Backroads of Northern Vietnam

Sorry I haven't written in a while... it seems like these posts get further and further apart. That usually means that I've been having a great time, which I really have lately, but sometimes I'll admit that my energy is sapped by a period of boredom and lethargy. This seems to set in when I'm not around people that I can see regularly. I think that when I was in Mui Ne and Dalat I felt that way but I'm very very pleased to say that I'm back on top of things now and having a grand time with my new travel partners, Annika and Jurre (pronounced like yer-ah). They've been good company and I'm going to stick with them until I leave for New Zealand in January.

Ok, so the last post had me traveling to Hue with Annika to meet up with Jurre. I don't know what I said about them, but here's a summary. Annika is a 20 year old German student taking half a year off to see SE Asia. She spent 3 months volunteering at an orphanage in Phnom Penh and eventually set off for Saigon where she met Jurre and went north with him for a week or two before I met them. Her mother raised her and a few sisters with a bit of a feminist attitude (not that it's a bad thing) but she's a good sport, has an even temperament, and a great laugh. Annika is really easy to get along with and puts up with a lot of crap from me an Jurre I'm sure. She must like our company because Jurre and I talked her into extending her visa and staying with us longer in Vietnam. Incidentally, she claims that in Germany, Erika is an old lady name.

Jurre is 19 and Dutch. He works as a chef to support his training as an actor in Amsterdam. I think that the long hours of work and school burnt him out and he went on this long trip to unwind. He's been at it for a couple months already visiting Sri Lanka and then Vietnam and I think that he's going to travel for a few more. Jurre is bursting with energy and likes to talk a lot. He brings a fun and casual side out of me and I like him for that. Despite the age difference, I get along really well with these two and I know that they appreciate my experience and travelers wisdom as much as I appreciate their company and sense of adventure. I think that I've developed a sense that I can do anything these days, and I hope to keep that in the future.

I had the name of the hotel that Chris, Stefan, and Pierre had checked into so when we got off the bus in Hue we decided to get some single rooms for $6 rather than go with the $5 dorm rooms down the street at the lone hostel. Though I love dorms for the socializing, I don't need them if I've already got friends. It turns out that Chris and Stefan had left a couple hours before I got there and I wasn't to see them again, but Annika and I ran into Pierre at the hotel and a little later we met up with Jurre who had gotten into town that day too on the last day of his Easyrider tour.

We got some dinner and tried their home made beer... I think it was Bir Noi. Some time in the past, Czech people introduced the process of making fresh beer with a short shelf life to Vietnam and that's what you're getting when you find a $0.20 beer. Unfortunately it was godawful at this place but we had plenty of other stuff on tap and soon we had an arm wrestling competition that I handily won despite all of Pierre's sessions at the gym. I guess lugging a heavy backpack around for a year is a workout. Afterward we went to a popular late bar called Browneyes and one of the waitresses played a couple epic games of Jenga with the lot of us. I took a nice fuzzy photo of Jurre making out with some girl on the dance floor and we all had a good laugh in the morning.

The next day was a pretty hellish rainstorm for most of the day and so we stayed inside nursing the hangovers, smoking cigarettes (not me), and watched Napoleon Dynamite and Inception. Good times. That night we went to Browneyes again and danced for ages.

Despite being cold as hell and overcast, we went out the next day to see the Hue citadel. It was the seat of power for the last dynasty before WWI and was a pretty impressive palace complex in its day. Unfortunately it was largely destroyed in fighting with the Japanese, French, and Americans. What's there now is being restored slowly through grants from Korea. You get the sense that it would have been a great set of buildings but most of it is flattened and overgrown now. Still, it was good to get to walk around for a good long while chatting and seeking out hot coffee.

I also had to search around town for someone to change a $100 bill from my emergency money since I had a cash flow hiccup thanks to Paypal. I've been using Paypal to transfer money between my banks so that I can get it out of ATMs here at a good rate, but they decided to fire me as a customer since I raise too many security alerts since I use IPs from all around the globe. That sucks but even worse they're holding $2000 of my money and say that it takes up to 6 months to get a refund. Cute.

I think that we spent the rest of the afternoon writing and I made my last post then. We found a restaurant with an English menu that made the best food that I've had in Vietnam. Not only was it good, but it was also dirt cheap so that I could enjoy a kind of friend duck cake with a great dipping sauce for just $1.50 and I stuffed myself on 5 such items. Amazing service too and I went back to the kitchen to thank the woman that made our dinner. We didn't drink too much that night thankfully.

