Good Morning Vietnam!

We crossed the border quickly and with no fuss from the guards. They even exchanged our small amount of left over Laos Kip to Vietnamese Dong at a bad rate for us! This Dong worked out to be the perfect amount for lunch that day and a taxi ride to our hostel from the bus station. The only problem we had was with the Vietnamese bus company we used who were really aggressive and had a bad attitude towards women.

We swapped buses towards the end of the journey to get to Hanoi and finally arrived after 15 hours where we then got into a taxi that we thought was ripping us off as the meter was running crazily fast, even when we were stationary - turns out later we actually got a fairly good price when we asked at our hostel! The thing with Vietnam is we’ve heard so many bad stories of the locals ripping you off so you’re always on your guard. Certainly we’ve noticed that you ask at a street stall how much a drink costs and the owner will pause for slightly too long to consider and then say some outrageous price. Also there’s no real service in the tourist industry it seems to be run by dour faced people who don’t care if you buy a tour from them or not which is a big contrast to the rest of SE Asia so far.



Bamboo Ladders anyone?

Hanoi was face meltingly hot and bustling with lots of scooters all over the place. Literally you can’t walk on the pavement because all the scooters are parked there! After the ordeal of the border journey it was nice to have 2 days pottering around Hanoi. We enjoyed seeing the Old Quarter with its product specific streets such as the electronic fan street, the bamboo ladder street, the paper lantern street and many more. All featuring multiple shops selling the same things! We saw a traditional long house that was a single room size wide and about four room sizes deep (long and thin) with two stories. The History museum was full of army tanks and anti-aircraft missiles captured from the Americans during the war. Most interesting was the sculpture made out of parts of crashed B-52 Bomber Planes. We also walked to see the B-52 memorial which is a lake that still has the untouched wreckage of a crashed Bomber Plane floating in it! You’ll all be pleased to know the street food in Hanoi is as fantastic as the rest of SE Asia J

We did a lot of research into which Ha-Long Bay tour to do. Fortunately we choose to do the cheapest tour we could find as we’d heard all the budget and mid-range tours get thrown together and all you pay more for is the tour company’s commission. Well we were very happy! We went with low expectations and out of everyone we met; only one other couple seemed to actually enjoy the tour! Everyone else seemed to be unhappy with everything and complained non-stop!

The first day was a bit drizzly so we didn’t get great views of the bay. It was still quite cool to see all the shadowy Karsts rising out of the sea as we slowly passed them by. We visited the heavenly cave which was massive and reminded us a bit of Chedder Caves because it was all lit up. We passed a floating village where houses float on oil drums and docked nearby to Cat Ba Island for the night for some swimming in the warm sea before dinner and drinks on the boat.

The next day the weather cleared up around mid-day. We went onto Cat Ba Island and did a short, but very muddy trek up to the top of a hill and saw fantastic panoramic views of the Island’s National Park. We had the rest of the day at our leisure so we walked around the lovely Harbour admiring all of the multi-coloured boats and enjoying iced coffee in a cafe. Later on in the evening we went out with Simon and Claire who we’d met on the boat the day before and found a bar selling tasty Beer Hoi (fresh low alcohol draught beer) where we had six drinks for under £1!

The final day we were back on the boat to cruise through the bay again and we had absolutely brilliant weather all day and what a difference it made! I couldn’t stop taking photos as it was so stunning! On the way back we stopped off to do 20 minutes of Kayaking around natural caves in the Karsts which was really nice for a different view point.

Ha Long Bay

We had one more day in Hanoi yesterday where we wondered around some more sights including the very Chinese Confucius Temple of Literature and then in the evening we caught the night bus to Hue where we have just arrived and seen the Imperial Citadel. Tomorrow we’ve booked onto a tour to see the De-Militarised Zone or DMZ. The DMZ is a small strip of land that divided Northern and Southern Vietnam and the opposing political parties during the war. Looking forward to it!

Love Chris & Kat xxx