North Vietnam - 2012 (part 1)

Puff clouds like cotton,
makes me wish I'm an angel
and can lie on those
cotton puffs...

Day 1 & 2: Ho Chi Minh City

It's been almost a year and a half since my last trip to Vietnam, however, it feels a lot longer since then and I miss my friend dearly. So glad to have been invited back to visit and travel with her and her brother (who's back for a short holiday before returning to Toronto to find a job after graduating uni).


This whole trip was quite an experience - starting with me having to rush to the Vietnam Consulate in Hong Kong to arrange for my visa 2 hours before my flight (my own fault as I forgot that I needed a visa and thought I could get one upon arriving in Vietnam) and it was lunch hour when I arrived at the consulate ... thought I was doomed to missed my flight, but thankfully the people were very nice and got my visa done in 5 mins while on their lunch break.

HCM has many coffee shops that serve coffee,
snacks and simple non-vietnamese meals
in nicely decorated stores like this one.
This one specializes in drinks made with Soy -
I had a Dark Icy Chocolate Soy drink.

I arrived in Ho Chi Minh City (HCM) in the early evening, and it was just as I remembered it, hot air, streets packed with motor bikes - although the airport seems less chaotic than the first time, maybe because I already knew what to expect.... :)

Next morning, Tien still had to work on Friday, so N.T. and his parents took me to Cu Chi Tunnel for a short trip. I didn't get a chance to visit this area last time I was in HCM, and it's quite nice to go there. We started off the morning with Vietnamese Ice Coffee - mmmm yummy! It's very rich and with lots of ice! so as the ice melts, it dilutes the very strong coffee making it just perfect. Usually Vietnamese enjoy a cup slowly while sitting at the roadside make-shift coffee stand, I guess that's another reason why they put so much ice in, so that the drink stays cool for a long while.

left: see how little coffee is in the cup?

right: after adding ice, it becomes a big cup of ice coffee!

Cu Chi was an area outside of HCM (or as it was known in the past - Saigon) that was minding its own business when the Americans suddenly started moving past the borders of Saigon to try to expand its territory. But according to the video we saw, the people of Cu Chi fought back and made all these underground tunnels and built almost an underground city to live in.

The peasants of Cu Chi dressed in these clothes during the war

Bombs dropped by the Americans over Cu Chu area

One of the entrances into the tunnels of the underground city,
it's so small, I think only one of my legs might fit through... haha

We saw some of the quarters that they lived in, and also tried the cassava that they lived on during the war with the Americans. Cassava tastes almost like a cross between potatoes and yams. They wore sandals made from the tires of tanks.

After that we went for lunch, had a variety of beef that we can eat with rice cake, in wraps, skewers etc. The beef was really yummy, and I really enjoy all the different herbs that we can put in the wraps, I can't recognize the herbs if my life counted on it, but they all taste good to me! hahaha.... and they feel really refreshing to eat when it's so hot out. (although we did get an air-conditioned room so we weren't eating in the heat.)



On the way back home, we stopped by a famous sugar cane drink store - this one is really special and the only one of its kind. It mixes sugar cane juice with durian and green bean paste to form a thicker-than-usual sugar cane drink. It has a hint of durian smell, but is actually quite tasty!

That afternoon, we rested at home, until it was time to go pick up Tien from work and then we were off to the airport for our evening flight to Hanoi! We arrived in Hanoi that evening about 9:00pm, and the hotel we were staying at arranged for someone to pick us up (the ride from the airport to Hanoi city centre is about 1 hour).

Our hotel is located in the middle of the busies food district, there were places to eat everywhere! And also we were very close to the "old quarter" (if you've googled about Hanoi you will know), this is the place where the streets were named after the products that they sold in the past (it's not the case anymore). You will find "cotton street", "paint street", "curtain street", "silk street" etc. etc. Now these streets may not sell only these products anymore, but a collection of mostly general daily things or some shops that cater to tourists specifically. More on this later (I think.... haha... I was so bad with documenting the beginning of the trip and I don't think I actually took that many photos on these streets...)

