Matt and Kylie

Hanoi

On arrival back in Hanoi we needed to find a hotel because we had left the other one before the tour after not being to impressed by it. The lady from the tour company had a sister who ran a hotel so offered to have them come and pick us up to go and check it out. 5 minutes later a guy turned up on a motorbike and motioned with us to go with him… we were slightly confused because surely both of us with our massive packs and day bags could not fit on one motorbike?! After telling them that we didn’t think this was going to work they finally agreed that we should probably leave our big bags behind and we squished on to the bike and set off, kylie had it ok in between me and the driver but I was hanging off the back barely clinging on, no helmet, no foot pegs – it was slightly uncomfortable and I was constantly wondering if I slipped off the back whether or not I would be able to land on my feet or my face. However we eventually got there in one piece and decided to check into the hotel – partly to avoid the ride back to the tour office and partly because it was a decent enough place.

The next day we planned on visiting Ho Chi Minh’s Mausoleum but after sleeping in we realised we had screwed up majorly because it was only open in the morning’s and closed on Friday’s (the next day) and as we would be flying out the on the Saturday morning we had missed out on seeing Uncle Ho which was a pity. We decided to walk to the Ho Chi Minh museum and also check out the outside of the mausoleum anyway. Afterwards we walked back to the old quarter and around Hoan Kiem lake before stopping in at the water puppet theatre to buy some tickets, the only show we could get into started in an hours time so we wandered off down some back streets before finding a nice little place called Le Pub for a pre show beer.

The water puppet show was pretty unique, very similar in format to the various shows we had been to in China though with the traditional live music band and small dance/story segments. There were fire and water spitting dragons, boats, phoenix dances etc. After the 1 hour show we decided to head back to Le Pub for dinner but got slightly side tracked when we got offered a set menu dinner including drinks, garlic bread, mains and after dinner fruit for about $13 NZ.

After dinner we found a few DVD stores to raid and ended up with a good copy of the newish movie Step Brothers to take back to the hotel and watch. We decided to have a ride back to the hotel in a cyclo, they are definitely wider in Hanoi than in other parts of Vietnam but it was still pretty squishy with me and Kylie sitting side by side in it.

On the Friday we had to move out of our current hotel to a new one (with another sister!!) because the had a massive booking and no room for us, we were not too worried though as the new hotel was just down the road and was a few dollars cheaper, we were slightly concerned however when the insanely loud jack hammering started up just after getting to our room but it only lasted until 5pm on the first day and we were not there for most of it.

It was somewhere around this time that we realised that we were most likely not going to make our flight the next day as Bangkok airport was still going to be closed. We started trying to figure out alternatives but it was pretty hard going because most people we talked to just said it was impossible to get to Thailand. Over the next two days and after visiting various travel agents plus the Air Asia office to see what we could do with our already booked flight (not much!!) and Vietnam airlines a couple of times we decided that the best option was to head to Cambodia. We cleared it with our travel insurance and bought some flights for $239 US each (ouch!!) so lets hope travel insurance comes through!!

One bonus about this whole mess was that we had an extra day in Hanoi so managed to go and see Ho Chi Minh’s body, it was a slightly weird experience and me and Kylie both decided that if we ever become revolutionary national heroes that we really wouldn’t want to be preserved and put on display for hordes of people to stare at for the next few decades.

Hanoi turned out to be a pretty cool place, it took me a few days to warm up to it and I still don’t think I liked it as much as other cities in Vietnam, but it still has it’s certain charms. Kylie particularly liked how entire streets would be dedicated to one thing, there were Christmas streets, kitchen utensils streets, shoe streets etc. Overall we really liked Vietnam and we already have most of our next trip planned out if we ever manage to make it back some day.

Change of Plans…

So after waiting an extra day in Vietnam optimistically thinking that the Thailand situation would blow over, and then realising that it wasn’t going to, we’ve made the snap decision to head to Cambodia this afternoon. We were going to do a loop involving northern Thailand, Laos and then Cambodia so it hasn’t thrown our plans out too much as we are just starting the loop in Siem Reap instead of Bangkok. Two or three weeks in Cambodia should be nice and after that we can see how Thailand is looking.

So bring on Cambodia! Thailand please sort your shit out…

Halong Bay Baby!

Fabulousness!  Our Halong Bay tour turned out to be the highlight of our time in Vietnam – the boat was great, the food was fantastic, the tour was busy and the organisers were onto it – two thumbs up!

We met the tour bus (a luxurious new 16 seater air conditioned van-vehicle) at 7.45am at the booking office where we got to leave our ever-expanding packs.  The thing with tours here, is that the tour company will pick you up and drop you off at your hotel and usually (like our DMZ, Cu Chi, Mekong Delta and Nha Trang tours), all you need to do is tell your hotel operator that you want to be on it and they organise and pay for it, then you pay on check out.  So we headed out and picked up 8 others that were going to be on our boat (there were 13 tourists on the boat total, we met 3 out there).  We ended up being the only tourists not from Europe, and we made friends with a single traveler called Patrick, who enjoyed beer just as much as Matt.

