Food: One very good reason to go to Vietnam

If you ask us, the Vietnamese food alone is an excellent reason to come here. We have tried a loads of Vietnamese specialities and even if some of them were things we would never have tried if we had known what it was, everything tasted really good.

We had some less-than-perfect food experiences, but that was always in restaurants (or on the cruise) catering for tourists. The best food we had was in the little food stalls on the side of the street.

Food stalls on the side of the street, the best way to experience the Vietnamese cuisine!

Pho, the classic noodle soup. Simply delicious!

Fresh fruit tastes even better if you dip it in chili salt. Yummy!

Vietnamese coffee, simply great! The best coffee so far!!

Hanoi and Halong Bay

Feeling brave, we decided to go for a night train again. (Not until we had checked that there are no wild elephants who might want to get run over in Vietnam though! If you missed our train adventure in Malaysia, here is the post.)

The night train got us from Huế to Hanoi in only twelve hours and was not too bad. We shared the cabin with a Vietnamese couple who did not speak much English, which was ok since we slept through most of the trip.

The downside of the night train was that we arrived in Hanoi at four-thirty in the morning. Try checking in at the hotel at five, they will not be thrilled. We left our backpacks in the lobby and went out to explore early-morning Hanoi. As we reached the Hoan Kiem lake it was still dark but the sidewalks were bustling with people out on their morning run around the lake. Groups of people were practising Tai Chi. It was amazing! Old ladies in groups of up to twenty were doing their morning gymnastics. One square was filled with younger women doing something that looked like a mixture of Tai Chi and aerobics. It felt as if the whole city was up and exercising before going to work.
After watching the crowds for a while and walking around the lake, we visited the Ngoc Son Temple (The Temple of the Jade Mountain) which is located on a small island in the lake. By nine in the morning, we had already seen a lot of the Old Quarters and the area around the lake and went for a second breakfast before checking in at the hotel.

Hanoi is much nicer looking than Saigon is. A lot smaller, prettier houses and less traffic. Unfortunately for us, Hanoi has four seasons just like Europe. Even though the winter is short and a lot milder than at home, 12 degrees is rather cold if you are not dressed for it. We were so cold!

But Hanoi has some nice cafés where we could warm ourselves up between our sightseeing walks. Some Hanoi pics:

The Hanoi Opera House



The garden of the National Museum

Courtyard in the Temple of Literature

Temple of Literature

Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum

Since it is really easy to get to the Halong Bay from Hanoi, we decided to go on a 3 day cruise even though the weather was not ideal for it. According to the weather forecast the Sunday would bring more sun than any other day in the next two weeks, so we booked a cruise starting on Friday.

The bay really is amazing, even if the grey skies did their best to ruin the trip for us. We spent one night on the boat and the second night in a bungalow in a very secluded bay on Cat Ba Island. When we woke up on the island we were finally rewarded with blue skies and sun (but it was still really, really cold!). On the boat trip back to Halong City we could really enjoy a beautiful scenery! See for yourselves:

Imperial Huế

Transport in Vietnam is not a problem. There is the very convenient system of open tour buses, where you can buy a ticket for a special route with certain stops on it for virtually nothing. To get from Saigon to Hanoi can be as cheap as $ 45, but you are stuck to the route that you chose. Good thing is, you can stay for as long as you like at every destination along the way.

We went from Hoi An to Huế by open tour bus and payed US$ 4 each for the three hour bus ride. I have never seen a bus like this one, it was a sleeping bus with bunk beds (sort of, built for Asian size people though). Three rows with about 14 seats in a row. Quite a comfy way to travel I must say.

Open bus

We arrived in Huế around noon and were welcomed by a steady drizzle and grey skies. Huế is supposed to be a nice city, but every city loses a bit of its magic when it is raining. (Everyone who's ever been to Salzburg will know that...)
Except for the citadel and the former Imperial City, the central parts of Hué don't have that much to offer, especially not in winter when it is cold and rainy. The Citadel and the Imperial City are quite something though. Sadly, large parts of it was destroyed in 1968 during the Tet Offensive but many of the buildings have been restored and you get a general idea about how beautiful the Imperial City once was.



