Vietnam Part 1 - Castaway Tour & Hanoi

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We've been travelling really intensely these past few weeks, really packing a lot of things into our days so naturally I haven't had any time to sit at a computer and write a blog for a while. Out of the past eight nights, five of them have been spent on overnight sleeper buses! I seem to be leafing further and further back in my journel to find what I want to write about so I thought I'd just cover some of the best things and catch up with myself a little bit! Vietnam was a really incredible place and I thoroughly enjoyed my time there. From the bonkers, mopeds-absolutely-everywhere madness of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) to the incredibly peaceful and naturally beautiful beaches and islands further south it's a great place with some incredibly interesting history. Vietnam really does have it all.

Castaway Tour

The Castaway Tour has been without doubt one of the highlights of the trip so far. I'm quite partial to a knees-up and a two day booze cruise to a private island in the stunningly beautiful Ha Long Bay, coinciding with my 22nd birthday, just seemed to good an opportunity to miss. The four of us and our thirty-two fellow castaways boarded the coach at the hostel in Hanoi for the four hour trip to the boat. As soon as we were on the boat we were briefed on some of the drinking games that would be in force throughout the trip; if you said 'mine' or 'ten' at any point you had to do ten press ups on the spot (my arms ached for a good week afterwards) and if you drank using your right hand someone could scream 'Buffalo!' at you and you would have to finish whatever was left in your drink (I don't think livers can ache, but if they could, I have a feeling mine might have ached for a while afterwards too). We got to know the rest of our group, mainly through the medium of enforced exercise and drinking, as the boat sailed between the thousands of islands that make up the Ha Long Bay. It really was quite incredible, Tom (resident geography buff) explained to me that the islands used to be a vast mountain range and that the islands are the peaks of the mountains, with the rest of it washed into the sea. We arrived at the Castaway Island, which was literally a beach with a couple of huts for sleeping, a big communal hut and a small toilet block, populated exclusively by party goers and a few Vietnamese bar men. It was completely unlike anywhere in the world I've been before. We played some beach volleyball, ate some dinner before getting on with partying the night away in our secluded paradise. An absolutely incredible night, and some amazing (if somewhat hazy) memories!



I got up the next day (my actual birthday) and struggled through some jam sandwiches before a group of us took the kayaks out for a paddle around the bay to see some of the islands up close. We got back to shore and had some lunch before heading out 'tubing'. Tubing was sold to me by the tour guide as "you bounce along on the waves, it's quite relaxing." Just what I could do with following last night, I thought, but it turns out tubing was actually the four of us perched on a giant inflatable that got dragged along by a speedboat at full speed! Great fun and certainly more than a little hair raising. The first time we all fell in I thought "yeah, that was fun," second time it was a little more "actually this is really starting to hurt now." Battered and a little bruised but still smilling we headed back to the shore.



The rest of the afternoon was spent sat around with our fellow castaways swapping stories and welcoming the evening in with some beers. Due to our complete inability to build a fire, a few strapping Norwegian chaps decided to dig a massive hole, the true purpose of which became clear to us when we had to come up with an initiation for the next boat arriving on the island. We'd been drinking for a few hours so decided it would be a fantastic idea to fill the hole with beer and make them race across the beach to it. If you've never seen 30 grown men and women run the length of a beach before diving into a massive hole to retrieve a beer, then you quite frankly haven't lived. Without doubt one of the strangest, but most amusing sights I've ever seen in my life. They really went for it too. One person was so determined they even managed to fall in the sea BEFORE they reached the hole. Absolute gold. At one point we had to stop everything and evacuate the hole because we were genuinely concerned that someone at the bottom might die! Thankfully nobody did and I have some physics-defying photos of the hole, limbs and bodies protruding from all angles.



The evening was very similar to the previous evening in terms of partying. Since it was my birthday I was suitably bullied and spent most of the early evening being forced to dance on the table. During a big communal drinking game I foolishly sent a drinking punishment indiscriminately to our friends from Ireland. Ireland returned serve with the full force of five commited drinkers and it wasn't took long before I was back on the table again. Things get a little blurry from here on in, but, much like the previous night, it was genuinely one of the best nights of my life! I can't see myself having a birthday as good as that for a while!

The following morning we more or less crawled back onto the boat to set sail at 8am and essentially carried on where we'd left of the night before. We arrived back in the real world and went our seperate ways; friends made from all over the globe and safe in the knowledge we'd spent one of the greatest weekends of our lives together.

Hanoi

I really wasn't a big fan of Hanoi as a city. It's just nuts, and not in a good way. We stayed in the Old Quater, the busiest part by far and everything was just non-stop. A constant bustling of market traders and a never ending din of mopeds, honking their horns constantly for nor discernable reason. Even crossing the smallest of back streets was like playing Frogger on expert level, with some mopeds even just deciding to go on the pavement to further add to the challenge. We took a walking tour of the city, which passed through a local market. It was essentially an assault on the senses. Just people absolutely everywhere, all kinds of products imaginable and countless fish and various other seafoods in tanks ready to be sold and slaughtered. We were only in there about fifteen minutes but I felt drained afterwards.

We also visited the Hoa Lo prison (rough translation: 'Hell's Hole', a French establishment built to house the Vietnamese dissidents there during their time occupying the country. It was also used to house US p.o.ws during the Vietnam War. Looking around, the conditions which the prisoners were subjected to where incredibly inhumane. They were kept during the day in a single room, with about forty to fifty inmates all shackled in a line with no real bathroom facilities. They also had some of the torture instruments used still there, and accounts of what the prisoners were subjected to. It was absolutely horrific, just unimmaginably awful. The prisoners were quite remarkable though, using the almond trees in the yard to create an invisible ink that was used to commmunicate and log various events. A few even managed to escape from death row, Andy Dufresne style down the sewage pipe. There can't be many people in the world who've done that. The only thing that irked me somewhat the thick layer of propaganda they were applying to absolute everything. An interesting look at how things work in a communist country, but reading "magnificant and glorious Vietnamese martyr heroes" every other sentence does get a little tedious. The US section of the prison was also quite interesting too, the spin completely turned on its head here. The prison was sarcastically known as the Hanoi Hilton among the US prisoners, although I think the irony was lost on the Vietnamese as they seemed quite pleased with this nickname and used it as an example of how well treated the soldiers were. Senator John Mccain possibly the most notable resident here.



I'll finish off with a little annecdote my friends found utterly hilarious. Whilst walking down a street in Hanoi, my stomach, still in the mist of a constant disagreement with Asia, took a funny turn resulting in a quick sprint to the nearest restauraunt. After the minor bowel explosion that followed, I realised there was no paper at all and the bum sprayer thing you usually have to make do with in Asia was actually no longer attached to the wall. Following a brief but intense panic, I realised had my phone in my pocket for the first time in weeks, and managed to get the attention of the others. They delievered a wad of napkins through the window, something that they found incredibly amusing. It was a very lucky esacpe. I thought for a minute I was going to have to sacrifice one of the four pairs of pants I brought with me. Part 2 coming in a few days, hopefully.

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