Vietnam

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23rd October - 11th November

Ho Chi Min City aka Saigon

Our Vietnam experience began dramatically as our plane came in to land in a thunderstorm. All we could see through the windows was the white light of lightning reflected against the surrounding cloud. Our hearts started beating considerably faster as the plane touched down for a second before taking off again. We were left in the dark, or rather flashing light, as to why for the proceeding twenty minutes or so. Dad later explained that this is the pilots ‘code’ as it were; ‘aviate, navigate, then communicate’. I won’t pretend that thoughts of hijack were not consuming my mind during that period. The entire plane erupted in applause when we eventually landed. It took an hour or so to get visas and soon we were wandering the streets of Ho Chi Min City, better known as Saigon, in search of an 11pm meal. A nice restaurant was found and we began brushing up on our chopsticks technique. Mine needed a lot of work.

The next day was spent largely chilling out, recovering from various upset tummies and exploring the few streets around our guest house. We were immediately captivated by the Vietnamese streets which were subtly yet remarkably different to those that I have experienced in the rest of Asia. The street on which our guest house was situated was very narrow, much like an Indonesian gang. People sat outside their houses, doors wide open into living rooms and even bedrooms, cooking or preparing foods on tiny primary school sized tables and chairs. Rats ran from the gutters to and fro and even into people’s houses without anyone batting an eyelid and children played in the narrow corridor like intertwining roads which were frequented with motorbikes carrying almost implausibly wide loads. It was the same on the larger roads although these were teaming with motorbikes, so much so that the motorbikes frequently drive on the pavements at top speed when things are at a standstill on the road. There are very few traffic lights in Vietnam and pedestrians cross the road by simply walking across at a steady pace through fast moving though very congested traffic. It feels a bit like crossing a busy section of the A3. The rules of the road go like this; busses stop for no one, cars stop for busses, motorbikes stop for cars and busses, no one stops for pedestrians and if there is an accident, the pedestrian is fined.

When we ventured out for lunch on the first day James’ flip flops were ostensibly sliced. We realised this only when a young man came running up to him and offered to fix his shoes. As we looked down we saw two identical clean slits on each flip flop which had clearly been made by a knife, presumably by a mate of this shoe mender. Irritating but hilarious, we were more careful about where we lingered from then on. Still, the crooks, the rats and the incessant drizzle all added to the extraordinary charm of Saigon. We loved it.

The next day we went to explore some more of Saigon. We went to two markets, one of which sold American war paraphernalia, most of which was fake, and the other sold clothes, food and some souvenirs. The second market had us in hysterics again. Gone were the calm characteristics that we had come to believe encompassed all of the South East Asian people. Here, in this Saigon market, we were pulled violently into shops, sometimes both arms being pulled in different directions by different stall owners, and then forcefully expelled into the aisle when we refused to pay the price they were offering. Next stop was the revolutionary museum where we had hoped to find out a bit about the war. Sadly it was assumed that people attending the revolutionary museum would be ‘up on the war’ and thus we didn’t learn a great deal. We spent the afternoon shopping buying ourselves very useful things such as a 5.5kg tea set.

The Mekong Delta

We were up at 06.30 the following morning in time to check out of our hotel and buy some breakfast before our tour to the Mekong Delta. Ordinarily we wouldn’t have done a tour but at $20 for two days including food and accommodation we decided it was worth it. The tour, as largely expected, was one of these large group ones. We took a bus to My Tho from whence we took a boat down the Mekong river to a place where ‘coconut candy’ was made. We were all given a hot coconut sweet to try while we were shown how they were made. They are delicious. From there we took another boat to Tortoise Island where we ate lunch. Next stop was Unicorn Island where we tried some delicious natural honey products and tea. We were then ferried next door where we were served a giant platter of fruit and more tea while we listened to some pretty terrible local folk music. Small rowing boats took us through lush narrow deltas back to our motorised canoes. Then it was back on the bus. We hit a terrible traffic jam and we were all invited to alight the bus and walk the remaining two kilometres down the muddy motorway in the rain to the ferry which took us across the river to a town from where we took taxis to our hotel. The hotel, too, was better than expected. We were very impressed.

