East is East [Part 2: 23/7-01/8 - Vietnam]
[continued from part one here]
and so we landed at Hanoi airport about mid afternoon, changed some money into the new currency and set off to find the way into town.
Got a minibus into town provided by Vietnam Airlines with a bunch of other Western backpackers, that was supposed to take us to the airline's head office, which we had estimated to be fairly close to the gueshouse we had booked online the previous day. In fact though, having got into the city some guy got on (the driver didn't really speak any English) and started asking everyone whether we had a hotel already and that he knew a very good one if we didn't. We all did have one, but that didn't prevent the minibus from stopping right in front of the hotel touted by the guy, while he made some feeble excuse about there being a festival in town and the bus couldn't go on to its final destination, which was only a couple of streets away anyway. We cannot say we were too surprised by this, all the guides warn travellers about similar behaviours and recommend to just stand your ground and proceed to where you actually wanted to go originally - there is nothing they can do to make you stay at 'their' hotel if you don't want to after all, and in our case we effectively were quite near the supposed destination of the bus, The only thing is obviously having to find your way around with backpacks in the chaos of a city you've never been in before, in the searing heat, is something we could have certainly done without. Anyway we found our gueshouse relatively easily and settled in before going out for dinner. We were right in the middle of the old quarter, which is certainly a very interesting area, except the traffic and whole feel of it is completely insane - pavements in Vietnam don't seem to be made for walking on them, rather to park motorbikes and scooters, sell all sort of things or even just sit on and chat, eat or play cards, but certainly not walking. As for the streets, well... at any given moment, any given point, you are faced with a million motorbikes, rikshaws and bycicles coming from all directions and all beeping in order to signal the fact that they're there to everyone else, plus the occasional car (fortunately not many!) and the pedestrians. Traffic lights are rare and don't really matter much anyway, so what you must do is walk slowly but steadily making sure everyone sees you, and then trust the constantly moving traffic to drive around you and avoid you. I had seen something like that already, in Mongolia and China, but it was nowhere near as extreme as Hanoi (and, as we'd then see, the rest of the country) and it was quite a shock to the system, coming from slow-paced Laos and being suddenly catapulted into this.
Anyway, we found a place to have dinner and then had a wander around the Lake (Hanoi has a number of lakes inside the city, one of which - hoan kiem - is bang in the middle of the old quarter, before retreating to the safety of our hotel room. The next day we visited all the obligatory sights - the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum complex (sadly it was the the actual mausoleum weekly closing day so we couldn't go in - just our luck), Van Mieu (The Temple of Literature, apparently the oldest university in the world, having been built over a 1000 years ago) and the Hoa Lo prison museum, also known as the Hanoi Hilton cos it was where the captured American pilots were held during the American (Vietnam) war. The prison was however originally built by the French colonists and used mainly to hold vietnamese freedom fighters, and it is to this period of history that the museum is dedicated.
Outside the old quarter the landscape of the city changes a bit, with some wider, tree-lined boulevards, but all in all it's still very chaotic, congested and polluted, and the fact that the temperature was insane certainly didn't help our enjoyment of the place. I don't know, I'm not saying I was disappointed or anything, there are certainly many interesting things there, but I was expecting Hanoi to be very different from what we found. I suppose due to Vietnam's former close ties with the Soviet Union, and from what we had read in the guides about it, I was expecting it to be a much calmer, more orderly place, possibly with wide Soviet-style tree-lined avenues and parks - there certainly are a lot of those but obviously only in the newer parts of town. The chaotic constant hustle of never-ending vehicular and pedestrian traffic on the move is something we would have expected more from Saigon, described as much more full-on than Hanoi in virtually all the guides... which left us wondering HOW MUCH MORE INSANE it could have possibly been. Like I said, certainly not disappointed, but Hanoi was one of the places I was looking forward to most of our trip, and it probably didn't completely live up to what I was (wrongly in fact, with hindsight it was quite obvious it couldn't have been like that) expecting.
The following morning it was time to leave the city already, however, as we had booked a small junk cruise on the famous Halong Bay. We got there and boarded our boat in the early afternoon, got settled in our cabin, met the other people on the boat (a group of 5 American exchange students, three other couples - 1 Swiss, 1 French and 1 Malaysian, an Irish guy and an Italian guy, plus the Vietnamese guide and the crew) and the ship set sail. The rest of the day was spent gazing in wonder at the fantastic view of the thousands of small islands emerging from the bay and relaxing on the deck. We stopped at one of the islands to visit the beautiful 'surprise cave', full of stalagtites and stalagmites, then we had an hour kayaking and exploring the bay as we pleased, and finally, having got back on the boat, another half hour or so swimming, jumping into the sea from the deck. After dark we had a nice seafood dinner on the boat followed by a few drinks on the deck with some of the other passengers.
