Huế - Hanoi - Ha Long Bay


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Asia » Vietnam » Red River Delta
December 1st 2008
Published: December 1st 2008
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Ok so it's been a long time since our last entry and we have received many complaints about our slackness so here is the next long awaited chapter to our trip...

Since we first got to Huế it had been raining heavily so we had hopes that it would let up over the next few days, it didn't but that didn't end up affecting our activites too much.

The day after our last blog we went to the DMZ zone north of Huế. Over the course of the day we drove up north a few hundred km then visited a bridge, a war museum, and some more tunnels. These tunnels though were way better than Cu Chi in the fact that they built them for living in rather than fighting/hiding in so they were quite a bit larger. Ali could nearly stand in them. The tour also allowed us to go on quite a journey underground which was interesting. Without lights directing where to go it would be way easy to go down the wrong path and be lost forever.

The next day we wandered in the pouring rain (with our recently purchased umbrellas and ponchos) to the old imperial city. No need to say that we looked very, very attractive. Supposedly it is similar to that of the Forbidden City in China. Not too much to say about it, so it's probably better just looking at the pictures once we upload them (computers at the moment don't like the camera so we will do it at our next stop). That night we got on a night bus headed to the capital, Hanoi.

On this bus there was one other westerner with the rest being locals, and of course, we left late. Our already cramped legroom got worse as well when the driver decided to put large packages on the floor in our seats which was a bit annoying but they ended up only staying there for about half the trip. Once on the road we had the normal stops for no reason, lights going on and off whenever, picking up/dropping off people randomly but it seemed the bus drove a bit faster than the last few we had, this was probably because it was less a tourist bus and more a local bus. The trip lifted up a gear though when as soon as Ali went to sleep the front panel of the bus decided to drop off and get run over so we had to stop while they put it underneath. Ali was scared to go to sleep after this in case the wheels came off next...

We got to Hanoi on time at 7:30am but we got dropped off quite a bit out of the city so we taxi'd in to the central area and found some accomodation (rather expensive for us at $18 US a night). After a sleep we went looking for a cheap 2 day/1 night tour of Ha Long Bay which we managed to get down to $52 US each for a "Deluxe" experience. Our hotel tried to sell us the same tour for $75 earlier in the day so we were happy with the price. It was possible to get a similar trip but on a worse boat for around $30 but we had heard that the conditions on these were sometimes under par with rats and even less food.

Finally, Hanoi had the better weather we had been searching for. At night it gets down to maybe a jumper temp but during the day its quite hot.

In the afternoon we went on an adventure to find a westernish cinema so we could see the new James Bond so using our great "Rough Guide" we walked to the first place it listed. Upon finding the address it was a local restaurant and then we spotted it, the side alley which led to a dirty white closed/abandoned building that had cinema written on it. There were also 1980's movie posters on the walls leading up to it which looked like they hadn't moved since the 80's. So we quickly ran away while we could and caught a taxi to the next recommended cinema. But when we got there they only had a dubbed version of 007 without english subtitles which wasn't much help but the friendly staff there wrote down the address of a cinema which did have it so we got back in a taxi and found the address which happened to be a 6 story shopping plaza. As if "Rough Guides" just missed this one!?!? It's the biggest shopping centre in the city! Anyway, we finally got to see it and we thought it was pretty good so it was worth the trouble.
Hue Imperial CityHue Imperial CityHue Imperial City

It was very wet

The next morning we left our hotel and got collected by our bus to take us to Ha Long Bay. Upon going to the final hotel to collect the last couple, there was confusion of who the people were who were meant to be on our tour. So after 10min of waiting on the tiny thin street in a minibus a police truck parked next to us and shouted on his megaphone to the driver to move on. So we did a block (about 5 min in the traffic) and parked again outside. When we got back the staff were still trying to figure it out but the people were finally found. Then it appeared that they were hoping to bring a MASSIVE roller bag about the size of a fully grown adult onto our already full minibus, so after a couple of minutes watching the few of them getting angry through the windows we saw the hotel staff bring a handful of blue shopping bags over to them to move what they wanted to bring into them and leave what they didn't need at the hotel to collect upon return. Then the same police truck came up again and shouted and banged on our bus to move on again so we did another block and finally found them and picked them up, looking rather embarrassed when they finally got on the bus.

