Jan 10th. Deb and I were invited, out of the blue, to stay with a young doctor, Kim Hoang, who is married to an engineer named Vu. A few months ago they opened "My Hoang Kim", a street level restaurant which keeps her mother busy and provides employment for two young fellows, one of whom is the son of a cousin. We stayed in a large tiled balcony room with high ceilings above the restaurant, where Kim and Vu laid out high density foam mattresses and bedding for Couchsurfers to stay for free, dorm-room style. There were additional floors above this one, with additional rooms. It wasn't the Hilton, but it wasn't the Hanoi Hilton - that being the name that John McCain and his fellow U.S. POW's called their Hao Lo Prison here in Hanoi. It was something in between, a bit like camping indoors, and comfortable enough, with a private bath attached.
Our balcony room overlooked the street, and the only downfall was the constant honking and street noise, which begans early in the morning and lasted all day. "Cacophonous" is a word that springs to mind. I would say that it's a very busy street, but it might be true to say that every street in the city is very busy. I take earplugs whenever I travel, and here I used them to good advantage. The only thing I can think of that would have improved the situation would be a privacy screen, for couples.
We ordered a few meals from "My Hoang Kim", which was very reasonably priced, to show our appreciation for the free accommodation. The food was always delicious.
"My Hoang Kim" was only a short walk to the Old Quarter, which was very helpful. There was no need to take a bus or taxi to most of the things we want to see. Most backpacker hostels and mini-hotels are right inside the Old Quarter, including some rather luxurious ones. We shared our room with Evan, a friendly young man from Switzerland whose parents were teachers. He'd finished two years of mandatory army service in Switzerland, and was taking a year off before university to travel extensively in Asia.
We weren't able to spend much time with Kim and Vu, which is a shame because Kim has a very promising set of references on Couchsurfing and we were looking forward to getting to know her. Vu was been able to sit with us a bit and recommend things to see in the city, and special dishes at locally famous restaurants. Kim was working long days leading up to the Tet New Year holiday, and wouldn't have a day off during the short time we were there. She did cosmetic laser surgery - more lucrative than the cardiology she was into prior, apparently. Leading up to Tet, the ladies are lining up at her door for beauty improvements.
"My Hoang Kim" was only a short walk to the Old Quarter, which was very helpful. There was no need to take a bus or taxi to most of the things we want to see. Most backpacker hostels and mini-hotels are right inside the Old Quarter, including some rather luxurious ones. We shared our room with Evan, a friendly young man from Switzerland whose parents were teachers. He'd finished two years of mandatory army service in Switzerland, and was taking a year off before university to travel extensively in Asia.
We weren't able to spend much time with Kim and Vu, which is a shame because Kim has a very promising set of references on Couchsurfing and we were looking forward to getting to know her. Vu was been able to sit with us a bit and recommend things to see in the city, and special dishes at locally famous restaurants. Kim was working long days leading up to the Tet New Year holiday, and wouldn't have a day off during the short time we were there. She did cosmetic laser surgery - more lucrative than the cardiology she was into prior, apparently. Leading up to Tet, the ladies are lining up at her door for beauty improvements.
We shared a lovely huge "hot pot" with Evan in their restaurant on our first evening with them, and spent a little time chatting. The next day we toured the Old Quarter of Hanoi, just north of the Sword Lake, a legendary site in the centre of Hanoi.
Jan 11th: We visited the Museum of Women, and purchased bus tickets to Ha Long Bay, and booked another train ticket to Da Nang for the following Friday. We decided to try the Livitran train - very expensive, but we hoped it might live up to the photos they use to advertise it. Someone we met that evening told us it doesn't, which would be par for the course.
The Museum of Women was very cool, the first museum we've seen in Vietnam which has excellent translations into English and French. It showed the roles and history of women, through marriage, child birth and rearing, women's work, the fashions of different ethnic women, the significant contribution of Vietnamese women in the war effort - "When the enemy is at the gate, even the women must fight". I have a new respect and appreciation for the women vendors on the street who carry two baskets full of goods suspended from a flat wooden staff across one shoulder. Their families often have very small farms that can't support them year-round, so they work half the year in the city doing small retail, starting their day in the wholesale market at 4 a.m. and working 12 hours a day if they're lucky, 15 if sales don't go well. That's the only way they can provide enough income for their families to put food on the table, and for their kids to afford to go to school. Unfortunately there's a small army of them selling the same sugary donuts from basins, for example, and there's no way they can compete with each other in such huge numbers. They hear "No", all day long, but keep trying to sell, hour after hour.