The next morning after breakfast the ship arrived on Cat Ba island (the biggest island on the bay) where the 5 Americans got off (they had booked a 3 day cruise while the rest of us only had 2) and some other passengers got on to be taken back to Halong City, then after a few more hours cruising along we got back on land and from there we were taken back to Hanoi. We made our way to the train station, from where we were going to take an overnight train down to Hue, in Central Vietnam. The journey wasn't the most comfortable, I must say - the 4-berth cabins were sold out so we had to go for a 6-berth, hard sleeper cabin, and to make matterw worse the only berths available were the top ones. That meant a fairly uncomfortable night, practically sleeping on a shelf with a very low ceiling (I couldn't even sit up on the bed). To complete the picture, the bottom berths were taken by 2 vietnamese women (an American couple were on the middle ones), but the moment the train left an ever increasing number of children and adults kept appearing from other cabins and pretty much spent the whole time in ours, thus taking over the whole of the floor and bottom part and forcing us to stay in our bunks all the time.
Anyway the night eventually finished and we arrived in Hue, the ancient imperial capital in Central Vietnam (pretty much on the old border between North and South Vietnam and therefore heaving affected during the war). We hadn't booked any hotel this time, but it wasn't difficult to get one from one of the many hawkers at the station, and we were soon settled and ready to explore. Unfortunately though by this point we had pretty much ran out of dong (the vietnamese currency) and so the morning was wasted pretty much entirely trying to change some travellers cheques - only very few banks accept them and when we found one that did we we remembered that we had left our passports at the hotel... and of course despite our pleas the bank staff wouldn't budge and we had to go all the way back to the hotel - a good 20 mins walk, in the usual insane heat - to pick them up and rush back to the bank in time before they shut for their lunch break. We managed (just), but that left us rather knackered and somewhat spoiled the rest of the day for us.
Having finally got the money issue out of the way, we eventually made our way across the Perfume river, to the old Citadel; an interesting and beautiful place, though not a lot of it remains now, as it was heavily bombed during the war. From the very little we could see, in general Hue seemed a much calmer, more liveable place than Hanoi, and it's a shame that we had to waste half of the one day we had set aside for it running after banks; it might have been interesting to spend a bit more time there and I have a feeling we would have liked it more if we had.
There was no time for that, however, and the next morning we were back on the train for the - fairly short, only 2 hours - journey to Danang, and from there to Hoi An (on the seaside but not on the railway, so we went to nearby Danang and took a taxi from there. Again we had no hotel booked in Hoi An, but we asked to be taken to one of a number of addresses we had, figuring they were all close to each other in the town centre and we could have easily gone to one of the others if that one had been full or we didn't like it. It turned out to be by far the most luxurious hotel we'd been in during this holiday, easily 3 if not a 4-star standard and at $25 for the room (the room, not per person!) WITH breakfast we couldn't really say no and stayed there.
The rest of the day was spent leisurely wandering about the beautiful and laid back old town of Hoi An, a million light years away from the noise and traffic of Hanoi or even just Hue, finishing off with a fantastic dinner in a small riverfront café (although on the coast the town is not actually on the seaside, which is only a couple of miles away, but on the mouth of a river) - huge portions (I ordered crab and got two big WHOLE ones), excellent food and a couple of beers each for the grand total of £6!!
The next morning we got some bikes from the hotel (free for the guests!) and cycled out of town towards the beach. Fortunately we had read somewhere that there are 2 beaches in Hoi An, one where the whole world and its dog go, and another one which is much less crowded and much more pleasant - we obviously headed for the latter and got there a nice 20-25 minute ride through the rice paddies later. As you will know I'm not exactly a fan of seaside holidays, last year I swam in the sea (in the Ukraine) for the first time in almost 20 years, but I have to say this time it was a really pleasant experience: we were on this beautiful and deserted tropical beach, when we arrived there was only us (we got there relatively early and it was overcast, which certainly helped) and even later, when some other people arrived, it was only few. We had a nice swim and then a couple of drinks at a beach bar managed by a French-American couple, while playing with their kittens and dogs.
Cycling back to town we finally had a chance to take a nice photo of a water buffalo - we had been trying since we got off the plane but we were always on a bus or train and they were always too far, but this time we could stop and do it. Of course the moment we got off the bikes to go into the rice paddy a guy (not even the owner of the animal, who was instead riding it) appeared out of nowhere and appointed himself as a middle-man, making sure we took a nice picture etc... for a fee of course. I only had a 100.000 dong note (just over £3) on me and he appeared very happy about that and ready to go off with it. I managed to persuade him to give me 50.000 change which means for us it really wansn't expensive (what I gave him was not even £2) but if you think that you could buy 3 or 4 beers (depending of the place) in one of the tourist (and therefore more expensive) bars with that amount it's no surprise he was pleased.
The rest of the day was spent meandering in the old town again, Donia bought some silk thing for her and her sister, we watched sunset on a terrace overlooking the river and then had dinner and drinks before going back to our plush hotel for the last night, ready to leave for Saigon the next morning. Hoi An was certainly the most touristy place we've seen in Vietnam, but I have to say it certainly was the most beautiful and pleasant too, very pretty and relaxed, great food (the best we had in Vietnam) and even the heat wasn't as insanely intense as in the other places; the 2 days spent there were definitely much needed to recharge after the intensity of the previous few days.
