From Hanoi to Saigon (or, “Where will it stop raining?!”)

We traveled the country from North to South, trying to find the magic line where the wet and dry seasons reverse and we could finally dry out.

As a tourist destination Vietnam is well established, and the long, thin shape of the country tends to funnel everyone along the same itinerary.  Dedicated tourist busses run the route regularly, making the standard backpacker trip a turnkey affair, especially if you want to spend your time in the tourist bubble (which, as it turns out, is what most people want).

From Hanoi, the standard track heads north to the hills of Sapa, famed for trekking to dramatic views of terraced rice paddies.  But Hanoi was cold and wet enough, and by now we’ve seen so many rice paddies and so much terraced farming, and done so much trekking, that the promise of scenery wasn’t enough to overcome our desire to dry out and warm up.

The drowning karst towers of Ha Long bay

The second standard stop is Ha Long bay.  This is an area of karst towers rising from the water – like Guilin in China, the Rock Islands of Palau, and the islands off the west of Thailand (though the kids object to the comparisons, pointing out subtle differences in geomorphology and vegetation).  Ha Long bay can’t be skipped.  By anybody.  Which results in a comical assembly of tourist boats, crowded around the check-box sites like the tourists on tiptoes amassed in front of the Mona Lisa.

Double parking in front of a large, kaleidoscopically kitchly lit cavern

I’d intended to take one of the standard two-night tours of the bay, sleeping on the boat, and spent an inordinate amount of time reading reviews of the hundreds of boat operators.  Ha Long bay turns out to be the epicenter of the Vietnamese tourist rip off industry: false promises, baits-and-switches, and randomized standards of service are universal; there’s just no way to know what you are going to get.  Surprisingly, it’s easy to circumvent the entire cartel by going to Cat Ba, a large island in the middle of the bay; the trade-off is a waterfront dominated by concrete hotel towers and restaurants catering to Chinese tour groups.

But not to worry, the cartel still gets their cut.  Boat and bus schedules are constructed to that it is effectively impossible to get to the island using public transportation.  So for all of $7 we booked the bus-boat-bus combo from the front desk of our hostel in Hanoi.  It was a drive of a couple of hours across the countryside toward the coast, through rural, then industrial areas, and down smaller and smaller rutted dirt roads past abandoned factories and rusted ship parts until we came to a stop at a tidal mud flat with a scattering of scuttled ships and a small, weathered ticket booth.  The eight of us on the bus got off, suddenly realizing that we had no paperwork of any kind and no idea where we were or what would happen next.  I certainly couldn’t see any evidence of the “high speed hydrofoil” that was supposed to take us to the island, and the only posted schedule showed that the last boat should have left half an hour ago.  Two of the people on our bus seemed to realize they were in the wrong place, and began trying to negotiate a return on the bus to the nearest city.  This was definitely a time to suppress anxiety and just roll with it – it was either going to work out, or we’d have an “authentic experience.”

We felt reassured when another tourist bus pulled up, followed by a dozen or so locals on motorbikes.  Soon enough, people started walking down the gangplank toward the rusted hull of a ship, which turned out to be repurposed as a pier, and crossed onto a second rusted hull, which turned out to be our ferry.  Except that as we approached, the ticket collector blocked out way: “your company did not pay.”  Apparently, it was too late to pay now.  I pressed, and was told there would be another boat in 15 minutes.  I pressed harder, and the gate in front of us closed.  I sent Suzie to wake up the bus driver while I found a number for the tour agency whose name was on the side of our bus.  The guy who answered assured me not to worry, then promised to call the driver, and then, without anyone saying or doing anything, the gate opened and we were welcomed on board.  And despite appearances, the boat didn’t even sink.

The island itself has the same karst towers as the bay, but surrounded with farmland rather than water, with a road weaving its way among them.  After a fair bit of risk analysis, we rented a pair of motorbikes from a guy on the sidewalk for $4 each for the day – and that $4 was the only paperwork he required.  We stopped a hundred yards down the road to buy a liter of petrol from a woman with a basket full of refilled Pepsi bottles, then set out across the island.  I rode local style, with two kids on the back, who passed the time singing made up songs the whole way, thrilled at cruising up and down the hills and around the curves, and watching the speedometer on the straightaways with equal parts anxiety and excitement.

Cruising around Cat Ba on the local version of a minivian

Ethan in the main corridor of the concrete bunker built inside of “Hospital Cave.” The rooms on each side make perfect echo chambers that can entertain kids… for hours.

