Chapter 18: Goodnight, Vietnam
Cat Ba and Hanoi, Vietnam, January 29 - February 5
It’s a long one, y’all. Grab a snack or beverage and settle in to hear about the rest of our time in Vietnam.
Monday, January 29, 2024
Haiphong is solidly off of the tourist path, so it was pretty difficult to figure out how to get to Cat Ba Island, although it wasn’t a far distance at all. *We decided to coordinate transport through the cruise company and were so glad we did because the route they took us is one that we would never have figured out on our own. The driver took us far out of town, giving us a great tour of the area, which included both an electric car factory and a large Sun Group plant (more about them later). He ushered us onto a ferry where we were the only passengers on foot — everybody else was either in a car or on a motorcycle. As he waved goodbye, he told us his associate would pick us up on the other side and we hoped it was true! We enjoyed the chilly, short ride to Cat Ba Island, where we were indeed picked up by another driver who delivered us to our destination.
This type of transportation, where we’re shuttled from one place to the next, told what car to get into by people we’ve never met and combining forms of transport, is a common thing that we’ve experienced in Southeast Asia. I’m never really sure what relationship exists between the person driving the van and the company I WhatsApp’d for booking, and the name on the bus is almost never the same as on the receipt. It really goes against my ideas of how to be a savvy traveller (and to be honest, my nature as a person) to get into whatever form of transport is in front of me, but I’m learning that it’s really the only way to get around. For a very not go with the flow person, Southeast Asia is forcing me to pretend to be one.
We spent a little while at the tour operator’s offices before we were shuttled off to the harbor. We met our guide, Ben, and introduced ourselves to our shipmates. We were pretty disappointed with how cold and cloudy it was, but Ben soon started to explain the upsides of the bad weather. There were so few people booked for tours at that time that although there were only 8 of us, we were on a boat designed to house 26. We also got to spend the whole day on the sleeping boat, as opposed to spending the day on a small boat then transferring on to the sleeping boat. It was total luxury. Our rooms were beautiful, with squishy foam mattresses and huge windows through which to view the amazing marble karsts protruding from the ocean. As we cruised from Lan Ha Bay to Ha Long Bay we immediately took advantage of having access to our rooms by napping.
Once we were anchored for the afternoon, we ate a delicious lunch, then got ready for our first kayak of the trip! We had been towing the kayaks behind us and were excited to finally paddle. We got to kayak through caves, some of which were dark enough to require headlamps (thanks, Aunt Carol and Uncle Tim, we use them all the time!). Our guide also showed us the baskets that local fishermen use to grow oysters and farm fish.
After our paddle, we cruised further into Ha Long Bay, where we moored for the night. The crew was thoughtful enough to find us a spot that was neither close enough to the squid boats for their incredibly bright lights to affect us, nor for the music from the big party boats to ruin the calm.
After another delicious meal with more food than we could even think about finishing, we received the briefing for the next day. We were getting to know our shipmates pretty well, and they were such a fun group! All Germans, but different ages and different stories for how they got there. After dinner, we gathered to watch our guide catch a squid. He released it, and we got to see it ink as it swam away! He offered us to try fishing ourselves, but didn’t have any takers.
Between the drone of the engine and the gentle rocking of the boat, we had an amazing night of sleep.
Tuesday, January 30, 2024
After a great breakfast we hurried out onto the water. Our guide explained that he likes to be the first group out to beat “rush hour”. We paddled past the colorful fishing villages, through the caves and into disorienting grottos surrounded by steep marble on all sides. At one point we heard a Cat Ba Langur, an adorable monkey with a golden tuft of hair, but we never got to see them. The black kites (a local bird of prey) circled overhead and swooped around the cliffs. We had a very casual game of ‘who can pick the most trash out of the water’, but with a game like that, everybody wins.
Our guide explained that before COVID, there were many, many more people living in the floating villages, but that the government had forced them all out, back into their home villages on land, wherever that was. He also told us about the difficulties with Sun Group, which owns a lot of the land around the area. They’re limiting people’s access to islands and beaches under pretenses of safety or conservation, but it’s likely because they’re planning large-scale development instead. I really appreciated having such a frank guide who was willing to give us the real story of what’s going on in the area.
