Vietnam

Location: Hanoi Noi Ba International Airport

Time: 10:46am

Weather: cloudy 19C

Since my flight to Hong Kong is delayed for 30min I'll take some time to write and finish this post on the plane! We spent the most amount of time in Vietnam on this trip and still only saw a tiny part of the country. The more I travel the more I realize how many other places I haven't been to, and the travelling lust grows hungrier. Our experiences in Vietnam overall have been really good, although with some scamming thrown in at times (more details below). 

From Kep on New Year's Eve, we got on a bumpy bus and then a hydrofoil to Phu Quoc Island. The border was a lot less intense than the Thai-Cambodian border making for a smooth crossing. Our first scam on this trip came when we arrived at the island. We were told our combo ticket included transport to our hotel but nobody held their word. Of course one of the downsides of travelling in SE Asia is all the potential scamming, which although is usually not that much more money, is annoying when you know you've been taken advantage of. There are many tips online on avoiding getting scammed and the best advice I learned is to definitely do your research on how much things should cost beforehand. Anyways, eventually we paid for a mini bus that took us to Duong Dong, the largest town on Phu Quoc. This was also the first time that our hotel staff didn't speak any English and it became a funny but also frustrating Google Translate guessing game every time we needed to tell them anything. After changing money at a jewelry shop (illegal but they are everywhere in Vietnam and offer really good rates), we set out to check out the night markets. Vietnam definitely wins the award for the craziest traffic and nonstop chorus of honking. Crossing the street is leap of faith every time, if you wait for a normal gap in traffic like in other countries you will be there for a very long time. Somehow the motorbikes, by far the primary mode of transport, manage to avoid you, but it's important that you don't change your pace. They say that holding up a hand to the oncoming traffic helps but I personally believe it's just self-consolation. Other than the markets being a bit busier than normal, as we found out the next day, there weren't any special celebrations for the New Year. Vietnam also follows the lunar calendar and Chinese New Year, they call Tet, is much bigger. So we spent that evening eating seafood (I tried this delicious dish of sea urchin with peanuts!) and drinking beers on the beach at Duong Dong harbour with our new friend from Spain. 

The first day of 2016, we went on an amazing snorkelling and fishing (no catch of course because I'm too impatient for that) trip to the north islands of Phu Quoc. The beauty of Phu Quoc really shines through as our boat moved further away from Duong Dong, revealing secluded white sand beaches with green shimmering water. Too bad there's rampant construction on Phu Quoc and I have no doubt that it will be overdeveloped like Phuket in no time. I didn't see any big animals (although the guide did say they often have dugong and whale sightings), but the reefs off Turtle and Finger Islets were beautiful and appeared generally healthy with many colourful fluttering tropical fish. 

We booked a three day tour of the Mekong Delta and left Phu Quoc the next day. Things became a bit fishy when we got to Ha Tien on the other side and they tried to put us on a direct bus to Can Tho. After insisting the driver take us to the travel agency office, the lady there explained in broken English that there had been a miscommunication with the agent that we had booked with regarding where we were going. In the end we decided to do the trip by ourselves and got the rest of our money back, but had to wait for a few hours for the next bus to Can Tho. On the bright side Ha Tien had some of the cheapest coffees and baht mi's we found! Vietnamese coffee involves a special filtering device and always adds condensed milk, which might just become my new favourite addition to coffee. The 6 hour bus ride to Can Tho was probably our roughest ride on this trip filled with terrible Vietnamese karaoke, millions of potholes and incessant honking, and I have never been happier to get off a bus. It's funny how weary you can be after doing nothing but sitting in a bus all day. Can Tho is quite a lovely city, relatively clean and traffic seems more spread out, and I had my first of many bowls of Pho there.

 

With a wake up call of 4:30am the next morning, we set off at 5am on a private sampan boat tour of Mekong Delta floating markets. We merely passed by the more well-known Cai Rang Market and spent most of our time at the further away Phong Dien Market, where we were stuffed with Pho and fresh fruits purchased straight from the boats. We tried for the first time this purple fruit (but also can be green) called milk apple, so named because its juice is a milky white colour. Each of the boats had a pole where they hung the products they were selling, the majority being fruits and vegetables, but there were also smaller boats serving food and drinks that would latch onto the side of the tourist boats. Such an interesting bustling sight! Our captain was the most hilarious little old lady (also a great model!) and got us really lost in the small canals which gave us bonus time to see life along the water's edge. We all just laughed it off. The fertile Mekong Delta grows something like the second most amount of rice in the world and we also stopped at a rice paper and noodle factory on the way back to Can Tho. 

