10 Days in 'Nam

They actually wear these hats here!

We arrived in Hanoi (Northern Vietnam) just after dark on Dec. 12th. We had arranged for our hotel to pick us up from the airport and right away we realized that the Vietnamese spoke the least amount of English of all the countries we've been to so far. Dev asked our driver what his favourite pho restaurant was and he answered that the car had cost $20,000. :) Another thing that we noticed right away was the buildings. Land is very expensive in the city and there don't appear to be any building restrictions regulating the height of buildings. So the buildings are tall and skinny; the higher your hotel room the cheaper it is, so we had a lot of stairs to climb at our first hotel! :)

Junks in Halong Bay (Similar to our boat :))

The rooms were super cute though, so we checked in and got right to business as we had to book our tour to Halong Bay for the next day. Finally it was time to eat, but we had an extremely difficult time finding a restaurant in the dark so we had to settle for an Irish pub! Then Dev and I checked out the nearby night market. The streets were crazy, filled with people and motorbikes going in every direction. After a quick walk around, we headed back to the hotel for an early morning. This was by far the craziest city we'd been to in terms of traffic and people.



Meg Outside the Amazing Cave



We were picked up from our hotel at eight in the morning for the three and a half hour bus ride to Halong Bay City. After a confusing trip of bus and group switches, we finally made it to our boat (there are an infinite number of tour package combinations and somehow they are able to keep track of which people go where at what times!). It was a cloudy but nice day and the boat (called a junk) was really beautiful. It was made of dark teak wood and had a dining room and back deck, a sun deck on the top and private rooms along the sides. Our room was nicer than some of our hotel rooms! :) We had lunch on the boat and then made our way over to some of the cooler rock formations. We were given kayaks for half an hour, but Dev disagreed with the principle of kayaking around without anywhere to actually go, so we did a lot of floating around. :)

Then we were taken to the "Amazing Cave" which was actually amazing. :) It was enormous! Finally, back on the boat, we watched the sun go down on the upper deck while the boat made its way off the coast of Cat Ba Island. After dinner, Dev and I retired to our room for another early morning with breakfast at 7am although we did make a valiant effort to get up at 4am to watch the sunrise, it was a tad too early for us. :)

Halong Bay - On Our Boat's Sundeck

Dev in Kayak Gear!

The next day, after breakfast, our group was redivided and we were taken on a smaller boat to Cat Ba Island, a national park. We had the choice of a short trek or a bike ride, and considering our flip flops, we opted for the cycling. Like many of the bicycles in Southeast Asia, they were in comically poor condition and the group spent a good amount of time trying to find enough bikes that were adequately functional. My bike and an English girl's would jump gears whenever we were on even the slightest incline and one girl ended up with a flat tire, and this was only a ten minute ride! :) The bike ride took us to the "Hospital Cave", the self explanatory name for an 18-room cave dug out of the side of a mountain and hidden by a secret door which was used as a hospital during the Vietnam war. It was pretty impressive and even included a small swimming pool and ping pong room. Apparantely, even Ho Chi Ming stayed in the cave at one point (the Communist leader of North Vietnam and still the biggest deal even though he died in 1969). After our ride, we got back on the bus and then another boat (any tour here has to have a million steps in the process :)) to the Monkey Island Resort.

Our Monkey Island Hut

Monkey Island resort was beautiful with a great beach looking out onto Halong Bay. We were each given these great rustic huts just off the beach which were so cool. We had lunch and were given the afternooon to just chill and relax which was wonderful! At 4pm we met up with the guide and some people from the group to hike up over a rock hill to a secluded beach which was run by the monkeys! :) The guide actually said to us before we left that if we showed our teeth or made any sudden movements it was likely that the monkeys would bite us! A guy on our group actually did end up getting bit on the hike but was luckily wearing jeans so it barely broke the skin, crazy! :) We watched the sunset from the beach then headed back to the resort for our welcome cocktails! :) It turned out there were actually two girls from Scarborough (who teach English in Korea) and a guy from the Danforth on the trip (small world :)). We all had dinner together and a couple of beers around the fire. A number of people decided it was so great that they would stay for an extra day but unfortunately, we were on a pretty tight deadline so had to keep moving. :)

Dev & Pho at a Street Stall

The next day was a travel day, an early breakfast, a boat to Cat Ba Island, a bus across the island, a boat to the bigger boat, lunch, back onto a smaller boat and then the last bus back to Hanoi! :) But we were pretty lucky because it started to rain on the way back instead of on our trip! :) Needless ot say, we were pretty tired by the time we got back to Hanoi! Our hotel that we had booked through forgot to keep rooms reserved for us so instead put us up in their sister hotel nearby which was actually supposed to be $75 but gave it to us for the price of the other hotel, $15. It was awesome and brand new; huge bed, rainwater shower and huge flat screen tv! :) We cleaned up and headed out to find a Pho 24 (a chain of fast food pho soup restaurants). Pho is huuuge in Vietnam and there are loads of corner food stalls that serve nothing but pho beef run by little old ladies. Sometimes there are tables inside but the locals often eat right on the street on little stools. Dev and the girls we were with hadn't had Pho before so Pho 24 was easing into it. :) Also, we didn't know this before, but although the Vietnamese eat pho pretty much any time of day, it is most often eaten for breakfast or early lunch.

