I am writing this from the very wet city of Huè so I will try my best to remember everything as best I can !
We had a 7am flight from Bangkok – Don Muang, to Hanoi- Noi Bai so we had to be at the airport pretty early to pass through customs etc. This meant a 3am wake up to catch the 4am shuttle to the airport- I believe we paid 150baht which was a bit steep but the alternative was getting a taxi and having to pay the airport tolls which would work out to be about 150baht on their own plus the taxi charge.
We flew with AirAsia and I was surprised how long the lines were already at 5am! I also found it odd that you had to get any checked baggage X-Rayed before you could check it in? I’d never come across this before !
The flight was pretty uneventful, I think it was only about 1hr40mins so not very long in the air at all!
We had applied for the Vietnam Visa on Arrival through this website; there are quite a few websites around all with similar names but we used this one because we knew people who had successfully used it in the past. I think we paid around $24NZD for the two of us when we applied online and the approval letters came through within a day . You have to print the approval letter off which basically just lists your name and passport number along with everyone else who applied on the same day as you. You bring this letter and the filled in entry application form plus a passport size photo (we didn’t have this so they just took a photo of each of us for $1USD) to the Visa On Arrival desk which was just tucked away off to the side before Immigration. We queued for about ten minutes and then had to wait at the front for some time while a group from Korea managed to somehow push in in front of us. They then took about 15minutes to process the paperwork and then we handed over $45USD as a ‘stamping fee’ and received our visa.
-I was slightly nervous about using the online pre approval / visa on arrival service as one of the last travel agents I went to in NZ had never heard of it. She seemed very skeptical when I explained it to her and said she thought the only way in NZ to get a visa for Vietnam was to send your passport off to the Vietnam Embassy in Wellington. We had no issues with the process so I guess she must be a bit behind in the way that it works now. However I do know that the visa on arrival is only available when you arrive by air at Hanoi or HCMC, so if you are crossing a land border you would have to send your passport away.
We grabbed a couple of maps and some cash out at the airport ( Vietnam has quite a few ANZ ATMs in Hanoi and HCMC so it is worth getting an ANZ account to avoid the transaction fees you get using international ATMs with other banks) and then grabbed a taxi into the Old Quarter. We settled on 250,000VND off meter which worked out a bit cheaper then paying by meter. We were pretty shocked by the weather; we left Bangkok at 4am where it was probably only 20° but the humidity made it more like 25° and we landed in Hanoi which was very grey and only 21°. Our attire meant we looked quite out of place; we were rocking short shorts and runners while the locals had coats and jeans on.
We have found it quite hard to decide where exactly to go in each city; the cities themselves are pretty huge and there are hotels and hostels everywhere but it is hard to work out in advance where the best area will be to go. We decided on the Old Quarter as it is pretty central ( 5minutes from Hoàn Kiém Lake) and we had heard that there were lots of cheap hotels and hostels around the area of Ma May Ph.
We pretty much settled on the first place we saw, Hanoi Backpackers Downtown as it seemed pretty inviting and vibrant. We also thought that a hostel would be a good chance to meet some more people that we might see along the way heading down south in Vietnam. They didn’t have any double/twin rooms left so we had to take a double bed in a dorm room. From memory I believe it was 160,000 (=8USD ) which wasn’t terribly cheap nor overpriced . They were a really well organised place with activities each night but since we were so tired we didn’t really end up socialising too much and just went to bed relatively early.
We wandered around and found some street food which was alright, I’ve found the food in Vietnam to be somewhat bland so far, nothing has really appealed a huge amount to me . As we were sitting on upturned buckets on the side of he road eating lunch Lucky bumped into a friend from Dunedin ! Pretty crazy to think that in a city so big we could still bump into people from little old NZ!
We walked around the Hoàn Kiém Lake for a bit and then went into the temple (Ngoc Son Temple – entry was 20,000VND) which is on an island in the middle of the lake connected by a bridge. The temple itself was beautiful, quite small, but lovely architecture and artwork inside with a lot of really strong incense burning. Not the most amazing or elaborate temple I’m sure but quite a beautiful location! The bridge seemed to be the place to get the generic tourist photo, you couldn’t take a step without walking into someone’s photo! Naturally we had to get a photo as well just to prove that we were actually there !
Hoàn Kiém Lake . Our western faces seemed to attract a lot of stares . And photo requests.
There seemed to be lots of weddings going on within the Old Quarter, at first we thought they were really cute cupcake shops or something but then we realised that they were just decorated tents people put up on the street front outside a shop to have their wedding reception.
