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Published: December 13th 2005
We alighted at Ha Noi in the early hours of the morning, and were met with the image of thousands of Vietnamese - jogging, performing callisthenics and playing badminton in the streets. After being 'mislead' once more as to the destination of the taxi we were placed in (not the coach office as told but a hotel to sell us to) we de-stressed with a short nap to catch up on the sleep lost from the overnight coach.
The time spent in Ha Noi was punctuated by 3 days away in Halong bay - another Unesco heritage site. For ease we’ll consider the city as one chunk.
The time in Vietnams famous capital was enjoyable, both for the culture and its adaptation to 21st century life, which blends into a frenzied mix of masses of traffic tearing around the city streets, meals all taken on the pavements and street corners, and socialising being the point where the two blend.
The traffic; one of the most difficult things for me and Gill to do was trust the advice on how to cross the beeping mass of vehicles which is the road - 'step slowly into the blaze of fast
Halong Bay Vista
No sign of the Owl and the Pussy Cat yetmoving cars and motorbikes and walk at a slow and constant pace - they will avoid you'. The first time you try this and they really do avoid you, you feel like Moses after his Red sea trick. Even after the success of the first time though you feel nervous attempting the cross - which sometimes results in finding a local and crossing with them - placing them in between you and the traffic!
We didn't end up doing everything we wanted to in Ha Noi but we were going to be flying out of the city to Perth in W. Aus, so certain things had to be sorted, and time was running out.
One thing we (well, Gill really) made sure of doing was to visit Halong bay. This place is beautiful, and another site to which only photos can do justice - and it is another of those 'film guzzling' areas. With 3 days and 2 nights - one night spent on a picturesque boat, floating on a deep blue sea in-between columns of rock, it was a short time not to forget. While there we swam in the sea off the boat waiting for a
veritable feast to be presented to us. Kayaking between and through the sea-carved columns of rock, trekking around an island and venturing through scarcely seen caves. Maybe a bit too poetic but you get the idea!
Halong was a good final destination to finish off our 6 month Asian adventure, and realising - especially on our last day - that our time here was up made us both very sad. It was strange that a lifestyle that was initially so alien to us could become so normal. A way of life so drastically differently from the western lifestyle in which we'd lived and worked all our life had now become our day-to-day experience and had blended with our understanding to form a new 'composite' outlook. I'm writing this entry in a campervan coasting through the Australian desert - in an environment so similar in ways, yet so totally different from Asia - that the recall of places such as Halong, and many others elicits feelings similar to that of being home sick. 6 months isn't a lifetime, or even 182 days for that matter, but when immersed in cultures so intense and all pervading as those of India and
Cambodia and Vietnam it's easy to lose a footing on the solid, 'reasonable' cultures of a science based west. So - goodbye Asia and thank you.
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