The next day we were up early in order to visit a floating market where the farmers sell their products to the locals. The food being sold on each boat is advertised by piercing it and hoisting it on tall bamboo sticks. Some boats had about twenty different products on their stick towering high above their boats. We were then taken to a small family run rice vermicelli noodle making ‘factory’ where we were shown how the delectable noodles are made. It was a fascinating process. The rice is soaked overnight to extract sufficient amounts of starch which is then mixed with tapioca powder resulting in a thin pancake-like mixture. This is then spread onto a thin sheet which covers a boiling pot which effectively steams the mixture into rice-tapioca ‘pancakes’. These ‘pancakes’ are then spread out of bamboo sheets to dry in the sun. Several hours later where they have a tough, rubbery-like texture, they are sliced into noodles using an old fashioned looking slicing machine. This was all experienced before 9am.

We all opted out of another floating market and instead went to a rice factory where we learnt that brown rice is simply rice separated from the husk and white rice is rice separated from the husk and then chemically cleaned. Although I don’t like the idea of chemically cleaned rice it did strike me as a little ridiculous that I pay more for brown rice at home than I do for white rice! Our boat took us through the countryside and out into a wider stretch of the river where we beheld South East Asia’s longest bridge. Then it was back in the bus and back to the hotel to collect bags etc. We ate lunch in a restaurant which offered frogs, rats and snake, all ready in cages for customers to pick, much like lobster. Back in Saigon we arranged to meet a nice family we had met on the tour for dinner and had a marvellous feast with them followed by fantastic ice cream.

Mui Ne and Nha Trang

The next day we had another early start in order to catch the 8am bus to Mui Ne. At around 9am the bus finally left Saigon after much circling of the city in order to avoid the traffic police. Mui Ne is a beautiful sprawling beach town where we stayed in a lovely little guest house with a pool. I spent the afternoon indulging in ‘Pride and Prejudice’ by the pool while James did some work before heading to a delightful bar where we sat on beanbags watching the waves, enjoying some tasteful Asian music and drinking large bottles of 25p beer.

The next day we hired a scooter and drove out to the red sand dunes for a bit of sand sliding. The sand sliding was pretty ineffective but the dunes were absolutely stunning. There was also a beautiful view over the fishing village below where we watched the local people fishing in their conical boats. After a quick iced coffee to pay for our bike parking we returned the bike early (much to the amazement of the renter) and went to eat lunch in our guest house and wait for our bus to Nha Trang. The bus was amazing, reminiscent of the ‘night bus’ in Harry Potter, with three double-decker aisles of deckchair like beds. We had a very comfortable journey sunbathing while watching the world, literally, go by. Humorously, the bus ran out of petrol about twenty minutes before we reached Nha Trang and one of the guys had to hitch a lift to and from the petrol station to fill up. On arrival, we were greeted by the most amazing hotel we had stayed in during our entire trip. It had two double beds, tiled floors, an ensuite bathroom with a high powered shower and enough hot water for a bath. It even had a mirrored lift and it cost all of $8. We were incredulous and had to check the price at least twice before we accepted our luck with glee and went out to book a diving trip for the next day and have some Pho (rice noodle soup).
The diving itself wasn’t particularly exciting. We didn’t see much and only went to 9 metres which was a little disappointing. We had a reasonable lunch on board before returning to the port. Still, the two dives and lunch only cost us $35 so we couldn’t complain. The following day was spent generally attempting to pass time before our night bus to Hoi An. James had a shave at a mobile barber and we visited the market. Unfortunately our night bus was not as comfortable as our previous bus and the night passed uncomfortably.

Hoi An

We were very relieved to arrive in Hoi An the next morning where a rather too productive day’s shopping ensued. I had two dresses tailor made and James and I both had a pair of shoes made, his with a tie to match. We had arranged to meet Missy and John and their girls Gracie and Juliette, the family we had met on our tour of the Mekong Delta whom we had bumped into in Hoi An, but alas , we had too many fittings to juggle. Hoi An itself is a beautiful old town, especially at night when all the streets are lantern lit. It drizzled most of the day but a typhoon was due to hit Nha Trang the following day so I think we made a lucky escape.

Hue

The next morning we met Missy, John and the girls on the bus and had a comfortable journey to Hue, lulled to sleep by the typhoon rains. It was raining hard when we arrived in Hue and we spent most of the day hiding away in our room. The next day the six of us did a tour around the various tombs and pagodas of Hue which were all very beautiful, even in the rain. That night we took a night bus to Hanoi. Our choice of seats was unfortunate and just as James had finally managed to get comfortable enough to fall asleep, he was shaken awake by the conductor who asked him to move up to make space for people they were picking up. This was all explained in Vietnamese however and was both confusing and irritating. About half an hour later a lady got on and lay down in the bed directly next to James putting her bags on the spare seat on her other side which seemed most strange. Thus he was even more cramped and it was even more difficult for him to sleep. Several hours later we were woken by Julliete who asked me if I knew what was going on. Bleary eyed I looked about the bus to find it almost deserted. James’ mate who had shaken him awake not long before was soon shouting at us to get off quickly not even giving us time to look around and check we had got everything. Apparently no one thought to wake the people (us) sleeping at the back of the bus. We were escorted to another bus which was completely full and told to sit on the floor where we spent the next five hours or so, in the middle of the night, desperately uncomfortable and desperate for sleep. Eventually we arrived in Hanoi and were put into taxis to take us into the old quarter. No apologies were made. No refunds were available.