Imperial City, Huế

We rented bikes from our hotel to explore the Citadel in the morning and headed out to the old Elephant Arena in the afternoon. It was the fighting arena where tigers had to fight elephants, a kind of Vietnamese Colosseum. The elephants represented the monarchy and they always won since the tigers (representing rebellion) had their fangs and claws removed before the fight. Not exactly fair now is it?
This is a quite forgotten site and not many tourists come here even though it is just 4 km outside of town. Maybe because it is not that spectacular anymore and the arena itself was closed for conservation. But it was still a nice place and the old Elephant Temple nearby was very peaceful even though it looked like it had been neglected for the last century.

Elephant Temple

Tiger and Elephant Fighting Arena

Hoi An. One word: wow!

Hoi An must be the perfect place to go to. It is just so gorgeous that it feels a bit unreal and the best thing is: Hoi An is full of tailors (just waiting to make you a new dress, shirt, suit, jacket or whatever you might need) and shoe makers.
We could not resist, so Matthias ordered a suit, a waistcoat (mind you, out of cashmere wool and silk!)and a shirt. I got myself three dresses (two fancy and one plain), a pair of linen trousers and a blouse. It just feels so luxurious to actually get things that fit you, like REALLY fit you. All you have to do is tell them which style you want, either from fashion magazines or from the Internet and they will make it just the way you want to. And it is just so cheap!
If we hadn't been backpacking, I would have bought so much stuff that we'd have to turn the bedroom into a closet. Hoi An is every fashionista's wet dream!

But not only shoes, handbags and clothes are made here in Hoi An, they make silk lanterns here as well. It is so nice to walk through the streets of the Ancient town at night, when all the restaurants have lit up their fronts with colorful lanterns.

We had time for more than just getting measured and go on fittings, so this morning we went to My Son, a Buddhist, originally Hindu, temple complex from the Champa Kingdom. It is about the same age as Angkor Wat but much much smaller. Unfortunately the Viet Cong chose it as a key base and the Americans bombed the area quite heavily. Of the original 70 buildings, only 20 are left and you can still see the bomb craters.

The weather has not been the best during our stay here in Hoi An. When we arrived it had 31 degrees and it was really nice, but during the first night it started raining and yesterday was pretty gloomy and this morning it was a bit cold. All the Vietnamese were wearing jackets and scarfs, after all you do actually feel cold when the temperature drops to 22 degrees and the air is moist.

But even with a bit of cold weather, Hoi An is so worth a visit!

Japanese Bridge, Hoi An's trademark

Never saw anything like this before. The dog is really nursing the cat! Just so cute!



These beauties made Matthias' heart beat faster

One of the temple ruins of My Son

Good morning Vietnam!

That is how the motorcycle drivers in Saigon greet all the tourists. Diamond and Day were not different.

We met them in a park in central Saigon on our very first day here. After travelling around for a couple of months, you get really tired of people trying to sell you stuff. But these guys were different. They both had books where former customers had written about their tours together and after reading the very positive testimonals, we decided to go on a one hour motorbike tour in Saigon and saw all the sights in the inner city plus the market in Cholon, Saigon's Chinatown.
This proved to be a good idea and after the first hour, we agreed on going with Day and Diamond on a three day tour to the Mekong delta and the Cu Chi tunnels (an old Viet Cong tunnel system 70 km west of Saigon). After the first two day, we decided to extend the trip and go to visit Day's family close to the Cambodian border as well.

Me and Diamond

Coffee and relax

On the boat on the Mekong

House boats

Mekong delta

Matthias and Day on the road

1 kilo fresh (they are still alive here) shrimp for our sunset BBQ

Floating market in Cai Be

Cai Be

Rice harvest

Another coffee break

American bombs, Cu Chi tunnels

Cu Chi tunnels

Dinner with Day's family (yes, it is rice schnaps in that plastic canister. It was full when we started...)

Vietnamese drinking game - Shake the chicken head...

Temple at Ba Den mountain

Cao Dai ceremony

During our four days with the two of them, we got to see parts of the Vietnamese countyside which were not only stunningly beautiful, but there were no tourists there! The trip was a really good start to our stay in Vietnam and we can only recommend going on trips with local motorcycle guides!