Sunshine and Uncle Ho
Trip Start
Nov 26, 2007
1
22
44
Trip End
Apr 17, 2008
Hanoi,
Vietnam
Saturday, March 1, 2008
The biggest plasma TV I have ever seen!!
. Fortunately I have now perfected the technique of going to sleep with my Ipod on playing music on repeat; it works a million times better than ear plugs. Even the best Ipod in the world though doesn't prevent getting thrown around on a bus with no rear suspension as it overtakes a lorry which is overtaking another bus on a potholed single lane road. Anyway, take home message is: don't try save a dollar on overnight sleeper buses in Vietnam and don't use a company called Trekking Travel.Even when we arrived in Hanoi the fun didn't end there, not only was it pissing with rain but instead of dropping us off the hotel district as per normal in nam we got dropped at a bus station that was on no ones map. Obviously the sensible thing to do is to get a taxi to the hotel district but josie here manages to hook up with the tightest Danish couple in Vietnam and only discovers after everyone else has jumped in taxis that they have some kind of Lonely Planet bred mistrust of anything foreign and don't want to get ripped off in a taxi...after 45 minutes of walking with them in the rain without a clue where we were I educated them in the art of flagging down a taxi, negotiating firmly with the driver to switch his meter on rather than the 50,000 Dong he tries to charge and getting to ones destination for 25,000 Dong (less than a quid). I then persisted with them wandering round hotel in their quest for the cheapest room in town for half an hour before jettisoning them as they searched for the mythical $6 room in the Lonely Planet that will no longer be $6 precisely because it is in the Lonely Planet!
Me and Tommy my new mate
! I have to say I have some respect for the Vietnamese though, not only have they discovered how easy it is to stick above every shop, cafe and hotel a sign saying 'as recommended in the lonely planet' but they also call places exactly the same name as successful businesses, looking so good that you never actually know which one is the real one!! There must be 20 Sinh cafe's around Hanoi and as yet I have no idea which one is the real one!! Maybe the Lonely Planet will have the answer...So I ditched the Danish couple and then proceeded to go on a tour of hotels myself finding a tiny problem with every one before finally settling (for reasons unbeknown to myself) on one that was $3 more expensive than the best one I saw, without the free breakfast, without a real window (as most single people rooms seem to have in Vietnam) and further from the town centre...My 1st day in Hanoi was spend walking around, not aimlessly as normal though as I had to get to the Laos and Chinese embassies to sort out my visas...now there is something the Lonely Planet should be good for isn't it...do they have they opening times for embassies...no!! So by the time I got to the Chinese Embassy the immigration department was closed for the day. It also gets expensive this visa business, $35 for the Laos one and $35 for the Chinese one (but you have to pay another $30 for the Chinese one if you want it in less than 4 days)
Tommy's mate
. but at least I'm not American; Americans have to pay $130 for their Chinese one due to 'reciprocal behavior' it says on the wall of the Chinese Embassy. The whole embassy experience is very frustrating, you stand in a line for 2 hours clutching your passport and then some Vietnamese person walks in holing 30 passports and goes straight to the front of the queue as they have obviously paid the correct people off. They also like the whole power thing (a bit like bouncers in a club in the UK) so relish the chance to tell you off for talking in the line etc.Anyway, as I'd arrived on a Friday and by the time I had got to the Chinese embassy I had missed the meager 2 hours opening window so that sort of sorted out the rest of my plans for me so I decided to get out of Hanoi to Halong bay for the weekend. The cheapest way to do this was to book on a door with a night on a Chinese style junk and meals etc for 2 days for $29 (well is should have been $27 but somehow the Vietnamese Politburo had invented a new tax overnight according to the tour operator so it was negotiated to $29 in the end).
In the evening of the aforementioned Friday night I dropped into a Bia Hoi place near my hotel. This was a little bit out of tourist central so was just full of Vietnamese people. Within 10 minutes I was chatting away to some Vietnamese young lad, then his mates showed up who were on a sort of stag do as one was getting married on the Sunday. We ended up having a right laugh and I got to sample some traditional food (weirdest was the boiled pig intestine...mmmm). At the end of the night when we'd all had enough the bill came - less than 10 quid for all of us!! This is perhaps the only time I've had an interesting conversation with some Vietnamese people who didn't want anything back from me in return
My new business - importing these!!
