Hanoi

It felt strange to be leaving China after nearly 2 months, but we felt ready for a change of scene and excited about entering Vietnam and going to Halong Bay in a few days. First stop though was Hanoi, the hectic northern capital. The border crossing was relatively straightforward, just long and a bit tedious, though we managed to get a cheap SIM card for Vietnam and to change up our remaining Chinese Yuan for Vietnamese Dong. The exchange rate to the pound is a bit complex as there are about 33,000 Dong to the pound – so three or four nights in a hotel can easily cost a million! It has definitely taken us a few days to adjust to spending thousands on even simple things like a bottle of water.

Getting across the border with ease should be fine with a Visa stamp nestled securely in your passport, but people were still being encouraged to bribe their way through passport control. We managed to get lucky – not only did we not have to pay any bribes, we also got processed really quickly and were on one of the first buses out of border control. It’s quite a strange system once you’re through the gates, as you change buses and end up with a completely different group of people and with no obvious link to your original bus company. I have no idea how they manage to make that work without leaving people behind! We were all wearing badges to show we had a ticket… but it didn’t seem to mean much once you crossed the border. 

When we arrived in Hanoi, we were dropped off at the side of a busy road saturated with motorbikes, with a twenty minute walk to our hostel ahead of us. The busy Hanoi roads have to be seen to be believed – you just have to surge across in order to get to the other side, there is no polite or patient way to cross these roads. 

In fact, even when you have a green light to cross, this doesn’t seem to apply to all directions of traffic so you still need to look out for cars and motorbikes coming round corners to mow you down. 

Our Hanoi hostel was a real treat compared to where we’d been staying before now at this budget – your money goes a lot further here! The staff were almost suspiciously helpful, but we soon realised that’s just the way people are here – extra helpful and super-friendly. Our room had two double beds (why??), something I’d assumed only happened in American hotels, and a fridge and mini bar, and even better we had breakfast included!

 At this point, we didn’t realise that virtually every hostel, hotel or guesthouse in Vietnam would offer breakfast, and it seemed a real novelty.

Before we started to look around properly, we organised our bus-boat-bus tickets to Cat Ba Island in Halong Bay. This took all the organisational headaches away so we could make the most of Hanoi. 

We spent most of the first day exploring the Old Quarter, wandering through the streets and admiring the various ‘streets’ selling a product of choice. Once upon a time, it was decided that there would be 36 streets (representing the 36 guilds established in the 13^th century) selling different items, and so they were named, for example Silk Street (P Hang Gai) sells silk products. Therefore, you can be wandering through the Old Quarter and suddenly find a whole street filled with shops only selling sunglasses, or jeans! I’m not sure that either of these products were in the original listings, but the trend has persisted. Exploring the Old Quarter also led us to a cute little bar for lunch, RockBilly. The food was delicious, so we knew we’d be back! 

We decided to take a stroll around Hoan Kiem Lake before it got dark, and walked round the edge while dodging joggers and like-minded tourists. 

It’s reputed to be a little bit risky to walk around the lake without your guard up, so after our experience in Guilin we made sure we were on the alert… but the most threatening thing that happened was being questioned repeatedly by kindle-bearing Vietnamese students on how to pronounce confusing English words – or to explain what they might mean.  I had quite a lot of fun with this over the next few days – maybe I could be a teacher after all!

There is a small temple, Ngoc Son, on Hoan Kiem Lake – it’s not much, but it is very peaceful after wading through the fast-paced crowds. From the temple gardens you get an excellent view of the lake, and you can see huge balloons ringing the edge of the lake – it’s a pretty and somewhat festive sight.

 

A great 200kg turtle resides in Hoan Kiem Lake – not that we saw it, though it’s apparently a regular sight. Turtle stories abound round the lake – as well as this whopper of a creature (known as ‘Old Grandfather’), there is an embalmed giant tortoise in the temple grounds, and legend tells the story of another great tortoise that returned a mythical golden sword to the gods back in the 15^th century.

After some more exploring, we decided to call it a night and grabbed a sandwich from a street vendor to take back to our rooms. Street by street, you can always find a sandwich seller, and these Vietnamese sandwiches can range from amazing to downright revolting. This first one was great, but future stops in Vietnam would introduce some dodgy fillings. Most of these are the fault of a nasty tasting liver pate that can get slopped in if you’re not quick enough to stop it – though this is also hit and miss as sometimes the pate tastes great (in a ‘don’t think about it’ kind of way).  The best approach seems to be to decide how brave you’re feeling, choose a sandwich filling based on that instinct, and chomp away! Universally though, the egg sandwich is always a winner.

The next day, we were hyper-efficient and mopped up the last piece of organisation prior to heading to Cat Ba Island – booking our train tickets to Hue for when we returned from Cat Ba. Another night train – but apparently with air-con this time, and for a very reasonable price we were in a cabin of four beds with a door, rather than six beds backing onto a corridor. We hoped it would be worth the extra Dong! This was our last full day here as we had work the next day, so we scooted straight round to the Temple of Literature, close to the train station. 

 

This was an incredible Confucian temple with several beautiful and well-tended floral displays as well as some intriguing buildings and statues, including one of a dragon or phoenix, or flamingo – not quite sure really, but it looked pretty cool! 

We wandered past the Ho Chi Minh complex, where usually Ho Chi Minh’s embalmed body is resting and open for visitors (morbid!) but somewhat fortunately he was undergoing maintenance (he has an annual three month holiday in Russia apparently to be spruced up) so we walked past the complex rather than paid a visit. 

Just to the north of Ho Chi Minh’s final resting place, there is a huge lake (Tay ho, or West Lake) with more mini-pagodas skirting the edges, so we settled into a lakeside café to try some Vietnamese coffee before enjoying a late afternoon walk back through the Old Quarter.

We stopped at RockBilly for dinner (it would be rude not to as we were in the area) and popped to the shop for some sesame seed snacks to sustain us during an evening in with a film. 

Before we settled down to some hard work on our final day in Hanoi, we did one last spin around the Old Quarter, visited St Joseph Cathedral (which somehow became more impressive the longer you lingered there) and checked out the Memorial House, where you could learn about traditional Vietnamese crafts, particularly the history of crafting the iconic conical Vietnamese hats. After an ice cream by the lake (we are very British) we headed back to the hotel to get cracking with some work. One sleep later, and we were shoving our bags into a taxi bound for the bus station and the famous Halong Bay…

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