After checking into Luxury Hotel (http://www.luxuryhotel.com.vn/), we went straight to bed as we had to wake up early to go to Halong Bay. I didn't take any photos of the hotels that we stayed at, but the photos on this website are pretty accurate. We had large, clean rooms, and Tien got a really good price for these rooms. For this one in Hanoi, we paid about USD $10 per person per night (VND $200,000).


Day 3: Halong Bay trip

The next morning, we woke up early and went out for breakfast at one of the many street stalls selling Pho - a breakfast staple for Vietnamese. N.T. warned me that in the North the food is more salty than in the South (where they like to cooke with both salt and sugar for balance, whereas in the North, they either make it really salty or really sweet). This morning we were pleasantly surprised that we got really good food! The cooked beef pho that we ordered was light and the soup was clear, the beef was tender and not fatty.... mmmm... it was really good!

Not long after, we had got on a mini-van (seats like 12 persons) and picked up other travelers from other hotels along the way to Halong Bay. Before setting out for Hanoi, we had checked the weather, and found out that there was a Typhoon heading towards North Vietnam and we were afraid that our trip would be affected by the typhoon. About half way to Halong Bay (it takes 4 hours by car from Hanoi), the tour guide told us that the typhoon is approaching the coast at such a fast speed that no boats will be out on the water overnight, and so our plans to stay one night in Halong Bay on one of the boats was immediately foiled. In the end we decided to continue with the day's plans to visit Halong Bay and see the caves at least and then head back to Hanoi in the evening.

When we got to Halong Bay and arrived at the pier to board our boat, we could see a lot of other mini tour groups. There were lots of foreigners, ever so often we would hear some French, Japanese or Korean.

We had to transfer from a shuttle boat onto a larger boat - which we would have stayed overnight on if not for the typhoon. Along the way, we some really nice mini-cruise liner looking ones, and ones that were not as nice. Ours was quite nice and seemed like they had recently refurbished it. The table was already set up and ready to for us to have lunch. We had a big meal of clams, fish, tofu, chicken nuggets, veggies, salad, spring rolls etc. There was a Slovakian guy in our group and he had brought his own Vietnamese vodka for the trip and added it to the orange soda that we were served when we first boarded the boat.

While we were enjoying our lunch, the boat had been sailing out towards the UNESCO protected karst mountains and caves. And after we had our fill, we moved to the shuttle boat to get closer to the karst mountains to go and explore the caves.

We visited the over-crowded-with-tourists Dau Go, but it was pretty spectacular anyways. If you can block out the sound of all the other tour guides explaining weird formations, and just look up then it's pretty cool. There are many other caves in Halong Bay, but this is one of the ones that have lighting design installed so that all the rock faces light up in rainbow colours.

After our tour inside the cave of Dau Go, we went on a cruise around the islands and saw some of the more famous karst landscapes - including the karst formation that is now on the VND 200,000 note. Although we had a typhoon coming, the weather was still very nice, there was a breeze that was growing stronger as the day progressed, and the sky was overcase, but the photos still came out well. I think even fog or a mist would have made beautiful photos.

The endless karst landscape looks like clouds on the horizon

My regrets about this short trip to Halong bay is that I did not get to go kayaking into all the caves and there were the edge of the horizon where I saw a line of these Karst landscapes in the distance that we did not get to explore. I would have also liked to eat fresh seafood that we can buy from some of the fishermen straight from their boat.

Around 4:00pm we started heading back to shore, but as this was a sudden exodus of all the tour groups, those that were not intending to leave that day actually had to squeeze onto tour buses and mini-vans with other tour groups to get back to Hanoi.

We traveled with the Halong Dolphins and although the weather really ruined the trip, the quality of the tour and the service was really good. We also got a look at one of the rooms that we would have stayed in on the boat, and although it's small and quite tight, it looked clean. On the boat they also have a bunch of activities that we can do at night - squid fishing, karaoke, board games etc.

The tour operator was really nice - they called the next day to ask Tien how she wanted to get her refund and apologized for the inconvenience.

A major accident caused us to be stuck in traffic for over an hour!

That night we got back pretty late due to traffic, and although we lost a day of Halong Bay, we gained an extra day in Hanoi.