We got up at a reasonable hour the next day and rented motorcycles for a visit to the DMZ. Well, we got scooters for Annika and Jurra since they had never driven them before but I got a shifting motorcycle since I think it's more fun. They picked it up quickly and we drove about 120 km to reach the Min Vinh tunnels just to the north of the DMZ. Oh, for anyone who doesn't know, the DMZ was the dividing line drawn between the two halves of Vietnam by the allied powers after WWII. See, they agreed that the Japanese soldiers in the country would surrender to the Russians in the North and to the French in the South. Despite the treaty saying that there would be no political separation of the two halves, the French and Russians decided to try and keep their two halves for their own and thus started what would become the Vietnam war.

The tunnels here were built because the Americans were continually bombarding the fishing village for several years and so the people took to living underground for protection. They were in much better condition than those at Cu Chi and also were larger since they weren't really used for fighting though they didn't cover such a vast area. A def guide insisted in leading us through the admittedly confusing tunnel complex. He was hilarious because he didn't speak any language and thus emitted a series of gurgling shrieks when he wanted your attention and sounded exactly like Frankenstein's monster or maybe an agitated zombie. We gave him a good tip. Some giant group of school girls mobbed us and took a good 10 minutes getting pictures with each of us on their phones and cameras. I haven't gotten that treatment since Jordan I think.

To get home before it got too dark we had to drive like madmen passing every truck and other driver on the road. I guess that we did the same thing on the Easyrider tour and I'm just used to that now. That night we met some people at the backpacker hostel and 7 of us came up to my hotel room for beers and music. We checked out early the next day and headed to the train station.

Since Jurre and I have got a lot of time to kill before our flights out of the country, we're taking our time and hitting up every town that sounds good in the guidebook. The next one to the North was called Dong Hoi and it took 3 hours by train to get there. It's a true tourist backwater and had just one hotel where they spoke a touch of English but the three of us wanted to see how cheap things could get and we found a triple for $10 after an hour of searching. The first place had haggled down to $11 but we thought we could do better. We really haven't got anything better to do with our time in the late afternoon. That night we wandered around the neighborhood searching for motorbikes to rent but could only secure them for the next day. Dinner consisted of noodle soup at an outdoor stand where we met some local guys who invited us to share some rice vodka with them. I slept very well.

Early the next morning we picked up our bikes, had a small meal, and set off driving to some big cave in the area. None of us can recall its name, but it's a world heritage sight for some reason. It was also my companion's first time on bikes that had manual shifting but they picked it up easily and we raced through the countryside with a hand drawn map that the hotel made for us. Once there, we had to rent a boat to follow up the river to reach the cave. We didn't want to spend $10 on a big boat for the three of us so after another hour's wait we found a large group of local tourists that invited us to share their boat. A couple of them spoke decent English and were really friendly.

The cave was sort of interesting. The slow and wide river actually comes out of the mouth of the cave and the boat takes you a ways in before dropping you off. The water was pretty high though in this season and we were lucky it was open at all. There were some nice formations, but nothing blew me away. After riding back to town, we searched for lunch and settled on an upscale looking floating restaurant moored in the bay. When we tried to get a seat, a couple local guys that were sharing the otherwise empty restaurant with us invited us to join them for lunch. They also offered to pay for our food and beer and in exchange felt free to hit on Annika for a good hour in the most drunken and annoying ways. They sang to her, wrote love notes on napkins, quizzed jurre and I why we weren't in love with her too, and offered to make her a fourth wife. It wasn't in the worst of taste and was usually pretty funny and after a couple hours we set off with some good stories and lingering laughs. A short trip to the beach was in order in the late afternoon. That night we caught a sleeper bus to Minh Binh, just south of Hanoi.

The sleeper bus was very crowded and not super comfortable since Jurre and I were much too tall for the beds, but still we got some good hours of sleep. The bus was supposed to let us off at 4am but when we woke up at 7 we found out that we were in Hanoi. I guess they just forgot to stop for us. Anyways, we vowed to take another bus to get back to our original destination. With that in mind we took a cab on a short ride to the bus station whereupon he hit us with a ridiculous $20 fare. Of course it's BS but I played it cool and offered him $5 to get lost and then said that I was fetching the police. I think that we settled on a still grossly overinflated $2.50 each for the three of us but we were really tired and not in the mood for a bigger fight. No worries, that's small money. The 2 hour bus ride that followed was $2 each.