After a short cruise to a different part of the bay, we were offered the chance to swim around the boat and either swim or kayak to some small beaches. Dad and Al both jumped in and swam to the beach, while Mom and I kayaked over (me towing Al). On one beach, we crawled through a narrow cave under the karst to another part of the bay on the other side. The second small beach we kayaked to had sand mostly made up of shells and corals. Back at the boat, it was my last chance to jump in the water. Although it was still chilly and there was still no sun to warm up in, I couldn’t miss my chance, so I jumped. It was cold, but felt good. I’ve never regretted jumping into a body of water, and I try to remind myself of that every time I’m knee-deep and about to chicken out.
As we cruised all the way back to Lan Ha Bay, we had our last delicious meal onboard and exchanged contact info with our shipmates. Our cruise with Cat Ba Ventures was an absolute highlight of our time in Vietnam.
We had booked two nights in the hotel owned by the tour operators, which had just opened a few months ago. It was such a nice room. After being cold in Tam Coc and spending a couple of days on the water, it felt good to be so comfortable. I broke in the room with a multi-hour nap, and then we had dinner in Cat Ba.
Wednesday, January 31, 2024
It’s our 100th day of travel! We talk all the time about how lucky we are to do this together.
We started the day with a trip to Cat Ba National park with a local guide. The museum was the first stop, which was fairly scant in terms of interpretation and information, but did have some amazing artifacts of local fauna. Our favorites were the baby monkey in a jar, the display of pinned butterflies and some startling taxidermies.
We did a hike up to a peak in the national park, which was really challenging! In addition to the elevation, the last section of the hike was a steep scramble on fog-slickened rocks. Mom and Dad did great with the climb! The view from the top was spectacular, I assume. Can’t know for sure because the fog was so thick it was basically raining. We took some time to admire the “view” before heading back down the slippery rocks to the base of the mountain.
The last stop of our morning was Hospital Cave. It’s a large, natural cave that was used as a bomb-proof safe house and hospital for the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War. Our guide kept apologizing to us as he explained the history (although I don’t fully understand why he would apologize to us). It’s a pretty scary place, where the history is recent and brutal. It felt like there were ghosts leaning over me as I peeked into the cement room that functioned as an operating theater. There were photos of soldiers on the walls, and I was struck by how young they all look.
We had a quick break in the hotel to change, then headed out for lunch. I had found a promising-looking banh mi shop on Google, so we schlepped over. I thought it was good but not mind-blowing, but Al says it was one of his favorites! We had a couple more errands to do in town, and I wandered down an alley where I found a huge market. It had tons of things that I hadn’t really seen at other markets, like sea horse, but also lots of familiar local specialities, like huge ceramic urns full of fermenting fish sauce. Obviously on a trip like this it’s not possible, but I wanted so badly to bring some home! I’ve really gained a bigger appreciation for it since being in Vietnam. I’d have loved to do a fish sauce tasting (which I don’t think exist) to compare different brands and styles.
We stopped at a coffee shop, where Mom and Dad wrote while Al and I planned. We spontaneously decided to flip around the rest of our Southeast Asia itinerary, deciding we were tired of being cold and that we should head straight to Cambodia, instead of staying in the north. While at the coffee shop, we ran into some of the people from our cruise! It’s definitely the off season in Cat Ba, so the few tourists who were there tended to cluster. Lots of shops and attractions were closed, but we got a sense of how busy it must get during high season.
We wanted to have a special dinner to celebrate 100 days on the road and settled on hot pot! It had been so chilly, so soup sounded perfect. Plus, Mom loves her food scalding hot. As a bonus, there was a really playful kitten running around the restaurant, playing with the kids there and trying to swipe pieces of meat out of our chopsticks.
