Hanoi and Ha Long Bay

Day 47-51, September 1-4, 2008 (No Malaria)

Hanoi was probably my favorite “big city” that I have visited on my trip. I took the overnight train there which left from Danang. The landscape in the north of Vietnam is gorgeous and even though I had only a few hours of daylight on the train, I really enjoyed it

I arrived to the hotel around noon and had a whole day in front of me to explore Hanoi. I really didn’t know what to expect. Hanoi had always seemed like such and exotic and foreign place to me when I had thought about visiting. Before I could even leave the hotel, though, I experienced 1 of my 4 room changes for the 3 nights I stayed there. The hotel facilities were very nice and it was very well reviewed online. However, it was operated, much like everything else in Vietnam, like it was everyone’s first day on the job.

I must have walked 10 miles my first afternoon in Hanoi. It’s a pretty nice place to walk around. You have all of the annoyances of any SE Asian city: the beggars, the merchants, the taxi drivers, etc. but they seemed less frequent and less aggressive. Maybe I’m just getting better at ignoring them. Hanoi is also very beautiful with several lakes and parks. Near my hotel, past a very cool food market with all types of fish, meat, and fowl, was a large green lake with a temple in the middle. It was a good place just to go sit, relax and watch people go by. Even with the typical Vietnamese traffic and crazy street crossings, Hanoi seemed much more laid back than other big cities. I did notice, though, that there are very few dogs and no cats around Hanoi. Both are present is huge numbers in every other SE Asian City. Dog is still eaten here so that would account for the scarcity of canines but I still haven’t figured out where all the cats were hiding.



One other odd thing about Hanoi is the morning announcements. Every morning, somebody speaks to the entire city over load speakers placed everywhere. I missed these on the first few mornings but heard them my last morning there. I was told that they say things like, “Work hard for the state and the state will work hard for you” and “Don’t spit on the street.” I am pretty sure that they stole both of these quotes from JFK.

The only thing that I didn’t like on that first day was the Vietnamese Water Puppet Show. All of the guidebooks and several people that I met had all recommended the show and the theater was right around the corner from my hotel. The water puppet show was developed by farmeres as entertainment long ago on the rice paddies. Instead of a hard stage, the puppets are partially immersed in water as their stage. Unfortunately, this is an hour of my life I will not get back. I am sure that the puppeteers work very hard to do what they do but I guess that was just expecting more. The marionette scene is “Sound of Music” is more impressive. I suppose that I thought that this kind of show, being such an old and evolved art form, would be spectacularly intricate with puppets that defied how they should be capable of moving. I am quite sure that if I taped Mike English’s Cabbage Patch Doll to a stick and shook it over someone’s hot tub, it would be a more impressive display of water puppetry.


NOTE: Just before I posted this, I learned that Mike and Corie English welcomed their first child, Finnegan English, into the world this week. Congratulations Mike and Corie! Now Mike can stop playing with his cabbage patch doll.


The next two days, I was scheduled to go on a tour of Ha Long Bay aboard a Vietnamese junk boat. Ha Long bay is in the Gulf of Tonkin east of Hanoi a few hours. It is one of the natural wonders of the world. You’ve all seen it on TV or movies before. The water is emerald green with tall limestone cliffs shooting out of it. It is amazingly beautiful. The hotel almost talked me out of it though. In most of SE Asia, you can book all tours and day activities right through the hotel. I had wanted to do Ha Long Bay after seeing some pictures and reading about it in the guidebooks. Right after I checked in, alone, to the hotel, I tried to book the trip. The girl at the front desk was going over the details with me and said,

“This is very romantic trip. Night on boat very romantic. Good for honeymoon.”

She had just checked me in. She knew I was alone. Romantic honeymoon trip? About the last thing that I needed was to be a third wheel for several happy couples!

Then she says, “At night, you will do much singing and dancing.” Singing and dancing? I, under no circumstances, wanted to sing or dance. In fact, I was worried that if I was forced to sing or dance, there may be a mass suicide by drowning of those disgustingly romantic honeymooners. I decided to take my chances, though, and thought that if I got stuck in the middle of singing and dancing newlyweds, I could hide in my cabin…or just get stinking drunk.


I am so glad that I went. I ended up in a great group of people from all over the world and we had a blast. With me were about 14 people. The group consisted of two couples, an English family with a little girl, two French girls traveling together, me and two other guys traveling alone. Everyone except for the English family and one of the guys who was alone ended up hanging out together most of the trip.

I made good friends with a few of the people. Or and Rona are an Israeli couple with whom I talked a lot. They sat behind me on the bus ride to Ha Long so we had some time to get to know each other. I am going to be in Israel in a few weeks and they gave me a ton of advice on visiting and I have actually changed my plans based on their advice. They also taught me some Hebrew to get me through my trip including some great curses. I can’t wait to bust those out. Ben Zona! On the bus ride back to Hanoi, they put together a Hebrew language guide for me which was very funny in content and very nice of them also. Or also taught me a thing or two about haggling at the markets. You’d think that I’d be better at this but we just don’t come from a haggling culture and it is a skill that takes practice. I’m getting better.

One of the other guys traveling alone was named Danny and he lives in Chicago. His girlfriend, whom he left at home, lives on the same block that I lived in 2001-2003 only a few houses down from where I did. We bonded pretty quickly over that and the fact that he was viewing this trip as a good opportunity to sample several of the local brews. I liked where his head was.

The two French girls and a German couple rounded out the group with which I spent my time. At night, we sat on the top deck of the boat and all drank and laughed a lot. It was a lot of fun.

