Vietnam - Saigon to Hanoi

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Saigon or Ho Chi Min City as it's officially known as is a very busy city on the verge of a giant traffic accident. The pollution generated by the millions of mopeds in the organised chaos is the worst we have experienced in south East Asia so far - not as bad as India, but it's bad and the humidity is pretty intense. An interesting visit to the war remnants museum gave us our first insight to the atrocities of the war with some fantastic photography taken by the journalists on the front line, the reunification palace looked a bit strange and surprisingly modern so we didn't bother with that.

The highlight for us was definitely the trip out on a local bus to the Dam Sen water park, we both jumped in the first slide - a kind of corkscrew, which from the outside didn’t look too bad but it actually turned out to be really scary. Generally we underestimated just how powerful these slides were and just thought it would be like the orange flume at Folkestone pool! Needless to say that Vanessa did not try out too many slides after that, but an enjoyable day out.

Crossing the road in Saigon is quite a challenge and we soon learn (by copying the locals) that the best way is to just walk slowly, keeping eye contact with the traffic coming towards you and never to rush or hesitate, wait for a gap in the traffic and you could be left standing all day! The trip to the Cu Chi tunnels turned out to be interesting and very touristy, great fun when it was time for target practise with an AK47.

Our next destination was Dalat, a hill station in the central highlands, about 200km north from Saigon. It was a lovely journey on the bus through tea and coffee plantations and quite mountainous but through the towns the bus went very slowly for fear of speeding fines from the corrupt police, which made for a safer journey but slow going and turned out to be over 7 hours. It was cold in Dalat and very strange to be wearing shoes, socks, jumper and rain coat (it rained a lot), after walking around in shorts & flip flops for the past 3 months. We really enjoyed sitting in a rustic cafe talking to a group of motor bike tour guides famously known as the ‘Easy Riders’, over a glass of local strawberry wine whilst the weather was bad. One of the main reasons for coming to Dalat was for the trekking, unfortunately due to the huge typhoons swirling around in the Philippines, only one of the tour agencies were willing to take us. So we head out the next day, just the 2 of us and a guide, luckily the weather holds out all day and we have a fantastic 7 hour trek though coffee plantations, crossing rivers on wobbly wire bridges and a long hike to the top of a hill for fantastic views. We also came across some hill tribe people who invited us into their huts for strong rice wine and fish, they basically spend their time farming the surrounding coffee plantations which is exported all over the world. These were definitely the most real hill tribe people we have seen so far, unlike those staged tourist traps in Laos or Thailand, it was a long, hard trek but a fantastic experience and great to be in cool, fresh air at last.

Luckily the typhoons never hit Vietnam as forecast but we certainly caught some of it the next day with lots of wind and rain on our journey further north, to the beach resort of Nha Trang. Normally the water at Nha Trang is blue and great for snorkelling & swimming, but as we were there out of season it was actually murky brown with a 10ft shore dump, so no beach action for us! Rather than take a boat trip offered to us by every other person in the street and despite the weather conditions, we decided to hire some bikes and visit the 7th & 12th century Po Nagar Cham towers a few kilometres out of town. Well worth the trip out, not only for the towers nut also our first taste of some real backstreet areas of Vietnam and some great views back to Nha Trang. The weather held out for us, but still not really good enough for the beach so we waste some time at the Louisianne beach club before jumping on an overnight sleeper bus for an epic, very bumpy 450km journey north to Hoi An.

Vietnam is certainly a different county to travel in compared to Laos or Cambodia, there is only one tourist route that backpackers follow from south to north or visa versa and it relies heavily on it’s tourist industry, Hoi An is no exception to this. A week previous to us arriving in Hoi An, we had read reports of severe flooding and people rescued from hotels in boats. Thankfully things had dried up and we were greeted by and enchanting riverside town, basking in beautiful sunshine and clear blue skies. Because Hoi An was relatively untouched by the war, it remains a living museum, very touristy but great to wander round the colonial, yellow rendered old shop fronts and houses. We managed to negotiate some free bikes with our hotel room because in a daze at 6am, we wondered off the bus by the lure of touts and ended up in a hotel slightly out of town. It is quite difficult to find a balance between ignoring hotel touts to avoid any possible commission scam and look for everything independently (using the lonely planet of course), quite often the tout is trying to fill a perfectly good quality hotel at a low price, but a bus will arrive full of back backers all with the same idea because they follow the same book!

We enjoyed a lovely couple of days wondering round the old historic town, drinking the local strong coffee with sweet milk (thick condensed milk), we did notice a flood clean up operation going on and we were shown the water level was at first floor level.

Another early start on a bus with a bit of sight-seeing on the way, through Danang and after a relatively short 5 hours, we arrived in Hue. We only planned to spend one night in Hue and get the sleeper bus out the next day to Hanoi, so we had 1.5 days to explore the town and surrounding area. A short bike round out of town got us to the stunning Thien Mu Pogoda on the perfume river, which during the 60¡¯s & 90¡¯s was a site for anti-government demonstrations and a load of monks were arrested for public order disturbances. We had just enough time to visit the ancient, mostly ruined Citidel which was first built in 1804 during the Nguyen dynasty, just enough remains of the Citidel to make it an interesting visit.

We had another huge bit of ground to cover, with not much in between to get us from Hue, 450km further north to the charming capital city of Hanoi. After a bit of walking around the old quarter of Hanoi at 7am, finding most of the hotels full or expensive, we managed to find a reasonably nice room after some negotiation on the price. With no sleep on the bus the night before, we decided to not prolong the agony and head out into the madness of the historic old quarter. We have quite a busy first day in Hanoi, deciding on a trip out to Halong Bay and also arranging visas for China among the many copy cat tour agencies all taking advantage of the non-existent copy right laws, it’s not an easy task. Exploring the maze of backstreets was fascinating with specialist streets dedicated to one particular product - clothes, cosmetics, fake sunglasses, musical instruments, plumbing supplies, jewellery, religious offerings, spices and woven mats to mention only a few!

We had a fantastic 3 days cruising around Halong Bay on an old Vietnamese junk stopping off at various islands to visit caves and rummage on the beach for cockles, which were cooked for us on the boat afterwards. Also included in the trip was an overnight stay on Catba Island and national park for a short bike ride and trek through the forest to visit a few more caves. The highlight of this trip was definitely the kayaking amongst the huge karsk mountains rising from the emerald waters of the gulf of Tonkin, also it was lovely to see up close the floating fishing communities who spend their lives in this amazing scenery. Another busy day in Hanoi on our return from Halong Bay and we managed to successfully get our passports back complete with Chinese Visas, book a bus ticket to Nanning - the first major town across the border in China and also see ‘punch & judy in a pool’ (water puppets) which was quite entertaining and amusing.

We were really excited about crossing into China, looking forward to new systems, transport, currency etc. and not entirely sure what to expect. From Nanning we planned to travel further north to Guilin then Yangshou before heading south towards Macau and finally Hong Kong - our first major mile stone in this trip and worth a blog entry of itself at some point. Currently we are enjoying some time with Vanessa’s parents who we met in Hong Kong and crossed back into China to Shenzhen where we are staying with Andy (Vanessa’s brother) and his partner Dina, it’s great to see some familiar faces and generally catch up with things (including this blog!), we will spend Christmas here in Shenzhen and plan to head back into Hong Kong for new years celebrations.

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Comments

[Melissa]

Happy New Year
Hi Guys, thank you so much for my postcard, so lovely that you were able to be with the family at Christmas, been so hectic this end, Austen and I have moved in to our house properly now, just a bit of decorating and hanging pictures left to go - can't wait to catch up in person xxx