Thursday, February 1, 2024
Remember what I said earlier about having to go with the flow for transportation to work? Today was another one of those days. We had to check out of our beautiful rooms at the Moon Boutique and get ourselves all the way to Hanoi. We had booked with a company called Cat Ba Discovery, but the bus that arrived said Cat Ba Express on the side. Are they the same company? Did they sell our reservation to another company? Is one a booking agent for the other? We will truly never know. The nice guy with the logo on his polo shirt had my name on the list, so we boarded the bus. Let’s do a quick check of what the booking said versus what we actually experienced. Direct transport to Hanoi with no transfers? Nope! Rode on two buses and a ferry. Wifi? Power at the seats? Nope! But did we arrive in Hanoi, a block from our hotel, on time and safe? Yes we did! And isn’t that what we really cared about?
After the tranquility of the cruise and the sleepiness of Cat Ba, we were knocked on our heels by the traffic and noise of the big city of Hanoi. Crossing streets required a lot of focus and blind faith in scooter drivers going in all directions. Our hotel was in a great location, a surprisingly quiet street in Old Town and just a couple of blocks from the lake. We rested for a while in our highly decorated rooms (complete with ruffled bed spread and rotary phone!) before heading out for the evening.
We walked over to Beer Street, a Hanoi landmark, a narrow road full of beer bars with pushy hosts and DJs. We had heard that Beer Street was the place to get bia hoi, or “fresh beer”. It’s a super local, super fresh beer. It’s low alcohol, with no pressurization in the kegs and no preservatives of any kind, so it has to be drunk on the day it leaves the brewery. Although we couldn’t find anywhere on Beer Street that served it, we had a couple of regular beers. We enjoyed the mayhem before taking refuge a few blocks away for dinner. We settled in at Bun Cha Ta, a place on the Michelin Guide. Can you have too much bun cha? Ask Al, he had it twice this day!
On the way back to the hotel, we finally found the promised 10k dong (0.40 USD) fresh beer! By this time we were all exhausted and full of bun cha, so it didn’t quite live up to the hype for us.
Friday, February 2, 2024
For breakfast, we went to a sidewalk stand called Banh My Mama. It was so good - I think it was my favorite in Vietnam! It turns out that adding freshly scrambled eggs to just about anything is an easy way to win me over! (Alex here. It was meh to me, because of the scrambled eggs.) The bread was also softer than many of the others we’d had before, so we didn’t end up with the dreaded shredded roof of the mouth that French bread so often causes. We also got some Vietnamese coffees from the shop next door - they were so strong they almost tasted alcoholic.
Although lots of sidewalk food vendors have a few places to sit and eat, Banh My Mama didn’t so we wandered around the corner to the plaza outside of St Joseph’s Cathedral. It’s a little weird having a big Notre Dame-style Catholic cathedral in the middle of Hanoi, but it was a French colony after all! We popped in for a quick look around. It was mostly empty, but very beautiful.
We walked across Hanoi to the Vietnamese Women’s Museum. We had been recommended to go here by a couple of people, but weren’t really sure what to expect. It turned out to be such an amazing place! It really was the history of Vietnam, but entirely focused on women’s perspectives and contributions. The Vietnam War section was especially intriguing, since it contrasted with the story we usually hear about how women contribute to war efforts. The exhibit talked about the secret meetings held entirely for and by women’s leadership in battalions, and the ways that they used low expectations against the enemy. (Here’s a hint: quang ganh, the bamboo shoulder pole that usually has baskets on either end, used to carry food and other supplies? It has other uses.)
Another highlight was the exhibit on clothing and fiber arts, primarily focused on hill tribes such as the Hmong. It had beautiful examples of the weaving and embroidery traditions of those cultures. The section on beauty and beautification practices talked about the large amounts of silver jewelry, stretched ear lobes and the process of varnishing the teeth black using betel juice. In the photos showing the results, the women had twinkling eyes. To me, it was a really good reminder of the arbitrary nature of what’s considered beautiful.
We were getting hungry so we picked up the pace, but I remember two specific things from the birth and motherhood section. One was a WPA-style government poster talking about the importance of vaccinating your children (hell yeah). The other was the process of finding a name for a newborn, which includes asking the ancestors for approval for a name, then throwing runes to determine whether approval was given (also, hell yeah).
