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Published: October 16th 2008
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I loved, loved, loved Hanoi. Staying in the old French Quarter, every building had an ornate balcony and every street was full of shops and women selling products via two baskets strung to a pole carried on their shoulder.
Visiting Ho Chi Minh's museum, house, and mausoleum was an eye-opening experience and I'm forever grateful for seeing the Vietnam War and Vietnam's complex history from their perspective. Unfortunately, every year Ho Chi Minh's body is sent to Russia for 2 months for re-preservation so I did not actually get to see his body but I was fully satisfied with the plethora of other activities and homage attributed to Ho Chi Minh.
I had a mini-routine of waking up early, bargaining for a baguette filled with eggs and veggies and sitting by Hoan Kiem lake and watching the older ladies doing their stretches: slowly and methodically... it was very heart-warming and entertaining. Hanoi provided a funny deja vous feeling because they created an uncanny resemblence to the lakes in southern Minneapolis.
Hanoi was a great city to walk around and at night the evenings activities included a venture to the "bier hoi" corner. Beer Hoi meaning simply, draft beer.
For approximately 18 cents I could get a cup of beer, sit on a wee stool, and chat with locals and expats. I had one of the best nights I had in ages and by the end of it I was single-handedly convinced my future lie in teaching English in Hanoi (until I woke up the next morning 😉). In any rate, I met some truly grehttp://www.travelblog.org/Admin/edit-entry.htmlat people and enjoyed the relaxed atmosphere: it was a nice juxtapose to the ubiquitous chaos.
The next two days were filled with a lovely trip to Halong Bay, a world heritage area with land formations that envision a dragon swan diving into a bay, which is what the name means, roughly. It was the most relaxing days I had had in weeks: a boat prepared all our meals, we saw a massive cave, went kayaking, swimming, and took in the landscapes.
After Halong Bay I was a bit overwhelmed with the nubmers of tours and taking the advice of some young, French backpackers, changed plans in a 10 minutes and took a bus to a small town called Ninh Binh just south of Hanoi. It is the host of Tam Coc
Men playing Chinese Chess
You would often see men playing this, anywhere where they were as flat surface - where geological formations strikingly similar to Halong Bay were surrounded by rice paddies and fields, rather than seawater.
To get there from my hotel, and to explore the area, I rented a motorbike (very usual for me by now).
To see Tam Coc, you rent a small row boat where drivers switch off between rowing with their and rowing with their feet. lol. I kid you not. The driver, and his son, whom jumped in the boat about 10 minutes in and helped his father during the 2 hour journey (we saw a fair number of mother/daughter or father/son pairs) were highly entertained by the fact I arrived by motorbike, by myself. In fact, he told all his other friends who were drivers and then tehy were laugh or look at me shocked, motion driving a motorbike, I would agree, adn then they were start chatting away to one another. lol
Then I took my time getting out to a monkey park, passing fields, locals, people who are not jaded by tourism yet and still smile, friendly and curious, to anyone who does not look Vietnamese ... At the Monkey park I learned that Vietnam has
24 of some 250+ species of the worlds monkeys, and that 14 of them were at this conservation, to avoid extinction. They were beautiful and funny .... since traveling I've discovered there are so many species of animals which I thought were restricted to only a few species, looks, designs and at every turn I get excited and am delighted to find there are even MORE new species. It makes me feel like I have still so much of the world to see, so many more things to discover.
After Ninh Binh I went to a small town called Hoi An, just below the DMZ, or 17th parallel, the imaginary line dividing northern and southern Vietnam. I stayed in the old section: very clean and orderly, right on the water. Hoi An is historically known as a port town and recieved many Chinese and other traders. Thus, they have cultural houses for visitors: I went to the Funanian House, the oldest, dating back to the 17th century. They were used for meeting, sleeping, and eating by visiting Chinese from the Funan province. It was a great insight into Chinese culture and a nice introduction for what I would see
One Pillar Pagoda
dates back to the 14th century in Hong Kong.
Unfortunately, my photos were copied to a DVD and sent home before I saved them elsewhere so I won't be able to post any photos about Halong Bay, Ninh Binh, Hoi An ....
After Hoi An I booked it down to Ho Chi Minh to see Katy, a good high school friend who was student teaching in Saigon for a few months at an international school. 😊
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