Arriving at the boat, three hours later, we were greeted by the crew with welcome fanta drinks, and we were off!  There were hundreds of junks (the Vietnamese style of boat that we stayed on) in the harbour, and we led the pack!  The boat had three above-deck levels – the bottom were the cabins, the middle was the lounge/dining area and the top was reserved for lounging on deck chairs – now this is living!

We checked into our rooms which were cozy and clean, complete with sea view and ensuite, and scampered up to the top deck to laze around a bit in the glorious, non-harsh, hard-to-burn-even-for-me Vietnamese sun.  The crew whipped up a delectable lunch (mum, note the prawns!), then the Junk pulled up to our first stop – the Amazing Cave.

The cave had three chambers and looked like something out of an Indiana Jones movie – spectacularly natural, kind of like it was melting.  Our guide pointed out all the sights – the rock that looked like the Laughing Buddha, a turtle, a couple embracing and a hole that looked like a heart.  After re-boarding our trusty sea vessel, we set out for the Titop area, where we stopped off for a spot off sea kayaking at the Luon Cave, where they filmed part of the James Bond movie ‘Tomorrow Never Dies’ followed by some open-water swimming and three story high jumps off the boat for Matt   All the time while we are cruising around, people appear in row boats offering to sell food and drink to you – everything from beer and Sprite to Pringles and Oreos… bizarre.  We watched the sun set on the top deck, and later the crew prepared a sumptuous Vietnamese dinner, all the while cruising Halong Bay.

Once the sun had gone down, we found our junk floating in the Halong Bay Harbour surrounded by a good 50 or more other junks… it was kind of surreal, like a massive floating city.  I think one of the reasons the junks all moor together is to help detract pirates… loads of ‘rich’ foreigners bobbing around on boats is possibly an easy target.  Later in the evening, the crew tried to start up a hearty round of karaoke, however as the lounge/dining area had turned into a bit of a book club, and as Matt and Patrick were the only two gunning for it, they got themselves vetoed.

We woke up to see the limestone karsts of Halong Bay out our window.  Halong Bay is absolutely stunning – the impressive 360 degree landscape is constantly changing as you cruise through the harbour – it was quite magical.  We feasted on breakfast on the boat and then sailed to Cat Ba National Park on Cat Ba Island for a two hour hike up the mountain.

We really enjoyed the steep hike – there was a lot of rock climbing involved as we scurried up to the top.  Our local guide was a real character, he would scamper ahead to swing on the vines for us like a monkey and then get us to give it a go.  Turns out he is a little more agile than us.  Once we got to the top peak, we clambered up a tall, steel pylon-like structure, dodging the precarious, unfastened floor boards at the top level…!

After checking in to our three star hotel (ooo, that’s right, classy for us backpackers!), we had lunch at the hotel and headed by boat to Monkey Island; a beautiful spit of sand at the edge of a jungle where the monkeys come out to play.  Sure enough, after about half an hour, a troop of monkeys appeared stealing whatever they could, starting with beer cans and ending with an unsuspecting tourists bottle of sun block which the monkey tried to drink…

It must be said though, we prefer our USD$10-12 rooms over the more expensive ‘starred’ hotels… the cheapies are clean and often come with better benefits – free wifi, cheap laundry, balconies etc and often seem less ‘sterile,’ with a bit more character.  Heck, in Nha Trang our cheapie came with washing fairies, who would pick up any clothes they could find and return them neatly washed and folded.. quite nice and unexpected after a hard day island hopping!

We had dinner at a wee restaurant next to the hotel, then managed to do a spot of pearl shopping (Ooo!) along the sea side strip before stopping in a New Zealand Pub called the flightless bird, decorated with Speights Gear and All Blacks memorabilia.  Matt even got to point out Eketahuna on the map to some of the people on the tour… ah the home comforts!

After a hearty breakfast at the hotel on day 3, we headed out to Gia Luan Pier to begin the sail back to Halong Bay and Halong City.  We had an early lunch on the boat and set off for Ha Noi again – we arrived back at about 4pm.  The trip was sensational, the whole time the sea was flatter than any lake we had ever been on.  Our hotel in Nha Trang had moved more in the wind than the boats we were on – we didn’t feel any water movement on the Junk at all   The sun blazed and it was great to have a small tour group again – a good way to end a fabulous trip in Vietnam.

Hue to Ha Noi

So we haven’t posted for a wee while, but we’ve been busy being adventurous!  However yes we are still alive, and no, we are not two of the four kiwi’s that are stuck at Bangkok airport… yet.  We are supposed to be flying with Air Asia to Bangkok on the 29th – at the moment all flights to Bangkok have been cancelled, so we are hoping that it will miraculously clear up tomorrow otherwise we might look at extending our visa in Vietnam and heading North to Sapa for a few days, or flying to Kuala Lumpur and heading North to Thailand, Laos and Cambodia in a loop, or take the bus to Laos.  We’ll figure something out!