One thing I saw at the museum that was quite fascinating was an exhibit that explained a kind of folk religion in Hanoi, the Mother Goddess religion. I'm not sure if you can really call it a religion, but there is spirituality, values inculcation and mediums involved. The celebrants worship by attending a theatrical performance in which the mediums "incarnate" various personages, dancing in front of the altar in very beautiful costumes. It's also called the "Four Worlds" religion because the participants worship the Sky, Earth, Water and Forests through theatrical spirit mediums performing in a coded choreography, but with realism and a genuine human connection to the audience.
Walking around to locate an ATM that would dispense the amounts of money that tourists need was a little wearing. They only exist in Hanoi and HCMC - all the cities in between dispense only $100 at a time, so you end up paying out quite a bit in ATM fees at both ends. Here we found an Australian bank that will dispense $500 in a day. We walked quite a distance, and included buying bus tickets and train tickets in our hike. We walked through parts north of Sword Lake that we hadn't seen the day before, and negotiated those narrow streets at rush hour. Think of a high school with a few thousand students, at change of classes...that's how you navigate in the streets here at rush hour, with people rushing at you and past you from all directions. But here, the teenagers were riding motorcycles and cars in the hallways!
We passed a bar with a sign that said, "Drink here, or we shoot the puppy!" It might not be an idle threat: a few streets beyond we saw a roast dog in a vendor's stall, with lips pinned back to display the canines, perhaps to prove that it was a young and tender dog.
We sat and chatted with Kim in the restaurant, when she wasn't distracted by customers. At one point she suddenly touched my nose reflectively, then her own, then looked pointedly at Deb and wondered if she'd have a nose job. A rather nosy question, right? Her friend Anne, who has studied in Australia and in the U.S., was sitting with us. She jumped in to qualify that a big nose wasn't unattractive, and that in Vietnam many of Kim's clients come to have their noses enlarged and made more "Western". Even guys, apparently...and there are guys who come looking for pectoral muscle implants - a quicker way than diet and weight lifting to achieve a masculine torso. I didn't even know such a thing was possible.
We were quite far north, and it was very cool in January. Most people wore jackets, some wore hats and scarves, and even ear muffs. It has been snowing in Sa Pa, not far from here. After a little research, and the realization that we wouldn't really want to partake of the kayaking and swimming that is scheduled into each of the package tours to Ha Long (in January!), we decided to take a bus to Bai Chay, just outside of Ha Long Bay, sleep in a mini-hotel overnight, and then walk down to the docks and get on one of the cruise boats as a day tripper in order to take photos in the sunshine and enjoy the scenery. We'd have to wait until Tuesday to get good sunshine for photography, according to the forecast. At the end of the day we'd spend another night in the same mini-hotel, and then return to our host here in Hanoi before heading back south to Nha Trang, which would be more than 24 hours of travel. We'll break it up with a two night stay in Da Nang, using the day in between to see a little of that town.
Jan 12th. We enjoyed the Museum of Ethnology. We spent six hours learning about the 54 ethnic groups that comprise Vietnam, and spent time in another gallery of cultures of South East Asia apart from Vietnam, and then a park full of moved and reconstructed houses of many of the ethnic groups we'd learned about indoors, including groups of musicians and singers. The museum has the same professional layout and translations as the Museum of Women that we visited yesterday.
We took Isaac, who was staying at Kim's with us, and picked up another young Portuguese lady, Adrianna, at a coffeeshop we'd enticed her into. On the bus to the museum our conversation turned to sex tourism, only because Isaac, who teaches in Korea on a Fulbright Scholarship, has a habit of connecting with young ladies wherever he goes. I'm guessing his quick friendships are innocent enough, but I'm surprised at how many western men are foolish enough to believe that they can pick up a footloose, fancy-free Asian plaything, no strings attached. The overwhelming majority of young women who approach western men here - and they've even cast appraising glances at me, until they realize I'm with Deb - are devoted to the well-being of their families, more than westerners can usually appreciate. A western man is a financial windfall for the whole family, not just a sugar-daddy for the girl. Back at Kim's, she and Vu made a point of describing how people that have stayed with them have been robbed (the younger, silly bar crowd, not old fogies like us), and they described ways that young women have enticed western male tourists and robbed them with the help of male accomplices. Sometimes a western male tourist flirts with a Vietnamese girl in a bar only to find himself surrounded by a group of Vietnamese men who don't appreciate the kind of attention he is bestowing on her - understandably annoyed at the attitude of western males looking for a pick-up date, or perhaps in some cases, using that as a pretext for a swarming.