We visited the Hoa Lo Prison Museum which is a couple of blocks west of the lake (entry was about 20,000VND for an adult- Vietnam seems to have student prices so remember your student id for a wee discount )
The Hao Lo Prison was used to hold over one hundred Vietnamese political prisoners, some of which were on death row, during the French invasion. Lucky and I both had very limited knowledge on Vietnamese history but we learnt a lot here. The prison also had displays on the Vietnamese/ American War as the prison was used to hold captured American pilots for a number of years. The conditions the pilots were kept in were a lot better then a majority of what most Vietnamese people were living in at that time and possibly even now. We found it interesting that the Vietnamese treated the Americans they captured so well, with the U.S. POW nick naming the prison the ‘Hanoi Hilton’ despite the fact that the Americans were destroying so much of their country and causing a huge numbers of deaths. If you have any vague interest or curiosity into Vietnamese history I could not recommend this museum enough!
Hoa Lo Prison Museum- an amazing place to learn about Vietnamese history !
In the afternoon we wandered around looking for a place to book a tour to Halong Bay the following day. Our hostel offered a Castaway tour for $80USD but you didn’t actually get to cruise around the bay unless you paid another $40 and it seemed to be more focused on keg stands then enjoying the scenery. I’m sure we would’ve had a great time but we really wanted to see the caves and actually appreciate the scenery while we were there. We figured the scenery must be amazing if it was one of the seven Natural Wonders of the World! We finally settled on booking with AST Travel through Hanoi Guesthouse on Ma May Ph because the ladies there were so helpful and it seemed like a fairly reputable place;we didn’t think they could get away with sending us on a sinking ship if they had a business to protect! The ladies there were more then happy for us to use their computers to look at flights from HCMC to Phuket even though we weren’t paying customers there!
There were travel agents everywhere in the Old Quarter so you certainly don’t have to look hard to find a place to book through but you do have to look carefully at exactly what they are offering. We paid $90USD for a one night, two day cruise of Halong Bay onboard a ‘deluxe’ boat. We had read quite a few reviews which said that it was best to pay a bit more for a better boat and you would have a much better experience. We checked out the companies listed in the Lonely Planet guide but found that they seemed to be at the more expensive end of the scale while we were looking at the idle of the price range. We could’ve supposedly paid $75USD for a deluxe cruise through another company but the man and the place offering this seemed a tad dodgy and it sounded a bit too good to be true. As the lady at the guesthouse said, these travel agents can quickly disappear as they have no real obligation to provide you with a good service but being an established business they had to be there for a long time for their customers who were booked in.
My Halong Bay experience will be in the next post if you want to read it ! Don’t worry it was amazing!
We grabbed some street food for dinner; a beef BBQ which was like a stone grill meal back home in that you cook all the meat and vegetables yourself. We crossed our fingers and hoped that the first time we got food poisoning in here would not be our own fault! There was a local night market on in the streets so we wandered around that for a but and enjoyed some of the local entertainment on offer including a street fight between a gang of three year olds. You would be surprised how entertaining it is to watch tricycle wars!
Vietnam seems to be the place to buy knock off runners, bags or NorthFace jackets! In the Old Quarter nearly every other shop is selling hundreds of varieties of Nikes or NorthFace jackets. We didn’t buy any runners here, I’m hoping they’ll still be selling them down south in HCMC so I don’t have to carry them the whole way! Also the people seem a lot more willing to haggle here compared to Thailand where they were all quite reluctant and you never felt like you had gotten a really good deal from you. In saying that we did get ripped off buying some donuts on the street. We were both pretty hangry and were looking for lunch and we didn’t hesitate when a lady offered four small donuts for 50,000VND. It’s so hard to think logically when you’re that hungry! Every time we see those donut ladies now we just laugh and politely decline .
Even one day into Vietnam I had already decided that I much preferred it to Thailand. I’m not sure if this is simply because we had only experienced Bangkok which is very busy and slightly uncomfortable in terms of heat. Vietnam seems much more authentic to me ; we sat on buckets in the street with locals eating soups with unidentifiable meats and simply walked out into insanely busy roads and everyone on motorbikes just swerves around you. Supposedly the number of motorbikes in Hanoi equates to the population of Hanoi, it certainly felt this way! The traffic is insanely busy and ridiculously loud, people are constantly honking whether it be a warning toot or simply a toot for no apparent reason!
p.s. We are heading to Hoi An very soon, does anyone have any recommendations for tailors ? T.I.A.
themostbasic 