. It raise an interesting problem though; do you take your bag with you to the toilet? I know that I would construe that as a little bit rude if I was sitting in Manchester and some took their stuff to the toilet every time so in the end I took the risk and just left it there and all was fine. It is bizarre to sit and have a full on conversation about English and Scottish football with people over here, I asked why and its purely down to internet betting on the games (and the fact that don't have to pay 50 quid a month for the games as we do back home).Halong bay was amazing; really magical feeling as we drifted around the karst outcrops. We went kayaking and to see some immense caverns. My little dream of sharing my cabin with some fit Australian bird was a bit overoptimistic...I got a 12 year old French boy. But in reality he turned out to be top fun and we spent lots of time teaching each other new words etc. There was a really good crowd on the boat; ranging from a Vietnamese born French physics professor to the Korean girl and her American boyfriend. It also turned out that Sammy and Nicola whom I had meant in Can Tho were on my boat so that was top. The whole experience was spoiled quite a bit by bad organisation and the rudeness/tightness of the people on the boat. They were over an hour late picking me up and coming home they shoved me and this mad Basque (as in Spanish) woman onto this local bus with capacity for 25 but actually carrying over 40 for a 4 hour journey. The tightness came to a head when the French woman asked for some extra butter with breakfast and got told she would have to pay for it!! I know the thing was cheap but for gods sake just make it a little bit more expensive if need be. Booze was also really expensive and their was a corkage fee for anything brought on board. However, Sammy worked out that if we bought beer from the women paddling round in little boats selling stuff we could pay the corkage fee and still be almost half the price of what it was on the boat....boy oh boy did the madam of the boat go mad at this; she was practically fighting with Sammy to stop him buying stuff from anywhere else...the only time she smiled the whole trip was when I gave her the money for all the corkage for the 15 beers Sammy bought for all of us
My junk
.Things to do and see in Hanoi:
Army Museum
A bit like the war museum in Saigon; basically a propaganda exercise (complete with FREE English speaking guides who will escort you and tell you how evil the French and American aggressors were) but backed up with loads of hardware like B52 engines, MIGs, tanks etc. I never knew how many US planes were shot down - 10's of thousands apparently. It just goes to show how closely the US and Russians were technologically matched back then as there is no one who could take on the US now.
Ho Chi Mihn mausoleum complex
Consists of a very strange looking embalmed body within a massive granite tomb set inside a park. There are some serious rules about getting into the place (more aggressive than at the airports according to people who have been through them). All bags are scanned for cameras and weapons
Junks
. You are only allowed to walk in certain areas with soldiers redirecting you if you stray. No talking. And best of all; for the 1st time since I was on parade at the Boys Brigade 20 years ago I was told to take my hands out of my pockets!! Its all very impressive for someone who explicitly stated in his will that his body was not to be preserved and his ashes to be scattered on the top of a specific mountain.After the tomb I was accosted by a government guide whop wanted to indoctrinate me in what a top bloke Uncle Ho was. It does genuinely seem like he had his head screwed on (could speak 8 languages etc) but to be shown how he shunned the imposing French colonial built imperial palace in favour of a nice wooden shack with a hard bed and only books by Lenin and Marx etc was rubbing it all in a bit too much for me. The fact that he actually spent much of the time they were talking about in various hospitals around the world has been quietly forgotten...
And if that wasn't enough they have a nice big 3 story museum also dedicated to Uncle Ho, with everything from his last shirt to his favorite walking stick...
Walk around the streets in the morning
The place looks totally different in the mornings with everyone sat huddled in corners eating noodle soup
Halong Bay
. The noodle soup has taken a while to grow on me but I'm really starting to get into the swing of having it in the mornings now.Water Puppets
Good things about Vietnam
Lovely scenery
Very cheap
Interesting history
Few rules.
Bad things about Vietnam
Every single person is out to rip you off. How on earth Ho Chi Minh ever thought he could make communists out of this lot beggars belief. Example: you get of a train at 6am still half alseep and get onto a minibus (having already battered the price down from 75,000 Dong to 30,000 Dong and the driver tells you the 10,000 in Dong in change you have given him is not right and tell you to give him the note in your wallet which is actually a 100,000 Dong note that happens to be the same colour as a 10,000 Dong note - he's just hoping you are too asleep to hand it over as many people would as you are being busstled around..
Nicola and Sammy
.You have to bargain for absolutely everything...gets a little frustrating when all you want is a can of coke.
You constantly get hassled my motorbike taxi drivers.
The combination of the above three items just tires you out completely each day.
People are very rude, they seem to get ruder the more tourists there are so it is hard to see how tourism can survive once all the American war veterans and French saga tours have been here.
People continuous lie.
People are very loud (there is something intensely annoying about being awakened in the middle of the night by the high pitched crescendo type screaming that tends to be how they speak when excited) and continuously shout at each other and you. For example you ask for one train fare, there is no way the woman will give you what you want as there is a more expensive one and ever penny from a foreigner seems to help, you complain and she just emits a loud meow noise at the top of her voice and looks at you like a piece of crap before walking away totally.
The noise of car horns drives you mad after a bit.
Me!!
They have no respect for you even when you stay in their hotel. They will offer free internet computers as part of the deal but then will play games themselves on them the whole time you are there. The best on was when they gave me a room near reception my last night in Hanoi and the proceeded to watch Rambo films all night shouting and screaming as he went along killing Vietnamese until I eventually lost patience at 1am (having gone to bed at 9pm!!). They then quitened down but made sure they made enough noise to wake me when they got up again at 6am hence ruining a day for me.So all in all it looks like its time for me to get out of Vietnam (and probably never come back) so Sapa and then Laos here we come...
