Hanoi

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So, it was with great sadness that I left Hoi An - what a great place. My favorite city in Vietnam.

For time budgeting purposes, we ended up flying into Hanoi. We'd decided that instead of doing Laos, we wanted to travel into the Yunnan province of China. It was supposed to be full of natural wonders, including one of the worlds deepest gorges and rice paddies built way up in the mountains that end up looking like staircases. But when we got to Hanoi, we went to the Chinese embassy, and it all went downhill from there. They seemed a little bit anxious about the upcoming olympics, so visa's were really hard to obtain. Even once you'd sent in your passport with photos, a contact/hotel reservation in China, and prepaid round-trip air tickets in and out, and waited the four to six days, there was no guarantee that you'd get the visa. We decided that all this trouble for little over a week's stay in China (by all accounts, not even close to enough time) was not worth it.

So! we decided to head instead for Laos, which is where we are off to today.

But in the meantime we hung around Hanoi. Let's see, what happened. We saw the temple of literature, which used to be a University, Vietnam's first actually. All the exams there were given by the king himself - talk about pressure! We also went to the revolutionary museum. So so. We got a couple of massages. Mine was fantastic, especially since it started with a sauna where they ran the steam through a bunch of herbs. Kieran said his was quite good as well, until the masseuse offered him sex. We were surprised by this as we'd found the name for the parlor (which was run out of a very posh hotel) in the lonely planet, where they'd specifically said there was no funny business going on here.

We did a walking tour of Hanoi, which really is the best way to get a feel for the city. Hanoi is much more bustling than Saigon (Ho Chi Min), there are more vendors on the streets, more touts with motorbikes following you, more kitschy shops everywhere, much more commerce, at a lower-end level anyway. There are streets full of spices - always a pleasure to walk down. Streets full of chains, old car parts, tools, shops full of safes. There are streets full of toys for kids, every colour you can imagine - toy helicopters buzzing about, entire shops of stuffed animals of pink and blue. There are entire neighborhoods dedicated to shoes. There is a very posh silk market.

In the center of town is a beautiful lake that is quite well lit at night. In the center of the lake is a temple, with a beautiful firetruck-red bridge. Excellent pictures. There are said to be giant tortoises in the lake - although they are rarely/never seen, about 10 years ago a corpse was found weighing over 250 kilos and over two meters long. There is some suspicion that the Vietnamese government had it moved there as we fail to understand how they could survive the urban development (namely the obscene amount of pollution).

Once we'd gotten our fill of Hanoi, we set off for Halong Bay, well recognized as one of natures most formidable sights. It's a bay of turquoise water full of giant limestone peaks coming out of the water from nowhere, and going vertically upwards as high as .. maybe 100 meters or so? Also home to some massive caves.

Halong Bay was a must do that I'd recommend to anyone for it's sheer beauty. Having said that, it was the most over-touristy thing I've done in my entire travels. The place is jam packed with people. When you explore the well-lit caves, you can hear nothing but people trying to talk over each other. When you leave, you must walk across several boats to reach your own, because even the massive dock cannot accommodate the number of boats. So I managed to enjoy the experience despite this, but I cannot help but think it would have been several times better if I'd been there thirty years earlier. I suppose it's this sort of thing that ruins travelling for me - the sense that I'm not discovering something mysterious, walking in on some ancient secret, but treading the same well-worn path as everyone else. Where's the adventure?

So now we head of for Laos, a twenty hour bus journey (bleh). I only have two weeks left in my trip! what a strange feeling.

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