Hanoi

We spent the day looking for tours to Halong Bay, becoming increasingly agitated by the excessive traffic and invasive horn blowing, and generally willing the day to end looking forward to a restorative sleep which was much disturbed by a group of drunken Irish girls who decided to embark on karaoke in the hotel.

The following day was also spent frantically searching Hanoi for a decent tour and in ‘tour mode’ ended up booking an overly expensive luxury junk cruise through Halong Bay and an equally expensive, though longer, tour around Sapa and its surrounding hill tribe villages. Eventually, at around 2pm, we gave ourselves a break and went for lunch. I ordered a bowl of vegetarian rice which turned out to be a huge bowl of steamed white rice. Disappointed I opted for a bowl of vegetable soup to go with it. This was literally a bowl of green MSG. I ate some to be polite, picked at rice and sulked. My politeness was rewarded with a night in the toilet. Before retreating to the bathroom, however, we did manage to take in a water puppet show which was very sweet. The puppets were beautiful and excellently manoeuvred and the accompanying music was delightful. Sadly there was no story line, however, which made it a little boring after a while. Still, we were pleased we had gone.

Halong Bay

The next morning, after breakfast, we lugged our possessions (tea set and all) to Vega travel (with whom we had booked our hill tribe treck) and set off to Columbus travel to meet our group for our Halong Bay trip. It was a longer journey to the bay than I had anticipated and was made difficult due to my still fragile stomach. Things improved dramatically on arrival.

We were given welcome drinks and a cold face cloth on arrival before sitting down to our extraordinary lunch. There were four to a table and each table was given a wonderful spread of food to share. Being a vegetarian I got a few special dishes of my own, the most notable being a plate of baby squid which I was assured was vegetarian. Some of the braver members of our table tried it and assured me it was not squid. It tasted of plastic, utterly unpalatable and utterly bizarre, but then I suppose that is what us vegetarians seem to the Vietnamese. After lunch we checked into our room and were ecstatic to find a rose petal heart on our bed. A silly childhood dream of mine fulfilled! We sunned ourselves on deck for a while before being ferried over to ‘surprising’ or ‘amazing’ caves where we walked around in awe of the sheer size and different textures of the rocks. It was beautifully lit which added to its allure.
Back on board we had a terrific meal, this time devoid of plastic baby squids, and were entertained by the couple sitting on our table who had a surprise honey moon party. They had to get dressed up in traditional Vietnamese wedding costumes while our guide explained the customs to us over glasses of champagne and delicious cake. The hilarious part of it was that they were not even married. They had simply booked the honey moon suite in their Hanoi hotel so they could get a good room and since then have been given honey moon cakes on the house galore. Not a bad idea I think!

The following day we took kayaks out into the bay and paddled around the limestone islands, through lagoons and crevices in the limestone. It was tranquil and beautiful though sadly the water was very dirty due to the huge number of junks populating the bay and their terrible waste management. It was rather depressing. After that it was back on the boat which took us to the port in Halong Bay city from where we took a mini bus back to Hanoi. Several hours later we were in a taxi on the way to the train station and then on our wonderful sleeper train where we slept fantastically until 5am when we were woken (unreasonably early in my opinion) by loud knocking on the door and then blaring tinny music through the speakers above James’ head. At 5.30am the train pulled into the station and we caught a mini bus to Bac Ha, an indigenous village which we had heard has a very lively Sunday market.

Sapa, Bac Ha, and the treck....

The people in Bac Ha wore a traditional dress very similar to that which we had seen throughout Latin America which we found extraordinarily coincidental. James was not feeling well so we didn’t spend a great deal of time looking around the market. Just enough to see the highlights, a Buffalo auction, dozens of pigs heads (not a personal highlight) and the beautiful clothes worn by the Coloured Mong people. We took a local bus back to Lao Cai, the train station, and from there a mini bus to Sapa where we arrived in the late afternoon.

