After a last walk around Luang Prabang, we flew to Hanoi, VietNam. Riding in from the airport, my observation was that the city looked modern and pretty clean. We were at our hotel, Hanoi Old Centre, long enough to find out that VietNam blocks Facebook! Glenna tried various workarounds with limited success. Really, in 2012 what is the point?
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| Bridge on Hoan Kiem Lake |
We then set out to explore the area and find some dinner. We always like to stay in the old section of town because that’s usually where the sites you want to see are and where the people watching is best. This hotel was just a block from Hoan Kiem Lake, the heart of Hanoi in the Old Quarter, so we walked down there to see the night lights and found a restaurant that had bun cha and bun bo nam bo (pork and beef dishes with rice noodles), two items on our must eat list, a list we make for every trip. These two were very good.
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| Vintage cars at hotel |
In the morning we walked over to the Water Puppet Theater to get tickets for that night; a few minutes later and we would have been out of luck. We strolled through the Old Quarter with Glenna looking at all the shoe displays and then down to the ritzy French Quarter where we saw lots of fine old buildings and plenty of brides and grooms having the obligatory photos taken in front of a truly ugly monument.
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Wedding photos in front of ugly monument
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Building in French quarter
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Eating at kids' tables
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Then it was around the bottom of the lake and through streets where almost every building is yellow and where sidewalks aren’t for people but rather for motorbike parking, watching the Vietnamese eat lunch sitting at children’s plastic tables and chairs, and on to a pho place. All over this part of the world motorbikes are much more common than cars and they speed around everywhere. Hanoi is known as a place where traffic laws don’t mean much. If I hadn’t grabbed Glenna’s arm at one point she would have been mowed down.
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| Beautiful flowers in the lake |
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Motorbikes on the sidewalk
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Our afternoon was probably the least pleasurable of the trip. We first saw the truly ugly Ho Chi Minh monument, a concrete monstrosity which houses his body which we didn’t get to see because it’s only open in the morning. Then it was the so-so but very ancient Single Pillar Pogoda. While Glenna took pictures, I watched a really disorderly group of soldiers, a characteristic that I saw reflected elsewhere during our stay.
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Ugly Ho Chi Minh monument
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One Pillar Pogoda
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Next was the 11th c Temple of Literature, a series of pogodas the last of which honors Confucius, so named because it was once a university. Today it’s clearly the place where all school children are brought. That was enough walking for me for awhile.
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| Entry to Temple of Literature |
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Free time for kids at Temple of Literature
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Dinner that night was at a restaurant named for their signature dish, another one on our list, cha ca la vong, which is prepared at the table and served with onions and greens, rice noodles and a sweet sauce. Really good.
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Cha ca la vong
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| Water Puppet Theater |
Then it was off to the puppet show. These seats have to be the most uncomfortable anywhere because the rows are so close together, I guess because the Vietnamese are shorter than the average Westerner. I don’t know how the tall guys endured it. But the performance was enchanting. The musicians playing traditional instruments and singers sat off to the side, and the puppets were actually in a large pool which filled the stage, controlled from behind by the puppet masters. The stories, all in Vietnamese, were of battle, fishing, rice harvesting, and love.
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Water puppets in a dance
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| Dragons spewing water |
The next two days were our other top activity of the trip—a cruise on Halong Bay, three hours east of Hanoi on a road passing through small towns full of the characteristic tall, skinny houses and lots of rice paddies which fascinated me.
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| Typical tall skinny house |
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| Worker in the rice paddy |
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Glenna in our cabin
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When we arrived at Halong, a tender took us out to our junk. There were cabins for two, a dining area, and a common area up top. The first order of business was lunch. And what a lunch! There are three classes of cruises, and we opted for the deluxe. Supposedly the main difference is the food. Our two lunches and one dinner were just awesome. They brought the dishes one at a time—and they just kept coming. It was like Asian tapas. The first lunch was Julienned salad of pear and papaya, stuffed crab, beautifully fried fish, tofu in sauce, bok choy, mixed grilled vegetables, and apples. And tiger beer. A lot of tiger beer was consumed in those two days. Dinner was even better: cucumber and tomato salad, shrimp cocktail, spring rolls, clams, rice, pork with spices, fish, chicken, cabbage, French fries, and pears—everything done to perfection and presented beautifully. Lunch the next day was equally good. We had the chef come up from the kitchen so we could give him a hand. And the second day the sous-chef gave us a demonstration of how to carve animals and flowers from vegetables, the most amazing of which was a swan from a tomato.
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Tomato swan, turnip flower, carrot flower
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Carving a flower
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Over lunch we started to get acquainted with our shipmates from Germany, Singapore, Portugal and Russia. Once again, everyone spoke English. We had a great conversation while waiting for dinner about the fate of the euro—different points of view from the Germans and Portuguese. Later we talked a lot about previous travels (This was a well traveled group!) and governments and social policy. The Portuguese gentleman said that in Portugal the out-of-pocket cost for going to the emergency room is so small that people go there when they’re lonely, talking animatedly one minute and “sick” the moment the doctor walks in. Wake up, America!
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| Karsts of Halong Bay from the cave |
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| Glenna in Surprising Cave |
Halong Bay is notable because of the huge limestone karsts that jut up out of the water. They are a strange sight. One of them was large enough to contain a quite large cave called the Surprising Cave though we weren’t sure what the surprise was other than maybe it’s size. We had to walk up a long flight of steps to get to the opening and then walked up and down through it. Definitely more interesting than Pak Ou.
Next Glenna and I went kayaking around the karsts, something we were doing for the first time. We got soaked, but it was really a lot of fun.
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Floating fish market
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Kayaking in Halong Bay
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The next morning we visited a floating fish market. It was a raft in the water out of which large holes had been cut. Nets which extended into the water were attached to the sides of the holes, and fish of a given kind were swimming around in there. One of the holes had many smaller plastic buckets sitting on the nets containing small fish and shellfish. Our chef bought two kinds for our lunch. Talk about fresh. After lunch we tendered in to shore and took the van back to Hanoi, still thinking about all that wonderful food. I just have to say it—yummy!
On our last day in Hanoi we first went to the Museum of Ethnology. Because we were short on time we didn’t get to see much of the inside though I think it was probably worth seeing. But I wanted to see the recreations of tribal houses out back. And they were fascinating, brought from all over VietNam.
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Interior of Bahnar house
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