The Travel Diaries: Hanoi

In between and after our time in Ninh Binh and Ha Long Bay, Jossi and I kept returning to Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam. There were a lot of different things to discover there and so we spent much of our days roaming the streets, finding new places to eat, shops to visit and sites to see.

One evening, Jossi took me to a restaurant, Quan An Neon, her and her family had visited before. The whole place was done up like a covered market, with bamboo stalls lining the walls, filled with busily cooking chefs, and jungle-like plants everywhere. The food was some of the best we had in Vietnam.

We ordered an amazing papaya salad (the dressing was just incredible!), prawns steamed in coconut water, fried spring rolls, squid, a rice dish and pho. We shared all the dishes while Joss laughed at my (slowly improving!) chopstick skills.

Another fantastic little food place we found was called Pho 24. This is a Vietnamese chain of restaurants selling, unsurprisingly, primarily pho. Pho is a thin noodle soup, flavoured with fresh veg and normally a combination of meats. It was delicious! They also served this amazing lemon-y lime drink which was so tasty that Joss and I returned to Pho 24 twice more just to drink the drink!

 While wandering through the street, Joss and I happened upon the Women's Museum. Surprisingly, this was one of the most interesting places we visited. Each floor was devoted to a different area of a Vietnamese woman's life: fashion, 'in the home', and 'in history'. We learnt a surprising amount about Vietnamese life as a whole and about the important roles women have undertaken, from bread winners to soldiers in the Vietnamese war, but also about how hard life can be for the Vietnamese people. One short video on the life of the street sellers was particularly moving as it showed us how women would leave their homes in the countryside and work impossibly long days to try and make enough money to send back to their families.

During our visit to the Museum, we were lucky as a special Korean cultural exchange event was happening. Therefore, there were a number of things happening, including a dance and music show. However, most importantly, this meant that we had the chance to dress up in traditional Korean outfits! This meant that two very excitedly giggling girls queued with a bunch of (much younger) students in order to try on the colourful outfits.... I regret nothing!

One of our final activities in Vietnam was a cooking course at The Orchid restaurant. This was absolutely fantastic and definitely one of the highlights of our trip.

We were picked up at our hotel door by little carriages on the front of bikes, given Vietnamese traditional hats and whisked off to a local market where our chef took us to buy our ingredients for the day and try some local delicacies.

As our chef, Mr Tien,  took us around, he explained where some of the food came from and what it was used for. I was shocked to find out that the meat we saw being sold had all been butchered that morning in the countryside and when it ran out, the sellers would return home, butcher more and bring it straight back!

One local delicacy we were encouraged to try was duck foetus, boiled in it's egg. This however proved to be a little much for Joss and I who struggled to take a bite while the store holders laughed good naturally at us. Thankfully, after, we were offered something a little more palatable- cinnamon pork in a soft, doughy bun!

Once back at the restaurant, we were excited to discover that we would be the only two in the class! As our class kicked off, we learnt how to finely chop our ingredients and watched as Mr Tien minced pork by hand, simply by chopping it over and over with a knife in each hand. We also saw how to BBQ inside- simply set up your BBQ next to a window with a fan behind and just blow any smoke straight on out!

By the end of the class, we had cooked Hanoi spring rolls, char-grilled pork balls with vermicelli, fried chicken with lemongrass and chilli and a kind of black bean desert.

The food we created was amazing. Once it was all prepared, we sat down and ate a banquet right there in the kitchen. There was so much food that Joss and I didn't have a hope of finishing it and so our leftovers were kindly boxed up for us and we polished them off for dinner as well!

Sadly, before long it was time to leave Vietnam. We had had an incredible time, met some lovely people and experienced some amazing things. But as they say, all good things must come to an end. Hopefully though, we'll be back soon!

The Travel Diaries: Halong Bay

After seeing some of the amazing sites of Ninh Binh, it was time to take to the seas and discover Halong Bay, or 'descending dragon bay'.  Legend has it that many years ago, the Gods sent a family of dragons to the Vietnamese people to help them defend Vietnam from invaders. These dragons spat many precocious jewels into the ocean and where these landed, great islands rose, forming a natural wall against the invaders who then became shipwrecked upon the rocks. The mother dragon decided to stay among the islands and so descended into the bay, which was then named 'Ha Long' Bay after her.

Halong Bay certainly looked magical. Everywhere you look, great sheer towers of limestone rise out of the water, covered in thick green vegetation. We took a boat trip from Ha Long City to see the islands close up and to visit the caves which tunnel through the rock formations.

We took a kayak to get a closer look at one of the islands. We paddled our way through a low rock tunnel, emerging into a hidden bay, surrounded by more sheer limestone cliffs. The scenery really was breathtaking!

