning three caves), an area nicknamed 'Halong Bay of the Rice Fields'. We opted for the more scenic route as opposed to the 7km main road route with heavy traffic and not far into the journey the map didn't quite match up to the roads we were on. Not letting this concern us, we continued cycling down the muddy pathways which were in fact roads, taking in all the beautiful scenery and enjoying watching the locals carry out their daily chores. This was an amazing highlight and we were so pleased we had got lost else we would have missed out on this. Along the way people stopped us to ask where we were going and pointed us in the right direction. Claire kept saying "I must stay on the bike...I must stay on the bike." The thought of hand washing muddy clothes was not very appealing at all. We were cycling along the mud roads for ages and it was such great fun, however the more we cycled, the more we
got concerned about whether we were travelling in the right direction or not. We stopped and Andy knocked on the door of what looked like a house, but was in fact a school - my goodness, children came from everywhere to look and talk to us. Their age range was between 6-8 years old and even at that age they knew enough English to ask us our names, and where we were from. They were fascinated by our white skin and had probably never seen white westerners before. They understood us (we hoped) and we continued along the narrow roads to Tam Coc.
We eventually arrived at Tam Coc around 5pm which sadly was a little too late to actually go on the 3 hour boat tour as our bikes didn't have lights on and sun set was approx. 6pm, so we decided to cycle as far as we could into the peaks. Along the way we were lucky enough to see a woman leg rower in her sampan boat. Wow, all the women rowers here were physically strong, but this was really impressive. We saw a young boy who we believe was about 10 years old, washing clothes
in a small lake and the trip wouldn't have been complete without being approached by several over-zealous women trying to sell us their embroidery! We took the main road back to the hotel alongside the big articulated lorries, buses, motos and other cyclists.
The next morning we decided to hire out the bicycles again and make our way to Trang An. This is a new complex they are developing to encourage more tourists into the area. New hotels, new roads and even new temples were being built! A little bit of healthy competition for Tam Coc which currently has the monopoly. As it was still being developed there wasn't much open, however, the scenery was beautiful and the few locals we saw along the way were all very friendly as they waved us by.
We felt we had got off the tourist trail during our time in Ninh Binh. This enabled us to see how the north Vietnamese people lived. They are very much in touch with nature and family life is a top priority for them.
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