The good news was that breakfast was free, and instead of the horrible sickly sweet bread that we found all over China, there was real crusty rolls, fried eggs, butter and jam, a much needed normality. Having not gotten much sleep on the train due to going through customs in the middle of the night, we didn't get up to much on the first day. Just took a stroll to Swan Lake in the old quarter and had some very un-Vietnamese Sushi for lunch. We did have a Vietnamese dinner though which we ate sitting on the pavement on small plastic stools which seemed to be the done thing to do for the locals in this area.
This was actually one of the more common uses for Pavements in Hanoi. Walking on them was considered a safe luxury. Mostly they are used for parking motorbikes and scooters, and where there is a small gap in the rows and rows of vehicles, there are chairs and tables for eating, or merchandise spilling out from shops. Walking must be done on the road, zigzagging inbetween stationary and moving scooters, dogs, and street peddlars trying to force their fruit or sugary dough balls onto you.
The next thing to note was that pedestrian crossings may as well have been squashed animals on the road for all the notice that the drivers took of them.
On our second day, we went to see the Lake, wandered around the old quarter and bought a copied Lonely Planet so that we could plan what we wanted to see in the rest of Vietnam. The Copy is actually pretty good. There are still colour pictures in the middle, and unlike some of the other poor quality copies the maps are readable. I did, however, manage to find half a page that was printed backwards and required reading in the mirror.
Maureen and Tim, our friends who we met in the hostel in Xi’an, arrived the next day and we organised a cruise to Halong bay and a tour of Sapa with the help of the very friendly tour operator at our Hotel. (Elizabeth Hotel if anyone is interested. Highly recommended. Rooms are not glamerous but spacious and have a fridge and air conditioning.) We also found out after hearing a few other people discussing what they paid for the tours that even though we were on exactly the same boat, and had exactly the same activities and guides etc, we paid less than half of the price other people paid for exactly the same trip!
The cruise to Halong bay was a trip lasting three days and two nights. We were picked up from the Hotel early in the morning and arrived at the Harbour about 5 hours later. Luckily the further out of Hanoi we drove, the clearer the sky, so by the time we reached the sea, the sun was beginning to peek through the clouds. We were recommended this particular cruise by a group of 7 English Travellers that we met in our Hotel who had just come back from the tour, and were very impressed by the quality and the price. We thought then that we were guaranteed a good time until we reached the Habour and we were told that for some reason the four of us would be joining a different boat. The sceptics suspected that this was the introduction to a inferior tour, but they needn’t have worried. We were taken on a little boat with another group of people to the boat were would be spending the night on, and it was lovely. I think there were 9 cabins altogether each with a little en-suite, a dinning room above and then some seats and loungers on the very top deck. We had lunch on the boat whilst we were ferried across the beautiful scenery towards our afternoons activities.
We visited some caves, which I personally thought turned out to be a bit of a disappointment compared to the caves we had just been to see in Yangshuo. They were not nearly as impressive, and there were hundreds and hundreds of tourists crammed into them so that it was more like a cave conveyer belt. We then went Kayaking until Sunset and had dinner back on the boat.
The next day we were taken to Cat Ba island where we spent the morning trekking up steep and rocky paths for a rewarding view, before going to Monkey island where we would be spending our second night in Bungalows next to the beach. Maureen and I took this opportunity to sunbathe immediately and did so for the rest of the afternoon until we were suddenly interrupted by some enormous speakers that had been hauled onto the beach blaring bad dance music from the 80’s and 90’s. Abba would have been an improvement. It seemed that the staff wanted to instigate a raucous beach party ut no one seemed that interested and although the music carried on util late into the evening, it was only the staff of the Bungalows who were dancing.
Unfortunately although I would have liked to stay on the beach another day, we left early the next morning and made our way back to Hanoi. We had booked a trip to Sapa leaving that evening so we grabbed some dinner and hopped in a taxi to our overnight train to Sapa. We originally thought we would be getting a soft sleeper, which would be a first for me so I was looking forward to it, but before we arrived, our tour operator called us to tell us that all of the soft sleeper train tickets were sold out and that we now had to get a hard sleeper. Although we had taken the hard sleepers several times befre, the vietnmese trains were rather more uncomfortable than the Chinese. The cabins were much smaller and narrower, there were no seats opposite the beds for people on the top bunks, and you couldn’t sit up straight on the bottom bunks. But still better than a seat, and the next morning we arrived.
We got the train back from Sapa to Hanoi and arrived first thing in the morning, but trying to cover the whole of Vietnam in three weeks, we didn’t have any time to hang around! We bought our bus tickets that would be able to take us right the way down to Ho Chi Minh and booked our first seat on the bus to Na Trang that would leave at 6:30 that evening. Having seen little of Hanoi itself we picked a recommended visit out of the trusty copied Lonely Planet and went to see the Museum of Literature.
A few hours later, the sights had been absorbed and we jumped on our sleeper bus to Na Trang. As there was no option to go straight to Na Trang we would have to take a 5 hour stop in Hue before continuing onto our chosen destination, but we thought it would be a good opportunity to have a break, get some breakfast, and see a few sights in another city.
The Bus itself is quite different to those that we had been on in China. To point out the negatives first, the layout is the same (three rows of beds arranged in two tiers like bunk beds) however, each bed unlike the Chinese equivalents are not flat but instead like normal bus seats that recline to around 150 degrees (so not quite flat). They are not quite as comfortable as you cannot really lie on your side, and as your feet have to slot into the space underneath the person in front of you, you cant really bend your legs any way that you choose, nor do you have a suitable place to put your bag. There is also not a proper pillow just a hard head rest thing (but luckily I have my own Pillow so now hat I know this, it shall be remidied for the next trip!) and a thin airline-like blanket as opposed to a proper duvet which you would think would be sufficient in a country as warm as Vietnam but the bus is thoroughly and perhaps over zealously air conditioned! On the plus side however, we did get a free T-shirt, we get a free bottle of water with every trip and there is a toilet on the bus, so you don’t have to be paranoid about drinking too much!
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