Minh Binh is a rather gritty small city that has a single hotel with a dorm. It wasn't very nice, but at $3 is made a fine place to meet other people and to visit the local sights. Tourists flock here to see the famous limestone pinnacles (called karsts) that jut up from the otherwise perfectly flat rice fields. Most people do it as a day trip from Hanoi to a place called Tam Coc. We got some motorcycles and drove a short ways to a village that sells boat rides through the area. First we visited a temple there that had stairs running up the side and through one of the karsts and it was really quiet and atmospheric. I loved it.

Next we took a row boat ride through the rice paddies in a rather narrow canal. I think that most people do it from a different spot that was really thick with tourists but we though we'd be smart and save a couple bucks by hiring some ladies in a different spot to row for us. The canal went through a couple caves and into some isolated and overgrown valleys. It was occasionally beautiful but I think that the main route might be prettier. Trouble is, the boat owners are supposed to be extremely aggressive hawkers on the side and if they're among the worth in Vietnam, then that's pretty impressive since Vietnam is among the most aggressive in the world. Oh, when we were negotiating the boat ride, we got to try out some betel nut that an old lady was enjoying. it's a kind of chewing tobacco made of a leaf wrapping up a small nut and spice package. I've seen a lot of it in India and some places in asia too. It stains the teeth red over a long period of time but we didn't get much effect out of it. It tasted pretty decent though.

That night we visited a restaurant in town that's supposed to be famous for its roast goat. I didn't think it was particularly good, and certainly not very fresh, and to top it off they don't have Saigon beer anymore... just the inferior Hanoi beer. We had a few more on plastic stools in the street and then called it a night at the comparatively early hour of 10pm. Annika went off to Hanoi the next morning to start the visa extension process but Jurre and I stayed to do one more day of motorbike exploration.

We got two bikes and set out to find a particular national park but after driving the main 1A highway for an hour we decided that we were lost and asked a lot of locals where we could be but of course nobody speaks English. Still, we managed to figure out with their help that we were way off course and we had to backtrack for a long time and finally got some good directions from a taxi driver. When we were close to the first turn that the cabbie had mentioned, we found and started to follow a tourists bus.

That bus led us to the first place mentioned in the guide book, a nature reserve. We explored the village area for a while but declined to do the boat ride through the nature reserve and so we set off to carry on to the national park. We reached it at 4pm after a grueling drive and got to explore it for just 20 minutes before we had to turn around and race home so as to avoid as much night riding as possible. We made it home in 2 hours since we knew the way this time. I guess that we didn't really accomplish much of what we had set out for, but it was fun trying. That night we had chicken and rice stew for dinner at a small outdoor restaurant and shared drinks with an ancient English guy and a group of soldiers that were celebrating something. It was a funny night.

Ok, so upon arriving in Hanoi the next morning after a bus ride, I wasn't really expecting much since everything I'd seen was rather dirty, poorly built, and lacking in frills. Jurre and I braved the public bus system since we were a long ways outside of the old town where the travelers stay and I was able to track our progress with my guidebook map and compass. As we got closer to the center, the town started to look nicer and nicer. We got dropped off at a small lake in the middle of town and hiked to the Hanoi Backpackers Hostel that Annika was staying at and I've got to say I really liked the look of this town. The streets were narrow but still had good sidewalks, large tree linings, big glass windows and vaguely reminded me of Boston with all the red brickwork. That's a hard comparison to accept, but I guess I just liked the look of it. It's much prettier than Saigon.

The hostel was just great too... large dorms with free breakfast and a rooftop bar. I'd heard good reviews of this place for the last 2 months and I can see why. There's a lot of new dorm competition in the neighborhood and the dorm price has dropped to $5 from the $7.50 that was listed in LP. That's a rare event. Annika introduced us to some new friends and once more we ran into Pierre. I like that guy. Jurre and I shared a cheeseburger pizza (I'm so sick of noodle soup and stir fry) and got some free beer for befriending the manager.

The weather was nice and balmy considering it was a couple days before Christmas and we walked around town that night chatting and searching for a cheap bar. Oh yea, we had a few free beers, and a funnel, at the rooftop bar before we set out. That night Jurre hooked up with an English girl but I just had fun chatting with the others and met a nice Russian girl named Tatyana. I don't meet many of those.

That night we also booked a boat tour of Halong Bay that departed the next day on Christmas eve but I'm going to save that for the next post. This one is already crazy long. I get really distracted traveling with Jurre and Annika because our humors really mesh up. Today I made a joke about the Chalula that I'm carrying (It's like there's a party in my mouth, and Mexicans are catering) and Jurre laughed for a solid minute. It was kind of awkward but made me laugh too. These are good days.