We left Hue and its dodgey weather behind and headed North on the sleeper train Saturday night.  The train ride was hideous – first we had to battle to  be allowed into our cabin as a Vietnamese family of four (4 generations of women including a 4 year old) had settled into the 4 birth cabin and did not want to go to their right beds, trying to convince us to take random beds that did not belong to them in other cabins.  Anyway, our big bags make us more of a stronger force, so we managed to get in… sharing with locals in the sleeper trains can be hard (as we’ve found out – last time we were sharing with a toddler who had to have the light on, door open and peed into a bottle).  This time however, the lights went out at 7pm, leaving us wide awake for hours and hours.  Our wee friend who had to sleep in her own cabin instead of ours, decided it would be a friendly idea to come in for a loud chat and cups of tea at 4am… Grrrr…not fun for us.  We assumed they must be getting off early, but they didn’t trundle away until 8am… a short, frustrating nights sleep!

We arrived in Hanoi at 9am after randomly finding Daniel, a guy who was on our DMZ tour.  We grabbed a taxi with him and set off for the hotel hunt, finally finding a decent one for USD$15…we later discovered that they didn’t speak a word of English – when we talked to them they frantically started dialing on a cell phone looking for someone who spoke English – it took a 3 way conversation to get an extra towel!  We spent the day scouting round Ha Noi looking for a good tour to Halong Bay – it’s hard to know what your money buys you, there are so many tour operators and options around.  Eventually we settled on a USD$83 (bargained from $89 –  oops I don’t think your supposed to do that) for a two night, three day tour, inclusive of everything from entry fees to food – all we need to pay for is drinks. 

The travel agent was very helpful, she let us keep our big packs at her office for the boat tour so we just have to take our day packs, and when the nearby ATM was empty, she quickly whipped out a helmet and volunteered to take me round to another one on her motorbike!  That’s epitomizes the Vietnamese for us – we have found them to be so willingly helpful and friendly – a really nice bunch!

Rainy Hue and the DMZ Tour

Well the semi dry weather didn’t last long! In fact it pissed down the entire second day we were in Hue but we didn’t let it slow us down too much and still went for a walk around the city. We wandered north across the perfume river to the citadel and then to the Imperial enclosure which had a few interesting things to look at… apparently it got majorly messed up by American bombs during the war so is in a constant state of restoration… they have a LONG way to go!

The next day after a lot of um-ing and arh-ing we decided to go on a DMZ tour (demilitarised zone for the nit wits who don’t know what that means). We were slightly hesitant because we had heard that it involved a LOT of bus and not much tour… turns out that was a pretty accurate assessment. At the ungodly time of 6.30 am we piled on to the already full tour bus to set off on our journey… some how in the confusion of the tour guides trying to sort out the over booking me and Kylie managed to get real seats (although apart from each other) and a couple of unlucky blokes who were already on the bus ended up on collapsible chairs in the aisles. They managed to get real seats when a few people hoped off at the first stop in Dong Ha 1.5 hours later, by which time I had begun chatting to a few Brits and Ukrainians – conversation comes quite comfortably when you are rubbing bums and shoulders together in the squishy back row. That’s pretty much how we spent the next 10 hours, with the exception of a few stops.

After the included breakfast at the first stop we set off along highway 9 to see a few of the American bases and other famous sites of the war, the tour guide we had was fairly average – she spoke broken English and it was pretty hard to follow what she was saying but with some help from the trusty Lonely Planet (sometimes I hate it, sometimes I love it) and a bit of back row discussion we got the general gist of things. Our first sight seeing stop was The Rock Pile which was an American observation/artillery post. All it really is these days is an anonymous hill that needs to be pointed out so you don’t miss it… you can’t actually get into the place you just stop for 5 minutes on the side of the road to take a photo of it.

The next stop was Dak Rong Bridge which is supposedly near where part of the Ho Chin Minh trail used to pass through, I don’t know if that’s true or what, all it really is, is a big bridge and a nice convenient stopping place for a bus. 10 minutes later and we were back on the bus again heading out to Khe Sanh Combat base. I’m not really sure what I expected here but it wasn’t a bunch of coffee plants and a pokey little museum. In my confusion of working out whether we were even in the right place I didn’t even see the airfield, I don’t think that was even part of the tour company’s plan which seemed peculiar to me. The one saving grace though was the big old Chinook out in the paddock. I hadn’t seen one of those up close before so that was cool. After 30 minutes it was time to get back on the bus!

1.5 hours later back in Dong Ha we ended up back at the same average restaurant we had had breakfast at for a 40 minute lunch before setting of for another hour towards the Vinh Moc tunnels. Along the way we saw a lot of rice paddies where some pretty intense fighting occurred and there are still a few bomb craters out in the middle of them. We crossed the Ben Hai river and entered the North of Vietnam for the first time on a our trip.

Thankfully the tunnels where the one saving grace of the trip, I’m not sure they made nearly 10 hours in a bus worth it but they went close! They were way better than the tunnels at Cu Chi, a lot bigger and just a lot more fun to explore, we went through a large section that popped out on to the beach and then went back in another entrance and went a different route back to the car park. This was definitely the highlight and if I ever come back to this part of the world I would definitely just go to the tunnels and skip all the rest.