Over the two days, we sailed around the bay, did some ocean kayaking, swam, toured an Island cave, and visited a small floating fishing village. Overall, the trip was pretty good but in true Vietnamese fashion, there were still several mishaps. I think that the boat was pre-WWII. The floorboards were buckled everywhere and it had defiantly seen better days. Also, the engine died for over an hour one day and we just floated. I told our guide, mostly jokingly, that I could help fix the boat. Imagine my surprise about 45 minutes later when she came and asked me to take a look. Thankfully, the crew fixed it before I had to go into the engine compartment. That will teach me to joke about Vietnamese technology.

Our guide didn’t speak great English. She tried very hard which was appreciated but was very difficult to understand. She would start each announcement to us with, “Ladies and Gentlemens…” Also, the boat had rats; loud rats. Late at night, the entire boat was wakened to shrieking rats running through the walls. At first, I thought that my fan had broke and was making a weird noise but after I heard the scurrying in the walls, I knew that there were more guests on the boat besides the tourists and crew.

The last bizarre thing about the Ha Long Bay tour was my roommate. To avoid paying a single penalty, which I’ve often had to do and means I end up paying two fares for one person, I had to have a room mate on the boat. I don’t usually mind this at all especially when it is only one night. My room mate, however, was the third guy on the boat traveling alone. His name was “Joe” and he was from Japan. Joe also had track marks all over his arms and slept for most of the trip. Most of the boat independently determined that Joe was in SE Asia for more than the scenery. He slept so much, though, that he was pretty harmless and quiet. On the bus ride back to Hanoi, he fell asleep on one of the English women’s shoulders. He also avoided getting into any pictures at all. I hope Joe avoids any Vietnamese prisons on his trip.

After a good Ha Long Bay trip, I only had one day left in Hanoi. I spent my last day in SE Asia with a few new friends: Danny from Chicago and Shannon from Vancouver (who I had met in Phnom Penh and who had arrived to Hanoi while I was in Ha Long).




The photo below is Shannon and Danny eating our back-alley lunch of Pho (noodles) and mystery meat. It tasted good but we still have no clue what we were consuming.







We started that day by going to the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum where “Uncle Ho” is displayed, against his wishes, like Lenin. This was one of the most bizarre overall experiences of my trip and I don’t think that the level of weirdness can come through in my writing. Much like the rest of Vietnam, the mausoleum is run like it is every one’s first day on the job and they are working out the bugs. You’d think that this would be the one place where things would run more smoothly because, since Uncle Ho’s death in 1969, there has been a steady procession of people through here for 8 months a year (the other four, he gets sent to Russia to get his makeover). It’s basically the world’s longest line of people paying respects.


You aren’t supposed to take bags into the mausoleum so we were going to check them. At the bag check, they told us that we didn’t need to check the bags. At the security checkpoint 20 feet away, they told us we needed to check the bags. Back at the bag check, they told us not to check the bags but just make them look smaller. Look smaller? So we went back to security holding the exact same bags with the exact same contents that we had shown to them 2 minutes earlier but now folder over on themselves to look smaller and they let us through. There are also signs that say no shorts or cell phones but the security staff didn’t really seem to care if we followed those rules. I wore shorts and took my cell phone in but did have to check my camera.


The people that did care about the rules, though, were the multiple armed soldiers that are everywhere inside the mausoleum making sure that people keep moving and don’t talk. While we were walking past the disturbingly wax-looking, mummified body of Ho Chi Minh, an English woman a few people in front of us must have been taking just too long of a look at Uncle Ho. She was pushed forward by a soldier with a machine gun. After we left Uncle Ho’s chamber, but were not quite out of the mausoleum yet, Danny said something to me and I started to answer but was forcefully shushed by another machine gun toting soldier. The whole thing was just weird: the security people, the body, the guards, everything.
(Ho Chi Minh Photo from internet)

We also went to the Hoa Lo prison more popularly know to Americans as the Hanoi Hilton where John McCain spent several years of his life. The original prison is now mostly demolished and what’s left is a museum. They have several exhibits showing the brutality of the French when they ran the prison with Viet Minh inmates. Also, they show how “gentle” and “kind” the North Vietnamese were to American prisoners when they later ran the prison during the Vietnam War. From their depiction, the “Hanoi Hilton” was nicer than any other Hilton I’ve stayed at. John McCain and the other POWs look like they had the time of their lives here. They got to play sports and music, decorate for Christmas, draw, and several other activities that look like fun in the Vietnamese photos. If I ever meet John McCain, I’ll ask him why he ever left.

That evening, Danny, Shannon, and I went to celebrate my last night in SE Asia. We went to a seafood restaurant near our hotels. I can’t really figure out why they even gave us menus. I am pretty sure that they just make you whatever they feel like regardless of your order. Danny ordered pepper crispy fish and got some curried fish. Shannon ordered seafood fried rice and was given vegetable fried rice. I ordered grilled fish and was given a dish of something unidentifiable that I guarantee was not grilled or fish. Also, I tried to pay with my credit card so I didn’t have to get anymore Vietnamese Dong from the ATM. That was a big mistake. It took about 45 minutes for them to run my card. They kept coming up and saying that their new “accountant” didn’t know how to use the credit card machine. Needless to say, I have been paying close attention to my statements. The dinner, strange and unorganized, was a perfect way to end my trip to Vietnam and SE Asia.

Despite what it must sound like, minus Saigon, I really liked Vietnam. I think that they are slowly trying to make themselves into a tourist Mecca like Thailand and they are well on their way. There is so much to do in the country; I didn’t even get to scratch the surface. I have made quite a list for my return visit.