That evening we had a relaxing dinner of duck that Vu brought home. We were supposed to eat with him and Kim, but they'd eaten earlier. They sat and chatted with us while we ate. They are delightful. In the morning we'd be up early to hike over to the nearest hotel lobby in order to get picked up for our trip to Bai Chay - the company was willing to pick passengers up from hotels, but not from home addresses or restaurants; especially not outside of the Old Quarter tourist zone.
Jan 13th: we left for Bai Chay in the morning, but at breakfast Vu expressed his disappointment with three young Russians he'd opened his door to the day before. They went out and stayed out quite late, and he had to wake up around 2 a.m. to let them in. His employees keep the restaurant open until 11, which is already a sixteen hour day for them. In their defense, the Russians are thoughtless young people and didn't have any specific instructions about when to return; what they did was impolite and irresponsible, but we also suggested to Vu that he needs a small placard printed with "House Rules" that clearly tells them if they're out past 10:30 p.m. they can expect to be locked out for the night, and should find a hotel to stay in. People like that give Couchsurfing a bad name. Fortunately they weren't exactly Couchsurfers: they'd arrived at the border after hitchhiking through Russia and China, and a friend of Vu's who works for Immigration had phoned Vu begging him to take them in because they had no Vietnamese money and it was too late to do currency exchange. However, they could have checked into a hotel - we've never paid at a Vietnamese hotel until it was time to check out.
Next entry: Ha Long Bay
Jan 11th: We visited the Museum of Women, and purchased bus tickets to Ha Long Bay, and booked another train ticket to Da Nang for the following Friday. We decided to try the Livitran train - very expensive, but we hoped it might live up to the photos they use to advertise it. Someone we met that evening told us it doesn't, which would be par for the course.
The Museum of Women was very cool, the first museum we've seen in Vietnam which has excellent translations into English and French. It showed the roles and history of women, through marriage, child birth and rearing, women's work, the fashions of different ethnic women, the significant contribution of Vietnamese women in the war effort - "When the enemy is at the gate, even the women must fight". I have a new respect and appreciation for the women vendors on the street who carry two baskets full of goods suspended from a flat wooden staff across one shoulder. Their families often have very small farms that can't support them year-round, so they work half the year in the city doing small retail, starting their day in the wholesale market at 4 a.m. and working 12 hours a day if they're lucky, 15 if sales don't go well. That's the only way they can provide enough income for their families to put food on the table, and for their kids to afford to go to school. Unfortunately there's a small army of them selling the same sugary donuts from basins, for example, and there's no way they can compete with each other in such huge numbers. They hear "No", all day long, but keep trying to sell, hour after hour.
One thing I saw at the museum that was quite fascinating was an exhibit that explained a kind of folk religion in Hanoi, the Mother Goddess religion. I'm not sure if you can really call it a religion, but there is spirituality, values inculcation and mediums involved. The celebrants worship by attending a theatrical performance in which the mediums "incarnate" various personages, dancing in front of the altar in very beautiful costumes. It's also called the "Four Worlds" religion because the participants worship the Sky, Earth, Water and Forests through theatrical spirit mediums performing in a coded choreography, but with realism and a genuine human connection to the audience.
Walking around to locate an ATM that would dispense the amounts of money that tourists need was a little wearing. They only exist in Hanoi and HCMC - all the cities in between dispense only $100 at a time, so you end up paying out quite a bit in ATM fees at both ends. Here we found an Australian bank that will dispense $500 in a day. We walked quite a distance, and included buying bus tickets and train tickets in our hike. We walked through parts north of Sword Lake that we hadn't seen the day before, and negotiated those narrow streets at rush hour. Think of a high school with a few thousand students, at change of classes...that's how you navigate in the streets here at rush hour, with people rushing at you and past you from all directions. But here, the teenagers were riding motorcycles and cars in the hallways!
We passed a bar with a sign that said, "Drink here, or we shoot the puppy!" It might not be an idle threat: a few streets beyond we saw a roast dog in a vendor's stall, with lips pinned back to display the canines, perhaps to prove that it was a young and tender dog.