With the rest of the day we walked around Can Tho, exploring a pagoda near the little man made lake Ho Xang Thoi and pretending to be students at Can Tho University. Vietnam is less obviously religious than Thailand and Cambodia, or should I say there is not a definite predominant religion. Not to say there aren't temples and pagodas, but they tend to be less flashy with fewer visitors. There is this  interesting religion found only in the south of Vietnam called Cao Dai, which is an amalgamation of Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism and Christianity, so perhaps the Vietnamese worship everything. 

From Can Tho we headed to the busy Ho Chi Minh City, which many people still call Saigon, where we did a wonderful walking tour with a university student Linh to the Notre Dame Palace, Central Post Office, and Independent Palace. It's a fantastic club that lets local university students practice their English while showing foreigners around. Even though language is only a part of a culture, cultural penetration and immersion is very difficult with a language barrier so it was really good hearing from someone on the inside about the Vietnamese way of life. Linh talked about how pressured university students felt to finish school and start working, with most taking extra classes in the summer to finish in less than four years, which was the complete opposite trend of North America. HCMC lies intermediate between the shiny skyscrapers of Bangkok and the colonial buildings of Phnom Penh, but there's definitely an impending sense of rapid urbanization and development for the coming years. 

To make the most of our time, we took the afternoon to go on a tour of the Cu Chi Tunnels outside of the city. A series of some 200km long underground tunnels that took 20 years to finish, built all only by hand, simple shovels and baskets, it was the hideout base of the Cu Chi people during the Vietnam War, which clearly left a gigantic impact on the country and is the subject of a good portion of tourist sights. It had a complex 3 level system with numerous secret air vents and bamboo traps that connected to the Saigon River. The most impressive feature was how narrow the tunnels were, because they were only made to accommodate the small sized Vietnamese people who were made even skinnier during the war. It was barely possible to move in the tourist tunnel which they already widened by 30%. I didn't like that there was a gun shooting range right on the premises, which many, you guessed it, Americans were eager to partake in. Somehow it didn't seem appropriate to be shooting for fun on a site where many had perished under those exact weapons not so long ago.

That night we had a flight to Hanoi and slept overnight at the Hanoi Airport before catching one of the first public buses to the Old Quarter for our trip to Halong Bay (only 9000 dong which is about $0.40USD, the cheapest transport from the airport to the city ever!). Out of my experiences of sleeping at airports, Hanoi ranks surprisingly high haha! Quite a few other people appeared to have the same plan of sleeping on the fairly comfy benches, and the security guard even woke everyone up at 5:30am, which worked out perfect for our schedule.  

The beauty of Halong Bay way surpassed my expectations from the moment we cruised amongst the karsts. I had read about how polluted it's gotten over the years but the water appeared emerald and clean and I never saw any floating garbage. Our first stop was Thien Cung Cave, accidentally discovered by a fisherman in 1993 and now considered the most magnificent cave in Halong Bay. There were funny names for many of the stalactites and stalagmites based on what they looked like, which were illuminated with colourful lights. Later that afternoon, we had the opportunity to do some kayaking around a tiny floating fishing community. At night we docked close to Cat Ba island and had a very relaxing evening filled with Dalat wine, a delicious dinner and squid fishing attempt #2 for me. 

The next day we had more time to take in the picturesque scenery and also got to have a class on making Vietnamese spring rolls. Our guide joked that we should all bring this back to our countries and start spring roll businesses. Around noon we sailed back into Halong City before embarking on the 4 hour bus ride back to Hanoi. As touristy as Halong Bay is, I would still say it's a must do is you're in Hanoi. Once you're on the water, the vastness of the area helps to spread out all the boats and you don't feel crowded at all. 

The rest of my time in Hanoi was mainly spent walking around the Old Quarter, I lost track of how many laps of Hoan Kiem Lake I did. The streets of the Old Quarter were especially narrow and windy which made the motorcycle traffic even crazier, but there seemed to be at least one method to the madness as every little street seemed to have stores that sold the same thing, from snacks to souvenirs to temple ornaments and dishware. After sending off my friend back to Taiwan on my last night, I went to a water puppet show, a Hanoi specialty, complete with the most terrific special effects. I'm not sure if it was because of Friday night but as I walked back to my hotel, the streets appeared to be closed to motorcycles and there were many really good street performances (my first time listening to Vietnamese music that actually sounds good!), which I ended up listening to much later than I had planned. Thank you Hanoi for a fantastic night of farewell!

This concludes my first but definitely not last trip to SE Asia. Admittedly I had some anxieties about safety going into it because I have never been to a developing country, but everything went very well even with a bit of food poisoning and scamming. SE Asia is becoming very well tracked and we met lots of people travelling alone so it's definitely okay as long as you have all the travel common sense. Things like frequent transportation and really good cellphone coverage (I would say even better than Canada) definitely changed my perception of this part of the world. The best part is of course how cheap everything is and I already have some ideas of where in SE Asia I want to go next!