At Ho Chi Ming Mausoleum

Meg was feeling a little under the weather so after dinner, we headed back to the hotel to enjoy a movie on our huge television (First Wives Club :)) and go to bed early. The next day we got up early in order to catch Ho Chi Ming at his masoleum. Ho Chi Ming was the leader of the Communist movement in Vietnam and is treated like a God; they have had him embalmed in this masoleum since 1969 when he died and everybody goes to see him. We were lucky because he had just returned from his two-month annual trip to Russia for touch-ups! Apparantly, Mao, Lenin and Stalin are also embalmed in Russia for viewing purposes. Weird! After that, Dev and I walked around the Hoan Kiem Lake in the middle of the city, ate pho at a street stall (delicious!) then went to the Hoa Lo Prison Museum. The latter prison is famous for keeping political prisoners for the French during the revolution and then prisoners of war during the Vietnam war. We're not 100% sure, but it was implied that John McCain had a stint in the prison.

Overnight Bus - Comfy! :)



That evening, we caught our first Vietnam overnight sleeper bus to Hoi An, a 22 hour trip! We could not help but laugh when we saw what the "VIP" bus looked like and realized that we weren't likely to get much sleep. The pictures made it look infinitely more comfortable. At about 6:00am, we had a rest stop in Dong Ha (the town separating north and south Vietnam - an strategic place during the war) for breakfast, where a man named Hoa convinced us to take a detour and do a tour of the DMZ or Demilitarised Zone. Hoa was a great guide and took us to one of many Northern Communist cemetaries and then across the border of what was once North and South Vietnam to Vinh Moc tunnels.

In DMZ Tunnels - Someone's Former Bedroom!

Because of all the air bombings over Vietnam, many tunnels were built where people lived for the better part of six years! It was pretty crazy. Then Hoa put us on a minibus with a bunch of locals and chickens back to Hue to meet our bus. After the second leg of our tour, we arrived in Hoi An, took the first hotel that we saw ($12 with breakfest and was actually really nice), grabbed a quick dinner and settled in for the night. Long trip!

Dev in Hoi An

Hoi An is a really cute, ancient port town where loads of Chinese, French, Dutch and Indian people settled and so the town is really beautiful and of course, on the river. The first day in town, I dragged Dev to the Hoi An Old Town where you can buy tickets to see inside some historic houses, temples and meeting halls, etc. Many of the houses are built using teak wood, which has been able to withstand 1-2 metre annual floods from the river for more than 200 years. One lady told us every wet season they move all the furniture from the lower floor to the top floor. Hoi An is also really famous because it's supposedly one of the best places to buy custom made clothing and shoes. Because we couldn't fit anything in our luggage, we totally resisted tons of great stuff, I only caved once for a jacket I really wanted. We ordered it that morning, the lady measured me up and told me to come back at 4:00pm for final fittings.

Hoi An At Night

So we headed back to the hotel to do some errands then went for a beer by the water where we ran into the guy from Toronto that we had met in Halong Bay. He joined us for a drink, we picked up the jacket, then we wandered around the markets and went for cao lau at a local food stall. This is a local specialty which consists of doughy flat noodles topped with croutons, bean sprouts and greens, pork slices and broth. Yummy! We also tried other Hoi An specialities such as the fried wontons (crazy good) and the white rose, shrimp steamed in rice paper (pretty good). Dev started to feel sick that night and I was still sick from the bus ride so although we had booked a half day tour the next morning, we ended up skipping it because we were going to have to survive another night bus the following day to Ho Chi Ming City (Saigon), a 28 hour bus this time!!

They'll load anything on their bikes here - even more bikes :)

This night bus was, I thought, a little better than the first and we both got some sleep (we had bought some sleeping pills from the local pharmacy and after googling them found out they were Valium :)). Dev continued to get sicker and was really burning up, so after finding a hotel the next evening we took a quick trip to the international hospital. We were pretty lucky, the hospital was clean and the doctor spoke English, we got in right away and they filled the perscription themselves. We ordered Pizza Hut from next door and went to bed early. The next day, he was still sick so we decided we would stay in the city longer than planned and instead of two more overnight buses to Angkor Wat and to Bangkok to see the temple ruins in Cambodia, we made the decision to book a 1.5 hour flight from Saigon to Bangkok on Christmas Eve. This allowed Dev to rest up while he was sick (apparently all Pfrimmer men are babies when they're sick).

Mekong Delta Traffic Jam

So we spent the first day recovering and going to the night market, eating Pizza Hut and watching movies (I did a little bit of exploring on my own around near the hotel) but the following day, I dragged Dev to go see the Reunification Palace (the government offices where North Vietnam finally conquered Saigon) and the War Remnant Museum. The next day, Dev still wasn't feeling well, so I booked a day trip to the Mekong Delta, rural Southern Vietnam. I spent the day with two Australian girls and a couple from Belguim where we went to a coconut candy factory, took a long tail boat through the river and went to a market. It was a tour of random stops but a good way to get out of the hotel and leave Dev in peace. :) He was feeling a bit better on my return so we went out to one of the bars on the main street for dinner and to watch the crazy Saigon traffic and then got ready for our flight back to Bangkok the following day!