Mom and Dad only had a couple of days in Hanoi, so we really had to pack in the sites. Our next stop was the Temple of Literature, across town. We needed fuel before heading in, so we got noodle soup for lunch from a really trendy place, then really excellent coffees from another trendy place. It was nice being outside of Old Town for a while and seeing more of what Hanoi looks like for locals. The Temple of Literature was cool, but the real highlight was all the women dressed up in their ao dai, taking photos for Tet. Tet, the Vietnamese lunar new year, was coming up in just about a week. It’s a huge holiday in Vietnam, with most people going back to their home to celebrate with family for a week or so.
We originally planned to be in Vietnam for Tet, but after talking to locals and doing research on travel blogs, we learned that although the holiday is a highlight of the year for Vietnamese people, it’s not fun for visitors. Shops, sites, restaurants and even hotels are closed for up to a week. One of the newer traditions is Tet photos, where (mostly young) women dress up in their fancy ao dai (traditional Vietnamese dress consisting of a pair of trousers and a dress with slits from the waist) to get beauty shots taken in scenic places. Although I’m sure it’s true that it’s not fun to visit Vietnam during Tet, it sure is fun being there for the lead-up! There were decorations going up, gift baskets for sale everywhere, and tons of beautiful outfits to look at. This made for excellent people watching at the Temple of Literature. I think there was something about Confucians or whatever, but you’d have to ask Al or Mom about that. I was focused on the clothes.
Determined to complete our tour of essential Hanoi sites, we walked to Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum. Unfortunately, both the mausoleum and adjacent museum dedicated to his life were closed. We walked around the complex a bit and discussed how odd it feels to see communist flags on display. (To be fair, there were even more than usual because the anniversary of the Communist Party of Vietnam was coming up in the next couple of days.) Mom and Al got cute photos with a guard who patiently answered our questions about when the mausoleum is open for guests.
On our walk back to the hotel, we realized we were passing right by Hanoi’s famous train street where the train tracks run through a narrow road lined by cafes on both sides. We went up to the rooftop bar for sunset. The view was great, the cocktails were fine. (Alex here again. Mine was great! Cam doesn’t like floral flavors, but I do.) No trains went by, but I don’t think my nerves could have handled watching people get that close to a moving train so it’s all for the best.
We had just one thing left on the list for Vietnam when Mom and Dad were with us - snails! We went to a Michelin-approved place right nearby, which was delicious. It wasn’t quite a full meal so we supplemented with some street food.
On the weekends, Hanoi implements what they call a “walking street”. This means that they close down some major streets around the lake, leaving them free for exercise, recreation and performances. Every time we went out onto the walking street, there were joggers, exercise classes, walkers, more Tet photos being taken, live music and little kids running around. It was like a totally different city!
Not quite ready to call it a night, we turned down an alley and up stairs to Leo’s Tavern, a place I had seen the signs for and was curious about. It turned out to not have the feel of a tavern at all and was more of a chic cocktail bar with a bohemian vibe. We had a couple delicious drinks while enjoying the view and each other’s company.
It was Mom and Dad’s last night with us - they were starting the long journey home the next day. We said our goodbyes before heading to bed.
Mom and Dad, thank you so much for coming to travel with us! We had a great time getting to try new things with you and loved making so many memories. Love you and see you on the road again soon!
I told you this was a long one. Keep going!
Saturday, February 3, 2024
We woke up on the early side so we could get breakfast before the big event of the day — a coffee making class! We were fans of Vietnamese coffee before coming here, but have gotten to drink a wide variety of coffees since being in the country, most of which we had never heard of before, and definitely have never seen on a menu at home.
In preparation for the huge amount of caffeine we were going to consume, we went to a pho shop on the corner that I had had my eye on for a few days. The proprietor looked around and realized all of tables on the street were full, so he ushered us down a narrow hallway to a room that looked like it could be his family’s living room, but is repurposed as overflow seating when necessary. He came back a couple of minutes later with two big steaming bowls. It turns out that a shared language isn’t necessary when ordering off a menu that only has one item! As we slurped our pho, we got a message from the cooking school that they wanted to switch us to the class an hour later. We used the extra time to walk around the lake, since the road was still blocked off as a walking street.