The journey to Saigon was the longest of the whole trip - it was supposed to take 21 hours but a 2 hour delay accumulated during the course of it meant it lasted pretty much a full 24-hour day. This time we managed to get one of the 4-berth cabins (and one of the berths wasn't even taken by anyone) and probably because it was a slow(er) train we were the only westerners on it, meaning we sort of became the attraction of the train. The guy in our cabin spoke a bit of English and was quite happy to chat, and so was one of the conductors and a boy from the next cabin, who came in at some stage asking if he could talk to us for a bit to practice his English. Apart from these people, when we went to the restaurant car (at the other end of the train) you could see that a lot of people were looking at us, pointing and smiling as if we were from another planet. The restaurant car itself was an experience - obviously not geared towards foreigners, there was no menu and the board on the wall only had a couple of things listed, of course in Vietnamese; at lunch we managed to just point at stuff other people were eating and convey the message that we wanted the same, while at dinner the english-speaking conductor was there and he helped us order - after which he acted as interpreter for all his colleagues who wanted to know all sorts of things about us (where we were from, what were our jobs, were we married, did we have children etc.). All in all, although it was a long journey, the day went fairly fast and the next morning we woke up while the train approached Saigon.
Saigon (everyone still calls it that, even though the official name is now Ho Chi Minh City) is effectively a fairly westernised place, every bit as chaotic as Hanoi but bigger and lacking the quintessentially Asian flavour of the capital. That said, it's still an interesting place enough to see, and it was certainly worth it. We visited the Reunification Palace (the most interesting bit of which is that it's been left pretty much exactly like it was when the North Vietnamese troops stormed through the gates in April 1975 finally ending the war, so looking at the decor and furniture it feels like being in some weird time-warp from the 1970s) and the War Remnants museum (formerly known as the American War Crimes Museum, apparently the PC brigade is at work in Vietnam too), very interesting though at times quite upsetting in the very graphic explanations and photos of how the Viet Cong prisoners AND the civilian population were treated by Uncle Sam's boys and their South Vietnamese allies. The day ended with a nice dinner in a restaurant at the top of a very posh hotel in the western 'business' district (in Europe you could never afford to do that) with great views of the city, followed by a few beers in one of the street bars back in backpacker-land (where our guesthouse was).
The next day the 'war-tourism' continued, as we went to see the Cu Chi tunnels, built and used by the Vietcong during the war; another extremely interesting visit, and it's unbelievable to think that so many people lived in those cramped conditions, underground, for so long. It was possible to crawl through a segment of the tunnels - I'm not a particularly claustrophobic person but it still felt a bit uncomfortable to be in there, and I was only passing through for 20 metres (you could go in and come out after 20, 30, 40 or 100 metres; I originally wanted to go a bit longer - though not 100 m - but mistakenly followed the people right in front of me out after 20. I blame the bad visibility in the tunnels!), imagine having to spend most of the day, most days for months or years, in there.
Having got back to Saigon we decided to take it easy in the afternoon and chilled out in our (airconditioned) room for a while before going out for dinner. Like the night before, then on the way back to the hotel we stopped at one of the street bars (literally a few plastic tables and chairs on the pavement, under a parasol) for a drink, but this time we ended up staying there till after 2 am, having a great time drinking and chatting with various people from the UK, US and New Zealand, as well as a couple of locals. Oh well, the next morning we'd have to get up at 6 to take the bus to Cambodia, I'm sure we'll be able to sleep then.
So, what did we make of Vietnam? Well, it's certainly a very varied country, there are a lot of differences between North, Centre and South. Personally, it was the country I was most looking forward to seeing before the trip, I had a lot of expectations about it, some of which were confirmed, other proved to be completely wrong. All in all I think I liked it, we saw some fantastic places (Halong Bay and Hoi An above all, but everywhere we went was interesting and worth seeing) and experienced many amazing things and situations, although as a European, and a Northern European at that (yes, I know I was born in Italy, but in the north which believe me in many respects is not that different from Britain/Germany/France) I am not really equipped to deal with the noise and seemingly lawless chaos that appears to permeate everything. Plus, although it wasn't as bad as in China, I don't really enjoy having 1000 people around me trying to sell me the most disparate things, ALL THE TIME, ALL AT THE SAME TIME. I understand that as westerners the people in poor countries see us as walking money bags, but I'm not too good at interacting with strangers at the best of times, never mind in the searing heat (another thing I hate) and when when they refuse to take no for an answer.
That said, however, the experience was certainly positive and once again I feel very lucky to have been able to go there and visit it. Next on the agenda was the final country of our trip, Cambodia - but this is another story and I will talk about it in the next instalment.
Photos: on Facebook, or in the unlikely event there is still somebody who's not on there, here:
Hanoi and Halong Bay
Hue and Hoi An
Saigon and South Vietnam.