Vietnam – If only we had longer…

Well if we thought that the UAE and Thailand were hot, nothing quite prepared us for Vietnam…

As soon as we made it out of the airport, we were hit by the heat and humidity. The humidity was so high, the air felt thick around us.

Hanoi is quite a way from the airport and so we ended up having to catch probably our most expensive taxi so far to get to our hotel. The scenery en route was made up of rice paddies with Vietnamese, often wearing conical hats, working in them.

When we reached the outskirts of Hanoi, it’s really interesting to see the French influence in a lot of the architecture. This is when we realised how little we actually knew about Vietnam, as the French had colonised the country previously, and had only left after defeat in 1954.

Something which we discovered fast was that Vietnam has one of the largest amount of motorcycles per capita out of anywhere in the world.

Crossing the road in Hanoi is probably one of the scariest things I’ve done, as the traffic hardly ever stops and so you just have to walk slowly across the road, while masses of motorbikes, and a few cars whizz by you, literally going in all directions.

One of my favourite things is that D is a bit of a celebrity in Vietnam, at 6.4 foot, he stands out in the crowded streets, and people ‘subtly’ take photos of him on their mobiles as we walk past, come up to him and ask if they can have their photos taken with him or take photos of him, or just say hello to him. One of the best quotes so far, is when a man had finished taking a photo of D, he looked at me and, referring to D, said ‘so tall, so beautiful.’

We stayed in the loveliest hotel The Art Trendy (we would highly recommend it, if you ever find yourself in Hanoi), in the Old Quarter, and although it is a 3 star, we have never had service like that before. It is family run, and everyone working there just can’t do enough from you. They even let us leave our baggage there while we went to Ha Long Bay for 3 days and let us use their showers hours after we had checked out. Their free breakfasts each morning are also absolutely delicious!

Although we only had a day in Hanoi before leaving for Ha Long Bay, we managed to see quite a bit, including Hoan Kiem Lake, Ngoc Son Temple and The Hoa Lo prison (aka the Hanoi Hilton). This was particularly enlightening as it gave us some really interesting history about Vietnam. They also have John MCaine (who was the Senator who ran against Obama in the previous election) suit on display, as he spent time as a POW there as well.

After much searching (literally walking up and down the same road for about 45 minutes), we finally also managed to find the Water Puppet Theatre and watched a performance there which was fascinating. Water Puppetry used to be performed in rice paddies, and so all the puppets ‘walk on the water’ which the puppeteers remain hidden behind a large screen.

The trip to Ha Long Bay (one of the 7 New Wonders of the World) which we did on our 2^nd day (although only about 150km away from Hanoi) takes over 3 hours – mostly due to the roads – to travel to. We used a company called Vega Travel and couldn’t have asked for better. After hearing horror stories about some of the Ha Long Bay trips (rats on board, cockroaches, horrible food etc.) we couldn’t believe our luck with Vega. The boat was lovely, and we even had our own ‘terrace’ off our room at the back of the boat.

Ha Long Bay was fantastic and I would highly recommend it – we kayaked, swam, visited caves and hiked on some of the islands. We also had a great tour guide who couldn’t do enough for us, and loved sharing about his country.

We spent 1 night on the boat and 1 on Cat Ba Island, which is the largest island in Ha Long Bay and half the island is made up of a national park which is home to the endangered Cat Ba Langur. Unfortunately we didn’t get to see any Langur on our trip, although we did see species of monkeys on some of the islands while kayaking in the Bay. Cat Ba Island is one of the only populated islands in Ha Long Bay, with roughly 13 000 inhabitants and 4 000 more inhabitants living on floating fishing villages off the coast.

The fishing villages are fascinating to sail through most of the houses are built on large Styrofoam boxes.

We’re off to the Philippines tonight, but are sad to be leaving Vietnam as there is so much more to see and it is really a country we wish we could spend more time in.

Most interesting things seen on a motorbike:

• A family of 5 (on a motorbike the size of a Vespa)
• A huge, live sow, tied up on the back on a motorbike

Favourite drink:

• Iced Vietnamese Coffee (with condensed milk – yum!)

Reasons to visit:

• Incredibly friendly locals, your money stretches really far, and it is a country with a fascinating history (which although you know the name of, you will probably find you don’t know that much about it…).