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Published: December 10th 2008
Hanoi
The lake in central Hanoi, 6amWell, the trip round Vietnam is finally over. Can’t believe how fast the past month has gone, during which I’ve been wandering through paddy fields, biking through mountains, swimming in pre-historic bays and eating my own weight in Cau Lao. Brace yourself, cause this is going to be a long, perhaps even tedious blog
After finishing classes the night before I was nice and ready for my hols. Met Dave and Jeannie for a leisurely Saigon lunch, then chucked all my crap in my bag and said ‘hen gap lai’ to Nick and Paddy for a month. After leaving the house and eagerly jumping in the first cab that came past for a life to the station, I soon realised the taxi meter going up pretty damn fast. So after abandoning the cab in the middle of Nguyen Thi Minh Khai street I hailed another, more reputable type of cab.
I was in a first class sleeper which was very nice but not noticeably any more comfortable than second class, thought far less grubby, although I have to admit I like the grubbiness of second class…I was sharing with a middle age couple who seemed to have a mother
in law in tow, heading for Hanoi.They were lovely, fed me and watched my stuff when I was wandering round the train. The wife spoke a bit of English and with us both flicking through the phrase book it was a nice way to spend a dark evening on the train.
Arrived the next day at Dieu Tri station, about 20km from Quy Nhon, a beach town. Quy Nhon is really nice and practically devoid of foreigners so locals do stop in their tracks occasionally when they see a non Vietnamese face. It’s really quiet and everyone is very friendly, wanting to know where you come from and what you think of VN. The beach is nice, surrounded by misty hills and there is barely any traffic. Mind you, at only 5000 dong for a bottle of the local piss it could be everyone is too drunk to leave the house…
As it was the first day of my holiday and there is little else to do in Quy Nhon in the evening, I went to the bar on the 10th floor of some beachfront hotel. The view was great, the cocktails cheap, the food good, all accompanied
by a Vietnamese lounge singer…sweet.
Next day, I wandered over to a beach that used be the private beach of a Vietnamese queen (the royal kind). Quite why she chose such a stony beach I don’t know, but the scramble through hills was worth it. I found a restaurant and during my lunch pretty much the entire staff come over in shifts, chatting and muddling along with the phrasebook. They were really nice, although the rider of the motorbike they called for me to take me back to town smelt like he’d been on the piss all his life, so the road back along the seafront was pretty hairy despite the lack of traffic
The following day I caught a train to Danang. I wasn’t particularly impressed with Danang, the weather wasn’t very good and there didn’t seem much to do. However it was nice to see Lisa and Oliver, and their house is lovely…there are windows that open into the centre of the house and with strategically placed ‘streetlights’ on the walls its like waking up and throwing open the windows onto a Victorian street…more than once I asked Oliver to buy me the finest goose in
all of London….
Nov 8th. I arrived in Hanoi at about 5am. Found a hotel pretty quickly and went back to sleep for a few hours. Once I was up I spent the next two days before Joe arrived snacking in the street and drinking the local beer. I really liked Hanoi, it is far more attractive than Saigon, and has lots of open spaces, which are nice and quiet, something you don’t get a lot of in Saigon, at least not where I live. However, the city just doesn’t have the same craziness running through it that Saigon has, and the people seemed far more hesitant around foreigners.
Joe arrived on the 10th, wandered round Hanoi some more, visited the odd museum and then headed out of the city towards the mountain town of Sapa. We took the day train which meant we had to spend 10hrs sitting on hard wooden seats as the train rattled towards Lao Cai, a town on the Vietnam/China border. The train journey was great although I’d be lying if I said it was comfy. Other passengers shared their food with us, and it was all going nicely until some old bat
cat and dog
Cat Ba island got on and decided I was in her seat…she turfed me out pretty quick, apparently, (as some guy in Sapa told me), she may have been into confucianism, which stipulates that if someone is unconnected to you, you don’t have to give a flying fuck about them. I don’t know how true this is so lets just say she was a miserable old cow.
After a pretty hairy journey up the mountains we arrived in Sapa. The scenery here is amazing, with the town surrounded by mountains it feels very European, and its also very cold. As I had brought zero warm clothes with me except a pair of jeans I soon graduated from buying a woolly hat on the first day, to socks and a jacket the next. They will now sit forlorn and useless at the bottom my wardrobe as Saigon is often too hot for anything more than a birthday suit and certainly never warrants a fleece lined hoodie.
One morning two old ladies (well, one wasn't that old, but the other was older than Yoda so I’m averaging their ages) first tried to sell me and Joe their wares and then decided to guide
bug
Cat Ba Island us to a village that in all honesty didn’t need guiding too. They were pretty cool though, it was really nice wandering through the local countryside with two tribeswomen and they were very funny.
The following day me and Joe went to some more villages in the area, this time on mountain bike. Well, about ten minutes into the trip we took a wrong path and then spent the next couple of hours climbing down the mountain on a very faint path, carrying mountain bikes… they were pretty good once we had crawled out of the undergrowth with them but, not wanting to make the same mistake again we decided that we would cycle back using the road that snakes through the mountains. What a shit idea that was. The road was steep as hell getting back to Sapa (16km away) and we walked pretty much all of it. Joe didn’t fancy my idea of running down the mountain and trying to find a shorter way back (which would probably resulted in a breakage or two so to be fair, Joe was right), so we struggled on sustained by two week old coconut candy, discussions about what James Bond
up yours
Ninh Binh would do in various situations (this pastime intensified once we got back to Hanoi and watched the new bond film), and me doing ‘name that tune’ for Joe.