We sat and chatted with Kim in the restaurant, when she wasn't distracted by customers. At one point she suddenly touched my nose reflectively, then her own, then looked pointedly at Deb and wondered if she'd have a nose job. A rather nosy question, right? Her friend Anne, who has studied in Australia and in the U.S., was sitting with us. She jumped in to qualify that a big nose wasn't unattractive, and that in Vietnam many of Kim's clients come to have their noses enlarged and made more "Western". Even guys, apparently...and there are guys who come looking for pectoral muscle implants - a quicker way than diet and weight lifting to achieve a masculine torso. I didn't even know such a thing was possible.
We were quite far north, and it was very cool in January. Most people wore jackets, some wore hats and scarves, and even ear muffs. It has been snowing in Sa Pa, not far from here. After a little research, and the realization that we wouldn't really want to partake of the kayaking and swimming that is scheduled into each of the package tours to Ha Long (in January!), we decided to take a bus to Bai Chay, just outside of Ha Long Bay, sleep in a mini-hotel overnight, and then walk down to the docks and get on one of the cruise boats as a day tripper in order to take photos in the sunshine and enjoy the scenery. We'd have to wait until Tuesday to get good sunshine for photography, according to the forecast. At the end of the day we'd spend another night in the same mini-hotel, and then return to our host here in Hanoi before heading back south to Nha Trang, which would be more than 24 hours of travel. We'll break it up with a two night stay in Da Nang, using the day in between to see a little of that town.
Jan 12th. We enjoyed the Museum of Ethnology. We spent six hours learning about the 54 ethnic groups that comprise Vietnam, and spent time in another gallery of cultures of South East Asia apart from Vietnam, and then a park full of moved and reconstructed houses of many of the ethnic groups we'd learned about indoors, including groups of musicians and singers. The museum has the same professional layout and translations as the Museum of Women that we visited yesterday.
We took Isaac, who was staying at Kim's with us, and picked up another young Portuguese lady, Adrianna, at a coffeeshop we'd enticed her into. On the bus to the museum our conversation turned to sex tourism, only because Isaac, who teaches in Korea on a Fulbright Scholarship, has a habit of connecting with young ladies wherever he goes. I'm guessing his quick friendships are innocent enough, but I'm surprised at how many western men are foolish enough to believe that they can pick up a footloose, fancy-free Asian plaything, no strings attached. The overwhelming majority of young women who approach western men here - and they've even cast appraising glances at me, until they realize I'm with Deb - are devoted to the well-being of their families, more than westerners can usually appreciate. A western man is a financial windfall for the whole family, not just a sugar-daddy for the girl. Back at Kim's, she and Vu made a point of describing how people that have stayed with them have been robbed (the younger, silly bar crowd, not old fogies like us), and they described ways that young women have enticed western male tourists and robbed them with the help of male accomplices. Sometimes a western male tourist flirts with a Vietnamese girl in a bar only to find himself surrounded by a group of Vietnamese men who don't appreciate the kind of attention he is bestowing on her - understandably annoyed at the attitude of western males looking for a pick-up date, or perhaps in some cases, using that as a pretext for a swarming.
That evening we had a relaxing dinner of duck that Vu brought home. We were supposed to eat with him and Kim, but they'd eaten earlier. They sat and chatted with us while we ate. They are delightful. In the morning we'd be up early to hike over to the nearest hotel lobby in order to get picked up for our trip to Bai Chay - the company was willing to pick passengers up from hotels, but not from home addresses or restaurants; especially not outside of the Old Quarter tourist zone.
Jan 13th: we left for Bai Chay in the morning, but at breakfast Vu expressed his disappointment with three young Russians he'd opened his door to the day before. They went out and stayed out quite late, and he had to wake up around 2 a.m. to let them in. His employees keep the restaurant open until 11, which is already a sixteen hour day for them. In their defense, the Russians are thoughtless young people and didn't have any specific instructions about when to return; what they did was impolite and irresponsible, but we also suggested to Vu that he needs a small placard printed with "House Rules" that clearly tells them if they're out past 10:30 p.m. they can expect to be locked out for the night, and should find a hotel to stay in. People like that give Couchsurfing a bad name. Fortunately they weren't exactly Couchsurfers: they'd arrived at the border after hitchhiking through Russia and China, and a friend of Vu's who works for Immigration had phoned Vu begging him to take them in because they had no Vietnamese money and it was too late to do currency exchange. However, they could have checked into a hotel - we've never paid at a Vietnamese hotel until it was time to check out.
Next entry: Ha Long Bay
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