Hanoi and Ha Long Bay, Vietnam

Nov 16: Arrival in Hanoi

We arrive in Hanoi at 7:30am, after a little over 14 hours on the bus. As usual, we are greeted by a flock of people offering us lodging. We found a sweet place for $8/night, including breakfast, a/c, and hot water. Super satisfied, we ate some breakfast, and headed out to check out the city. Our first stop was Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum, museum, and former residence. Ho Chi Minh's embalmed remains are contained in a large parthenon-looking building. Everyone forms a single file line, and get let in a few people at a time. There are guards everywhere, and you are not allowed to stop or take pictures. The room is dimly lit, and in the middle is a glass case with Ho Chi Minh. He looked almost fake. After that strangley humbling experience, we walked through the area that contained Ho Chi Minh's house, where he lived for from 1958 to 1969. We also saw his old cars. Afterwards, we went to the Ho Chi Minh Museum, which wasn't really a museum about him at all, but had a very interesting layout. Afterwards we wandered the streets and found a back alley market, where we ate some delicious Pho Ga. Next, we headed to the Temple of Literature, the oldest university, established in 1076. We walked through a couple of gates and ended up staring at a series of large tablets on the back of stone turtles. On the tables are carved the names of students who successfully passed on got their PhDs. (I think this should be done for everyone who gets a PhD these days). Afterwards, we headed to the Hanoi History Museum, where we climbed a tower and climbed into many old war machines (tanks, helicopters, torpedo launchers, etc) and looked at some pictures (the museum was under construction or rennovation, so there wasn't too much to see). Next we wandered and tried to book a tour to Ha Long Bay, which turned out to be a nightmare. Every other shop offers a tour. There are cheap tours and expensive ones, and who knows what you're going to get. We ready many horror stories about people being stuffed on to boats and being served shitty food. Finally, we decided on a company, and booked our tour. After eating some delicious grill-your-own-beef on the street, we headed back to the hotel to get some sleep.

Nov 17: Hanoi Day 2

We slept in rather late, and headed out to explore the Old Quarter, a congested and confusing area of Hanoi, with winding streets and lots of honking. Each street has it's own 'specialty' or something similar. One street is filled with motorcyle seat covers, the next with a bunch of shops selling lights, the next full of coffee, etc. We were in search of the famous Hanoi dish Bun Bo Nam Bo, or rice noodles with grilled beef, various vegetables, peanuts, dried onions and sauce. The lady cooked it right in front of us, and it was so amazingly delicious. Afterwards, we grabbed some coffee and then continued to wander until we found the restaurant we had been looking for in the first place (it served the Bun Bo Nam that we had already eaten on the street about an hour ago). We decided to have some more bun anyway. At this point, completely stuffed, we continued our explorations and found an internet cafe and hung out there for a few hours. Afterwards . We grabbed some tickets for a water puppet show (Hanoi is well known for these), and then went to find some food. We had saffron rice with various meat products (including cinnamon pork) and some beer. Then we headed to watch the water puppet show, which I thoroughly enjoyed and Phil thought was just meh. Then we went to pack and sleep.

Nov 18- Ha Long Bay, Vietnam

Today we got picked up outside our hotel at ~8:30 for our trip to Ha Long Bay, arriving at the docks around 11:30. We quickly went on board the boat and had some orange juice before setting out on our journey. While we were cruising we were served lunch of shrimp, spring rolls, clams, and some sauteed morning glories, which was all in all pretty decent. After lunch we went on top of the boat and got our first real look at Ha Long Bay. To be brief, Ha Long is amazingly beautiful. There are thousands of different sized limestone islands that our boat cruised between. With the wind in your hair and a beer in your hand, its really hard not to appreciate the sheer beauty of such a place. At some point we arrived at a small fishing village where presumably the boat crew grabbed some crab and fish for our dinner later that night. We had the option of taking a small boat into some caves, but it cost extra money and no one on the boat signed up for it. After a brief cruise, we arrived at a dock where we would get off and walk through the Surprise Cave. The caves were amazing to walk through, but really really crowded. One thing I should mention about Ha Long is that hundreds of boats are out there at the same time as yours, making it impossible to go to any major attraction without seeing a lot of other tourists (or to stand on top of your boat without seeing at least a dozen other boats). Anyways, the big surprise of the cave was a phallic looking rock formation which you can sort of see in our pictures (you'll find which one I think). It was pretty cool to walk through it and took about an hour (only because the massive amounts of people there). After the cave we got back on the boat and cruised over to a place where we could swim. Steph and others jumped off the top of the boat (see picture) and we ended up swimming over to one of the limestone island structures and found the tiniest beach I've ever seen (literally about 1 square meter of dry sand). We swam back to our boat, showered, and then had a nice dinner of crab, squid, chicken, french fries (don't ask, they're popular here) and morning glories. After dinner we had some time for karaoke, but none of us wanted to do that and instead we hung out with some of the other tourists on top of the boat. We brought along two super cheap bottles of vodka ($2/pint) since beer was really expensive on the boat. We shared our vodka with everyone and got a pretty good buzz going but eventually we wanted some more beer. Luckily there are local ladies in small boats riding around selling cheaper beer, which we happily purchased. The boat did not allow outside alcohol (they charged you for them even if you brought them from Hanoi) so we kind of had to sneak around drinking "dorm style". We even passed right in front of the boatmen, who looked annoyed and obviously could tell we had outside beers, but didn't make a fuss about it. We all got a nice buzz and talked till about 10:30 when we went to bed.

Nov 19- Ha Long Bay and Hanoi, Vietnam

Our second day at Ha Long started with 1 hour of kayaking around. It was really interesting to kayak around and get a little bit closer look at some of the limestone formations. After kayaking, we returned to our boat (with some passengers missing who were on a 3 day trip) and set off for our journey back to port. During this time we took one last look at the beautiful Ha Long Bay and managed to take quite a few pictures. After lunch back on mainland, we loaded into a minivan and drove back into Hanoi. Once back in Hanoi we had to find a new place to stay that night and ended up wandering around quite a bit, but ended up finding something decent. Dinner and a walk around town (and some famous Bia Hoi) was enough to put us to sleep fairly fast.

Nov 20, Hanoi, Vietnam

This was our last day in Vietnam and we had quite a bit to do. First things first, we decided we needed to send some letters and get some money, since we were really unsure what currencies they would accept at the Vietnam border. We had spent a long time during other days trying to figure out which banks would exchange our money but as it was currently Saturday we found our bank closed when we got there. Luckily there was a lady standing in front of the bank who, although giving us a horrible rate, exchanged some of our dong to US dollars. After the bank we ended up wandering around looking for delicious bun, but failed and instead settled for some noodles and miscellaneous fried foods. After lunch we spent quite a long time looking for an internet place, but internet games are reeeeallly popular with kids in pretty much all of SE Asia and as such many of them were completely full. On a long shot we managed to find one that had some empty spots. After a long internet session, we realized it was about time for our bus to leave, so we quickly went back to our hotel, grabbed our stuff and went to the travel agency...