* I wrote this 10 days ago but didn't get the chance to post it until now :)
HEY. My parents and I just boarded a second class train from Surat Thani in southern Thailand on our way to Bangkok for the next chunk of our trip. It’s pretty dece, similar to the ones in Vietnam, only instead of sleeper bunks there are seats that convert into bunks! What a treat! Also Chang beers are delivered on demand! Ooh but I just saw a cockroach. Better keep that one to myself and not tell mom.
So lets roll back 2 weeks ago. Exams finished up on Nov 20th (they went really well, thanks for asking!) and immediately after I finished my last one I grabbed my backpack and jumped on a night bus to Kuala Lumpur with Evan. Early morning I woke Evan up and pushed us off the bus outside Pudaraya so that we could grab a cab to the Low Cost Carrier Terminal outside of KL. Our cabbie was nuts, maintaining 140 on the empty highways at 3am in a little POS car that sounded like it had trouble topping 100. Not to mention she made a few drastically wrong turns but because we set the rate prior it was no big deal. Our flight from KL to Hanoi, Vietnam left at 6:30am and arrived there nice and early. We jumped a public bus to downtown and made our way to the Hanoi Phoenix Hotel, which Jen recommended as a good home base. It sure was! The staff was super friendly, we got free coffee/tea/bananas and Internet access and we even snuck in a free breakfast though we didn’t stay a single night there.
Through the Phoenix hotel, we booked a trip up to Sa Pa and another to Halong bay as well as train tickets to and from Da Nang. Basically, after paying for these trips I was set for the week although we still had to pay for all the stuff we bought and food and cab rides, etc.
We walked around Hanoi for most of the afternoon. It looked extremely similar to any typical big Asian city but the one thing that set it apart was the traffic. Unbelievable. There were mopeds and scooters and bicycles EVERYWHERE. It was so chaotic its way too difficult to try and explain it. Evan took a few videos though so I’ll try to get a hold of those. In one I strapped on my recently purchased moped helmet and tried to cross the street. The two wheeled vehicles will take you into account along with everything else and maneuver around you, so you really only need to worry about the larger vehicles. Still, just crazy.
That night we grabbed some dinner, spoilt ourselves with a massage and grabbed some shisha before being picked up from our hotel and taken to catch the night train to SaPa. The trains were sweet! They were all super old and broken down but were quite a bit of fun. Two bunkbeds per room and we were fortunate to get good roommates each trip! Food and beverage carts came around and we really just chilled, read books, talked with our bed buddies, listened to music and slept.
Early the next morning we were shuttled from the train station in Lao Cai and taken to a cool little hotel in Sapa. Sapa is a small town located in the northernmost province of Vietnam, pretty much on the border with China. It is at a decently high elevation and therefore, it was fricken cold! Okay, not cold, but chilly. I’ve definitely gotten soft over the last few months in Asia and close to freezing knocked me on my ass. I didn’t bring jeans so I went on a quest to buy some warm socks and a pair of traditional legwarmers that the local Black Hmong Tribal girls wore. Of course I succeeded, so I spent the rest of the trip decked out in chick leg wear. Yup! So that day we spent hiking all over the hills surrounding Sapa. We went around terraced rice fields, through local tribal villages and over and around rivers through the mountainsides. The scenery was unbelievable and I stopped so many times to take pictures of the rice terraces I was always rushing to catch up to the group. That night we did a home stay in a little house overlooking the valley. There were 10 of us at the house and we were given a delicious home cooked meal complete with homemade rice wine (which was pretty terrible but got you drunk regardless). Our beds were single mattresses on a second level in the wooden house. So so so cool! The next morning we hiked some more, across the top of the valley, through a bamboo forest and to a waterfall. After lunch we walked up to our pickup location and played some volleyball on a court outside a local elementary school. Back at the hotel we were given dinner and then shuttled back to the train station to take another night train back to Hanoi.
The next morning we walked to the Phoenix hotel and relaxed for an hour before heading out on our trip to Halong Bay. It ended up being over a 4-hour van ride before we actually got there. Evan and I decided to do the kayaking option so we were quickly separated from our group and placed on a junk (an old wooden boat) that left immediately after we got on it. The whole voyage was beautiful and I definitely enjoyed that part of the whole trip, but our lunch was mediocre, we were rushed everywhere we went and it felt like the people on the boat didn’t give two shits about our experience. Kind of disheartening in such an unbelievable place, but that’s what tourism does I guess. The whole harbor was full of junks trying to get a piece of the Vietnam travel crowd. Anyways, check the pictures and you will see why this place has become such a huge draw for the international crowd… it really is something else. Though I should mention that the Phang-Nga area in southern Thailand is extremely similar and tour companies such as John Gray’s Sea Canoe do fantastic tours through that region. Definitely a 100 times better than my Halong Bay experience.
Okay so that evening we jumped on another bus back to Hanoi (yup, a lot of transit time huh? I only had a week to work with so it had to be that way). We got back just in time to catch the late night train down to Da Nang. The trip from Hanoi- Da Nang was 15 hours, 12 of which are pretty easy to deal with. The other 3 are just brutal. You can’t sleep any more and your body just wants to move. In Da Nang we met a couple who was heading to Hoi An as well, so we spilt a cab there.
Hoi An is a small town/city about halfway between Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. It has become a pretty big tourist draw because of its middle location, but most importantly, because of it’s experienced and fantastically cheap tailors. I only had one full day to spend there, so I was determined to make the most of it. We shopped around a bit and eventually settled on a tailor shop called Indo Chine. I ordered a cashmere wool suit (so ballin), two dress shirts and two warm jackets for work this winter. Each piece was tailor made to my measurements, completed in about 16 hours and in total only cost me about $250SGD. I could have easily dropped a G there so its probably best that I didn’t stay any longer. I left Evan there and caught the night train back up to Hanoi. I spent the day relaxing around Hanoi and at the Phoenix hotel before heading to the airport to catch my night flight back to Singapore.
So, there’s my weeklong Vietnam trip in a nutshell. If you are thinking of going to South East Asia anytime in the future, please give me a shout and lets sit down to talk about it! Vietnam is wonderful and I wish I had a little longer to explore, especially down south, but that’s just how it goes I guess.
I met my parents in Singapore 24 hours after I got back from Vietnam and we have already done a bunch of traveling around S’pore and Thailand. If any of you have been paying attention to the news, the Bangkok airport had been closed since Tuesday because of political protests. It has finally opened back up but not before throwing our plans to see Angkor Wat in Cambodia out the window. At least I managed to make a bunch of last minute flight changes and alternate travel arrangements and the last few days have been a good adventure. It’s hard to believe that, looking at the calendar, I only have 14 days left on this side of the world. It’s going to be awfully strange to come back home and get back into the same old routine, especially since my life has been one hectic adventure after the other. I am looking forward to seeing everyone though, especially my brothers and my Grandma (its been 2 years since I’ve seen her!).
Thanks for reading! When I’m back in Canada, lets do coffee. I want to talk.
Cheers,
Matt
Todays Spin: Everything I Build – The Stills
