Hanoi
Firstly, apologies
for the delay in the posts, it has been hard to find enough time to dedicate to
the blog and I am now about a month behind, but travelling is hard work! I am
hopeful that the next few posts will arrive quickly and get us back up to date
in the near future and as an aside, I hope everyone had a great Christmas and
New Year!
So we arrived in Hanoi on the back of almost 24 hours of travelling
which involved: Sleeper-bus from Chiang Mai to Bangkok from 8pm to 5am,
arriving at Bangkok airport at 5:30am when our flight wasn’t until 12:40pm and
then the 2 hour flight from Bangkok to Hanoi. Despite its name, sleeping on the
sleeper-bus just isn’t possible for more than an hour or two at best and as a
result we arrived in Hanoi exhausted but ready to experience it in all its
glory.
The first real thing I noticed about Hanoi was how loud it
is. It seems to be that in Vietnam when you are learning to drive it is
essential that you use your car/motorbike horn at every single opportunity.
Initially I thought that this was just a feature of the bus driver when we
first arrived but soon I realised that it was every single person on the roads.
As trivial as this may sound, it can become very hard work especially when one
is dealing with a lack of sleep and as a result, patience. There are also a
hell of a lot of motorbikes on the roads, like biblical swarms at times and
navigating the roads can be very dangerous.
The food in Vietnam, and Hanoi in particular, is nothing
short of fantastic. We ate at a lot of street-food vendors with a lot of the
local people and I was blown away by dishes like Bun Cha (Pork with noodles in
a sweet soup) and Bun Bo Nam Bo (Pork, noodles and vegetables with peanuts) as
well as many other dishes where we have no idea what we were eating but the
taste was incredible. This was my food heaven.
We booked a trip to Halong Bay, a world heritage site with
huge caves which have grown inside rocks that formed out of the earth’s core
some 100 million years ago. The caves were fantastic and awe-inspiring due to
the sheer size and unfortunately the pictures that we have taken really don’t
do it justice. For our trip to Halong Bay we were due to spend a night on the
boat but due to unforeseen monsoon conditions, we were taken back to shore at
around 5pm. However, we did have time to take a bamboo boat around more of the
caves which was steered by one of the local people who lives on the local
fishing village. The village itself is just a large pier which has been built
on top of with a few homes and somewhere to eat. It was truly eye-opening to
see people living like this and I’m pretty sure they didn’t have wi-fi.
Arriving back in Hanoi after Halong Bay, we decided to
attend a Vietnamese tradition of Water puppet theatre. Something that developed
in Vietnamese culture for hundreds of years, it began as a result of farms
being flooded and so the local farmers built little wooden puppets to entertain
the children, and slowly the tradition grew over time where they now perform
several times a day to tourists.
The following morning we were up at 5am to begin our journey
to the small town of Dong Hoi on the east coast of Vietnam. We arrived at the
train station and realised that we were on a train for locals and nobody on the
train appeared to speak any English at all, especially the ticket inspector who
thought it was appropriate to keep turning his back on me every time I asked
how long it would take to arrive. To make our journey even easier, the train
stations don’t display the names of each station very well, so you have very
little idea of where you are at any given time. This led to an exhausting 10
hour journey, where thankfully we were able to realise that we had arrived at
Dong Hoi, thanks to some quick google maps deciphering by yours truly. :-)
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