We found a nice hotel for $5 with an excellent view of the glorious alpine-like mountains of Sapa. We ate a simple lunch and spent the rest of the afternoon looking for ‘Holiday View’ hotel where we were due to meet our tour guide the following day. Eventually we concluded that ‘Holiday Sapa’ was the same hotel and treated ourselves to a vin chaud before bed to warm us in the fresh mountain air.
Happily ‘Holiday Sapa’ was ‘Holiday View’. We arrived at around 7.15 expecting to find our tour group sitting around eating breakfast. Instead we were told our guide would be down to meet us at 9.30 which was a little frustrating given that we were both in need of extra sleep. Still, we had a pleasant morning sitting in the sun, perusing the buffet breakfast and reading in the mountains. At 9.30 we met Mao, our tour guide, and were delighted to find we essentially had a private tour as we were the sole participants and spent the following two days benefitting from Mao’s seemingly endless fountain of knowledge. Mao was born in one of the villages and had done so well at school that he had been sponsored to go to university and thus we had a very well learned local guide who spoke perfect English. We were very lucky.
The treck was pleasant, neither too easy nor too strenuous, taking us right away from the main road to villages connected only by tiny tracks. In fact, at times we had to totter over particularly narrow borders of rice paddies, watching the water buffalo wallowing within them. When we arrived at our intended homestay we were advised that the place we were supposed to be staying was not yet ready so instead we trekked up a steep hill to the main road and took motorbikes to an alternative.

James’ motorbike did not have brakes and thus his driver went very slowly using his feet as brakes which was great until he lost us. I spent a terrifying ten minutes or so worrying that he had had a terrible accident before he and the guide returned grinning and laughing.

The homestay was basic and delightful. We wrapped up as the sun went down and drank a beer, (well I did, James was still nursing a cold), and read our books until Mao invited us into the kitchen to learn how to make spring rolls. The kitchen took up half of the ground floor of the house and consisted of a large open fire with cheap pieces of pork hanging above it gently smoking. Typically there was no chimney and thus the kitchen was warm, smoky and insect free. A wok of boiling oil was sitting on the fire into which we placed our spring rolls. We were later invited back into the kitchen to watch the rest of our meal being prepared in the same wok. First tofu and fresh tomatoes were added to simmering garlic and put aside in a bowl, then a concoction of garlic, cabbage, peppers and some other greens which were also put aside in a separate bowl, beef with mushrooms was then prepared which looked so tasty it almost tempted me, and finally chicken with cabbage and vegetables. All this was soon served at the table outside and the lady who had cooked it and her ninety year old mother joined Mao, James and I in the feast. The food was delicious and a party atmosphere soon ensued as continuous toasts with the illegal locally made rice wine were made. These got even more frequent when the husband returned from helping a neighbour to build his house. We had an interesting conversation interpreted by Mao and learnt a great deal about each other before falling into bed exhausted by 8pm.

The following days’ trek was harder but considerably shorter and more beautiful as we entered the national park. We visited some more villages and were this time were quite alone, the crowds of yesterdays trek far behind us. After lunch we were transported back to Sapa where we spent five long hours waiting for the bus to the train station. Amazingly, the train back to Hanoi was even more comfortable than our previous train and we slept like babies until 4am when we were woken. By 4.30am we were on the platform at a loss of what to do.

Hanoi

We took a taxi into town and wandered aimlessly until James had the bright idea of looking for a hotel which might let us in and give us a coffee. We were admitted at about 5.45am and were served a very expensive coffee at 6am. From there we took ourselves off to our favourite bakery and had more coffee and croissants. We then sat in another obliging hotel waiting for Vega travel to open and when they finally did, rejoiced in showers and clean clothes. We spent most of the day dipping in and out of Vega which they generously ignored. At last 3pm came and we loaded ourselves and all our bags, somehow, onto a rickshaw. The poor man had to cycle about 60 kilos of us and our stuff to the bus stop where we took a bus to the airport excited about meeting mum and dad in a couple of hours time in Laos.

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Photos

The Mekong Delta
making coconut candy

The Mekong Delta
James getting down with nature

The Mekong Delta
in some very tippy canoes

The Mekong Delta
the rice vermicelli noodle factory

Saigon streets
crossing the road

Hung Long and fat
or so James likes to believe... tasteful tissues

Mui Ne
hiking the dune

Mui Ne
James gets a lesson in sand dune sliding

Mui Ne
obviously he wasn't listening properly

Mui Ne
connical boats in the port

Mui Ne
view from the dunes

Na Trang
diving

Na trang
at the barber shop

Hoi An
getting fitted

Hue
woman making the hats

Hue
the tombs gardens