We also delved into a huge cave network which bored through one of the islands. The rock formations were beautifully lit up by multicoloured lights, making the cave feel completely mystical!

Jossi and I both really enjoyed the boat trip. It was amazing to Halong Bay first hand and not just as a picture in a book. It was one of the places I had been looking forwards to visiting the most and the image I had held in my head of Vietnam while we'd been planning our trip.

However, a word of warning! The boat trips are great, but watch out for being ripped off when it comes to drinks! These were offered around as if free, but everyone was billed at the end of the trip! Bit of a nasty shock to everyone on board and the only downer on what had been an amazing trip.

The Travel Diaries: Ninh Binh

We didn't have long in Ninh Binh and so Joss and I were determined to see as much as possible of the surrounding countryside as possible. Therefore, we booked ourselves onto a day tour to see some of the more spectacular sites in the area. But first, straight after getting off our bus from Hanoi, we popped down the road to the local market. We met many friendly local ladies who were happy to show us their stalls. Here, we came across the cutest pineapples ever! Just look! They're all so dinky!

Our tour started early the next day. We were introduced to our driver, before hopping into our car and whizzing off to our first stop of the day, the Trang An Grottoes. I couldn't wait to visit the grottoes as I'd heard they were really beautiful but also much less touristy than Tam Coc, a place near by, offering a similar experience.

Once we arrived, we were shown to a little flat bottomed rowing boat where a lady was waiting to guide us down the river and through the caves. We quickly set off to explore the waterways.

The scenery was stunning. Everywhere you looked, sheer green cliffs were rising out of flat water. Lotus flowers floated near the shore and dragonflies skimmed the river surface. Our boat navigated through incredibly low cave entrances as we entered the cliffs, only to be faced with huge, long, dripping stalactites and reaching stalagmites.

Our boat stopped to allow us to visit tiny temples set into the shore, half hidden by their leafy surroundings. Here, we started to make friends with the three local Vietnamese people on our boat. They were very chatty (despite none of us speaking a word of the same language!) and friendly, pointing out sights and encouraging our boat lady to stop at various points so we could get out and climb on the rocks!

Three hours later, our tour finished (just as the rain set in!) and we hopped back into our car. Next stop was lunch and we were excited for food!

We were taken to a roadside restaurant. From the outside it didn't look particularly exciting, but once we'd sat down, the food started coming. And coming. We must have had enough food in front of us to feed an entire family of elephants. However, due to the language barrier, we had no idea really what we were eating again, although local speciality was goat and so we're pretty sure that was in some of the dishes. Nonetheless, the food was pretty yummy and more than enough to fuel us for the rest of the day's activities.

Our next stop was the huge Bai Ding Temple Complex. Here, we were taken by golf buggy across temple grounds to the main entrance. Inside, we explored the long corridors lined with rows of arhat statues. We found that as people walked passed the statues, they touched the knees or any other prominent part of the statue. We're not sure if this was for luck or out of respect, but we walked around doing the same. After all 500 statutes our arms were ready to drop off! 

We also got to see the giant gold Buddha statues in the heart of the temple complex, before heading back to the car and on to our next destination. 

Our next stop was  interesting but perhaps our least favourite place: Vietnam's Ancient City. Here, we found some very pretty gardens with little temples at their hearts, as well as seeing some of the still inhabited houses of the city. We were unsure however whether we actually saw everything there was to see. The great thing about the places we were being taken to on our trip was that they weren't very touristy- there were not queues of people or any of the touristy junk that tends to accompany this. However, the flip side of this was that there was very little information available in English, written or spoken. Discovering exactly where we were, what was going on or what we were looking at was next to impossible. However, we managed to muddle on through, hoping that we hadn't missed the main attractions. 

Our last stop was the Mua Cave Pagoda. By this point in our trip, we were very tired and well in need of a rest. Therefore, when we saw that the pagoda was at the top of a mountain, 500 steep steps away, we weren't sure whether to laugh or cry. Hysterics ensued. 

After playing on the horse statues, we stiffened our resolve and started our hike....well, after hiding in a cave for a little with some French students wanting to surprise their teacher...!

Dying a little, we finally reached the top and looked out over Ninh Binh. The view was spectacular! We could see for miles over the paddy fields, despite the weather not being the clearest. Jossi and I even got a little adventurous and hauled ourselves up to the very very peak- a rocky platform that could only be reached by deploying our amateur rock climbing skills! 

Before long, it was time to slip and slide our way down to the bottom of the mountain and head off home. We'd had a fantastic tour and had seen so much in just one day. Ninh Binh would go down as one of our favourite places we saw in Vietnam!