It took about 3hrs to reach the port where we then got aboard our "junk" and sailed off into the Bay. We were also told not to buy anything off the floating markets because as they say "they were here to serve us", which translated to mean, "we have spirits for $50 US dollars a bottle and the markets have the same for $8 so we want to rip you off". On our itinery it said that we got lucious seafood feasts provided so we were expexting something kinda nice. So the first meal we had was lunch which consisted of "cutlets" of tuna which looked disgusting and tasted the same, some squid and a kilo of rice. The servings were to share between your table of 4 or 5 people but realistically would of been enough to share between 2, except for the rice which could of be shared throughout a small country. After sailing for a bit over an hour we reached a karst
Halong city portHalong city portHalong city port

There were literally hundreds of tourist junks here!
cave which we explored without our guide as he got fined as he didn't have his tourist badge with him so he had to stay on the port. We next sailed for another 2hrs and got a kayak and paddled around some of the limestone formations which for us was probably the highlight of the trip. As we were planning a few drinks (but were not prepared to pay the price on the boat) we started finding a way to smuggle some alcohol onto the boat. We immediately started getting deja vu from college camps but this time we were 21!! So Mic unsuspicously waived over a boat from which he purchased a bottle of vodka from. The lady whispered to hide it so she obviously knew she wasn't meant to do it. It was all very down low and hush hush. And then BANG, I had got caught, they confiscated my alcohol and if I wanted it I had to pay a tax (similar to airports) of $7 US. As we really weren't desparate we said no and that we would collect it off them when we departed the next day. So after having a good laugh with all the other passengers about how being on this trip was similar to being in primary school (i.e. tiny food rations, not allowed to bring unapproved things onto the boat) we started talking about how much everyone paid for the trip. There were three bogan girls from brisbane who were very loud and opinionated who hated Vietnam because it was boring and unrelaxing. Funnily enough they had travelled from Ho Chi Minh up to Hanoi in 5 days (it is a 3 day ride non stop), so they had not spent ANY time ANYWHERE so no wonder they hated it. But everyone was very polite and we all saved our laughing at them until times they were not around. Anyway back to pricings, it ended up those three girls paid $150 AUS each for the same trip we had paid $52 US for so they had got way way way overcharged. Mostly though, people paid around the $62 US mark so we were happy wth our price.

So tea came around and it was the same meager portions so we knew we would go to bed hungry which we had already come to accept. Then the staff whipped out the karaoke which they generously let the westerners use for maybe 5 songs before they put on their vietnamese for 15 before letting the westerners use again for another 5 before telling them to go to bed. We had only paid $50 each for the privilege but we must say it didn't surprise us 😊.

The next day we headed back to land after only seeing one cave and going for one kayak on the whole trip (with the itinery saying we were meant to visit closer to 7 attractions) and had our final meal of masses of rice.

Back in Hanoi, we found new accomodation after the place we prebooked in to avoid searching at the last minute said they didn't have any rooms left for us. The next day we saw Ho Chi Minhs' mausoleum, his house on stilts and a museum (which had caves in the form of a brain and other abstract exhibits...basically we didn't understand any of them). We had also heard about a water park we wanted to see so after spending $8 on a taxi out there we found it was shut but the good news was a theme park next door
Ho Chi Minh's MasoleumHo Chi Minh's MasoleumHo Chi Minh's Masoleum

Appreciate this photo. Michael walked all the way back the next day as he had forgotten the camera the day before.
was open. Unfortunately the only ride there that wasn't for people under the age of 4 was a rollercoaster. This really added an extra element of fear that the Gold Coasts parks can't compete with as the harnesses were designed for people under 150cm and the rollercoaster had a nice rattle as it went upside down. We didn't go on it twice and promptly caught another taxi back to civilisation.

Since then we have been wandering the streets and markets of the old quarter of Hanoi and are presently waiting for our night train tonight to take us closer to Sa Pa where hopefully we will do some trekking to hill tribes then move onto to Laos in the coming days.

Mic and Ali

PHOTOS ARE COMING WHEN WE GET TO A GOOD COMPUTER

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2nd December 2008

:s
that tour sounded awful, cheap bastards! heh lucky you did't pay more like those moron girls! I'm at work, very busy... ahem xx

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