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Published: March 27th 2008
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We left for Vietnam at the start of the Lunar New Year (biggest travel date of the year) the expectation was for 180 million people to be moving about the country over the course of 10 days. We were also leaving in the midst of a 50 year winter storm (which for Shanghai meant ~5cm of snow and the closing of schools for four days), this storm had stranded just under one million people at the train station in Guangzhou which was our layover to Hanoi. So to recap—traveling on the busiest weekend of the year along with 180,000,000 other people and flying into a city with one million stranded pilgrims trying to get home to see their families (many only go once or twice a year). How did it go? The food on the plane wasn’t very good, bit tight making our connection but otherwise excellent GO TEAM CLARE!
We were only in Vietnam for 10 days and so we chose to stay in and around Hanoi, figured we would do Ho Chi Minh City and everything in between when we had more time. Hanoi is a very nice little city (geographically small, 4 million people), we walked with
relative ease everywhere we went. The city is centred on Hoan Kiem Lake which you can walk all the way round in about half an hour and this makes for a great landmark. Our hotel was in the Old Quarter three or four blocks from the lake and right in the heart of the action. “The action” basically means shopping, eating and dodging traffic, all of which we did like it was 1999!
Our tips outside of the city were to Halong Bay, the Perfume Pagoda and Hoa Lu.
The Perfume Pagoda was really very impressive. At the end of a one hour paddle down a river that wound through some fantastic scenery of towering cliffs and rice paddies we ended up at the foot of a large flight of stairs set into a steep hill. These take you up to a level area that was filled with food stands and tent restaurants getting ready for Tet (starting the next day) because this is a popular holy place during the New Year celebrations. It was in one of these restaurants that we had our lunch and behind this that I saw the cage of chickens and the cage
of cats outside the kitchen. I had a meat dish that wasn’t labeled but nobody would tell me if I could add cat to my “list of God’s creatures that I’ve eaten”, I’m just going to add it.
The Pagoda is a series of about seven altars (terminology?) in a cave waaaay up the side of a peak, very cool. There are lists of names that honour those who died while protecting the temple during air raids by the French, Japanese and lastly the Allies—we’ve all bombed these people—luckily they seem pretty good natured about it, I’m still mad at that S.O.B. who called me “old” in Thailand!
Halong Bay is a UNESCO world heritage site (one of five in Vietnam I believe) and I must admit it is a most righteous bay. This was a two hour bus ride outside of Hanoi then we board a boat that we spent the night on while anchored in the bay. It was actually very much like the paddle to the Perfume Pagoda, the peaks and caves were very similar. It was a very cool trip and I’d suggest it to anybody traveling in Vietnam, we had a bit of trouble
with hairy little stowaways keeping us up at night but Michelle held me close and managed to rock me back to sleep.
Hoa Lu was the ancient capital of Vietnam (Hanoi will celebrate it’s 1000th year as capital in 2010) and has some interesting surviving temples. As interesting as those temples were the only thing worth writing about here is Michelle forcing the bus to stop three times so that she could vomit on the side of the road. I tell you, at Hanoi’s 2000th anniversary villagers will still be telling the story of the towering white devil who shot forth from a van and puked in their rice patties. I dutifully stood behind her and held her hair out of the filth, it’s kind of nice really, I’ve never had a sorority sister.
All in all an excellent trip, a must stop location for people doing a tour of Asia. Vietnam has all of the scenery and rustic charm that westerners imagine of the Far East but is in fact not that easy to find. That’s all I’m going to write because I’m just plain deep down in my bones lazy and these are harder to write
than you may think. In the words of a great 20th century, anonymous, Vietnamese thinker… “why can’t you just leave us alone?”
Next trip Hong Kong in May, talk to you then.
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