We made plans to leave Sapa that evening, to get a night train from Lao Cai back to Hanoi and then catch a tour to Halong Bay. Whilst in Sapa we had time to catch motorbikes up to Tram Ton Pass, which offered some stunning views and is the kind of road that would leave Michael Caine hanging out of a coach…or get his three fast cars crushed by a bulldozer. The bus from Sapa took us down the mountain so fast that my ears popped constantly and were to remain a bit fuzzy for days afterwards.
Back in Hanoi, we watched the new bond film, which I thought was the best one in a long time, really enjoyed it. In the morning we caught the tour to Halong Bay…
Halong Bay was beautiful. Massive stone monoliths jutting out of the water, waves lapping gently against the boat, a cool breeze wafting over my face as I slowly compose something poetical to put in my blog…sadly that memory has
been overridden by a bunch of twats from ‘daan saaff’ (down south). They will now be referred to as ‘Shades’ (cant deal with hangovers) Essex girl (nuff said), Pork Pie (a bit fat and wears a Mickey Pearce hat) and Uni Boy (the brains of the operation).
Whilst most of the largely mixed international group were enjoying the majesty of Halong bay, I was reminded of pub beer gardens. Sitting on the boat led to speculation as to whether this place would be good for a ‘session’ (involving vodka and red bull, naturally), a trip to the caves inspired curiosity about whether or not sound systems would be permitted, and dinner led to ‘shades’ being unable to ‘cope with mushrooms’. Still, despite the police arriving on out boat when one of them climbed the mast in the wee small hours, I had some kind of sympathy for them, they were just a bunch of pissed up English twats out for a good time…they are heading for the Oz next, so by the time you read this they will be probably be standing in the Olgas debating whether they have enough Vodka and Red Bull to make it ‘til lunchtime
and where the DJ box should be…
Me and Joe dumped the tour on day two and stayed on Cat Ba Island, which is somewhere out in Halong Bay. We went on a nice long hike through the island, Joe looking like Ray Mears for most it in his utility outfit…. a running joke which I am yet to tire of…Cat Ba was great…amazing scenery. Some good trails and I got a nice bit of swimming in some kind of loch…
To cut a long blog short, we stayed on Cat Ba a couple of nights, then headed for Ninh Binh. Ninh Binh was pretty dull, despite being served VN wine by a shaking Dutchman who informed us that if we liked that he could lay his hands of 300 litres of the stuff (to match the 300 he had already had judging by his DT’s). I had a couple and decided enough was enough whilst Ray Mears called him a pussy and called him outside for a drink off...(I made that last bit up, sorry Ray,).
The next day we went on a motorbike tour through the countryside round Hoa Lu…again, it was breathtaking…like an ‘inland
Halong Bay’ (copyright lonely planet…if I was using my own words it was 'like a lot of beacon hills sunk in a paddy field')…Went to some caves that were populated by the offspring of the cave warden…they seemd to spring from every spriggy hole there was in the place and reminded both me and Ray/Joe of the movie ‘The Orphanage’. If one of them had appeared wearing a sack on his head I would have shit a brick, I tellst thee…
Then we took a boatride to Tam Hoc, a bunch of limestone Karsts rising out of the river not far from Ninh Binh. It was a great paddle through the caves, we even managed to avoid a flotilla of snack and trinket boats which loomed over the horizon about halfway through (Francis Drake eat you heart out, at least you had time to finish your bowls)…
Leaving Ninh Binh on a sleeping night bus (we should have trained it), we arrived in Hue 12 hrs later. I was expecting big things of Hue( pronounced H’way, not ‘Hugh’ like the drippy twat of grant.) Anyway, Its some kind of ancient citadel but, and I realise I may be
spoiled hailing from a land steeped in castles and old stuff (so many that we don’t even need to build gift shops, we just turn the less interesting bits into them, although I think we have cottoned on to portaloos…pissing on Simon De Montfort’s rosebush garden will not restore them to their 15th century glory. unless we drink 15th century mead). Sorry, I digress.
Anyway, Hue, i thought was boring. The town was dead and while the weather didn’t help I didn’t enjoy it much. The bridge lighting at night up was cool, the war museum good and getting caught in the rain and cramming on some guy’s bike in the middle of a downpour was a laugh. I went to a really posh hotel bar though…
Next stop Hoi An. Hoi An is lovely. Even if the weather was shit. The narrow streets are packed with tailors shops, lanterns and nice little restaurants…Didn’t really do much in Hoi An except get some clothes made, eat Cao Lau and wander around. After three days we went to Nha Trang, which was short lived as the weather was crap and so after a day we beat a hasty retreat
to Saigon.
After a month away, it was nice to come back to Saigon. I’ve got quite used to it and its starting to grow on me…Joe was here for a week in Saigon. I showed him round a bit but I was back at work after a day or two. I have been given all new classes so I don’t know any of the students.
When I left Saigon it was all pumpkins and ghosts, now I’m back it is a veritable winter wonderland. There are Christmas decorations everywhere…and no shortage of Christmas tat shops…excellent. We have a massive tree in the foyer at work and uptown the lights are sprouting all over the place. On the 14th we have the works Christmas party at the Sheraton hotel. It’s a James Bond theme so I’ve managed to make a shoulder holster and found a gun shaped lighter to put in it. Now i'm looking forward to the festive season...take it easy folks
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Roger Westmorland
non-member comment
Your Best Yet !
I don't know what you're on Jon, but you're certainly hitting the spot with your literary talents. Great blog. Have you met the future Mrs 'Ping Pong' Ball yet ? Keep on 'blogging'. Scouse Rog, the new Chief Exec. L.C.C.