We had a fabulous time at the coffee class. We learned how to make a full seven different coffee drinks over the 2.5 hours. We learned ca phe sua da (Vietnamese coffee with sweetened condensed milk), coconut coffee, egg coffee, salted coffee, chocolate coffee, orange coffee, and a new recipe from our teacher Wendy that she calls uptown! We can’t wait to make these for you at home! They gave us a yummy snack, but by the end of class we were still positively levitating from caffeination.
We crashed hard for a few hours, eventually rousing ourselves for dinner before going back to the room and watching Spirited Away. We’ve watched almost no TV or movies since leaving home, so when we do settle in to watch something, it feels like a big indulgence.
Sunday, February 4, 2024
Over our breakfast we did some planning for our leg in India and Sri Lanka with Al’s cousin Meera. We had to cut the conversation a little short because we needed to make it to the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum before it closed!
When we had visited the area before, both the mausoleum and the museum were closed, so there was almost nobody around. Not so this time! We went through a quick security check before joining a big line of people, all there to visit the former president. The line never stopped moving as it wound around the complex. Soon we entered the mausoleum itself. We were required to take off hats and sunglasses and be respectfully (read: modestly) dressed in order to enter. Inside the tomb it was cold and dark in order to help the preservation of the body. There were guards everywhere, but the six standing on either side of Ho Chi Minh’s body were especially alert, standing at attention. He was preserved well, looking like we were just at his wake, although he passed away in 1969. I learned later that this enablement went directly against his wishes — he wanted to be cremated. We walked past his body (we were required to continue moving forward), then were shuffled out blinking into the bright, hot sun. We spent some time in the museum dedicated to his life and legacy, then walked to a nearby coffee shop.
For lunch we had one of the last items on my Vietnamese Food Checklist - banh xeo. It’s a crispy egg crepe filled with vegetables or meat and served with rice paper, a pile of lettuces and herbs, and (of course) a dip made from fish sauce. It was completely delicious and totally lived up to my expectations.
After a rest and more planning, we headed out for our last night in Hanoi, and in Vietnam! Naturally, we filled ourselves to the brim with 40 cent pints of fresh beer (they tasted beer this time) before stopping at a sidewalk restaurant where you grill your own meats and veg. It was a perfect last night in Vietnam, except for when the ATM ate Al’s debit card. We were shocked and upset when it happened, but now we know it’s just fodder for the blooper reel!
Monday, February 5, 2024
For our last day in Vietnam, we returned to the school where we did our coffee class for a cooking class. It was just us and a sweet family from the Philippines, two parents and their three grown kids. The class started with a trip to the market to pick up some ingredients that we’d be using in class. She showed us the different herbs and different types of rice noodles, plus some details about where and when the pork in the market is butchered.
Back in class, we learned how to make a bunch of the dishes we’ve eaten and loved in Vietnam: pho, bun cha, fried egg rolls and papaya salad. We had a great teacher, and it was such a fun way to wrap up our time in Vietnam. We really don’t have much space in our suitcases for souvenirs, but cooking classes feel like a way of bringing something home.
This is usually the part of the day where I say we napped, but tragically we had already checked out of our hotel and had access to no bed. Stuffed with the successes of our class, we just sat on a bench, looking at the lake. Before long, a girl (9th grade, we’d come to find out), asked if we speak English and if she could talk to us. At first I was pretty suspicious, trying to figure out what her scheme was. She said she wanted to practice her English with native speakers, but it didn’t seem possible that a 14 year old could be that courageous and precocious. About 20 minutes into the HOUR LONG conversation that she and Al had about information theory, language, social media and career choices, I relaxed. If she’s trying to scam us, she sure is slow about it.
Eventually we made our way to the airport, then boarded our flight to Phnom Penh, the capital city of Cambodia. We arrived late and fell asleep immediately.
Loved it!! A lot of good memories