We visited “Hospital Cave,” a hospital and hideout for the Viet Cong during the American War, but mostly just enjoyed ambling around the hills during our one day of respite from the rain.  We stopped for lunch at a roadside living room-cum-café that’s about as far from a Chinese tour bus stop as you can get, and got back to town just in time to return the bikes and walk over the hill to the local beach resort for a sunset cocktail while the kids played in the sand.

A sunset cocktail overlooking Ha Long Bay while Ethan digs in the sand

We took the next day off, exploiting a day of downpours to map out the rest of our time in Vietnam and study a bit of math.

A floating fishing village on a drizzly day

Although we had seen the karst formations throughout our makeshift motorbike tour of Cat Ba island as well as those offshore nearby, we still wanted to get deeper into the bay by boat.  And we still had to get back to Hanoi, ideally some way other than how we had come.  The solution was a hack of a trip put together by one of the island tour agencies: we started on one boat for the second day of their three day tour of the bay, then pulled alongside and boarded, pirate-style, a boat returning to the mainland port for the end of their 2-day trip.  We were then put into a taxi for a ride to the other end of the port where we would “meet the captain” and got there just in time to jump on a 1 day tour boat with the hordes arriving from Hanoi, after which we continued with them by bus back to the city.  If it sounds hard to follow in retrospect, it was a real leap of faith in practice — all we knew was that we would be on a boat through the islands and would end up in Hanoi; we had no idea that we’d be hopping boat to boat, had no paperwork beyond a hand scribbled receipt, and kept getting handed off from one “guide” to the next.  But it worked, and we got a voyeur’s view of what the standard tour agency cruises would have been like, for about 10 percent of the price, missing nothing other than a night on board.  On our cruise(s) of the bay we saw floating fishing villages and got views of the rock formations, had the standard, much touted “10 course lunch” (which is 10 small shared plates all served at the same time), and made the obligatory kayak and cave stops.

Aaron kayaking out of the secret bay through the cave tunnel to rejoin the floating hordes

We got back to Hanoi in time for the overnight train to Dong Hoi, gateway to Phong Nha Ke Bang National park, home to two of the three largest caves in the world.  The only way to visit them is through the monopoly concession running cave-for-pay tours for $3,000 per person, and with a minimum age of 16.  Luckily, a few other caves are open for regular tourists, and they don’t disappoint.  You reach Phong Nha cave by cruising up the river, then into the cave itself where they cut the engine and row for the next four kilometers.

In Dong Hoi, between the market and the bus station is a row of restaurant stalls displaying bowls piled high with various local specialties.   We sat down and held up four fingers, and got lucky – at these places, you don’t choose what to eat, each plate is made with one scoop of everything.  It’s like a highly efficient 10 course tasting menu – for two dollars.

The next day we rented motorbikes again to reach Paradise cave, which is so heavily decorated with formations it would look artificial if it weren’t for the fact that no one would build something that big.  A rainy day is a great time to visit a cave, except that you have to get there first.  We managed to get helmets with visors for the kids; I alternated between sunglasses and squinting, and we arrived thoroughly soaked.  We rode the old Ho Chi Minh trail through the local villages; there’s no direct evidence of the history, except for the warnings not to go on any hikes, as this is one of the most heavily mined areas in the world as well as being littered with unexploded ordnance.  (Walking the path through the jungle to the cave had us recalling both the old British show “Danger UXO!,” a grad school favorite, as well as the South Park episode where Cartman warns everyone to “Look out for Charlie up in the trees!”)

Reflections in a rimstone pool in Paradise cave

Returning to town, we saw the local ferry – a small canoe rowed by a tiny woman, shuttling 3 motorbikes (and their riders) at a time across the river and somehow not capsizing.  We returned the bikes just in time, and chose a restaurant based on their roaring fire, where we finally started to dry out and warm up a bit.

We decided to skip Hue, reading between the lines in the description of it as a city “on every first time visitor’s itinerary,” so our next stop, a few hours down the train line, was Na Trang, gateway to Hoi An (I’m sure the taxi cartel laid the tracks to be just-far-enough away from the main tourist sites).  Hoi An is Vietnam’s Kyoto / Pokhara / Chiang Mai – the place where you get off the bus, look around, and exclaim “We found the white people!”  It’s a city of boutiques, tailors, art galleries, and celebrity chef restaurants.  The kind of place where trip advisor reviews report that prices are reasonable if they match what people pay at home.  The kind of place where cocktails are sold “by the bucket,” happy hour specials last all day, and where the couple at the table next to us ordered a plate of French fries and two slices of cheesecake.  It’s pleasant enough, in a sort of Disneyland (or Carcassonne) way, and at any rate is a nice respite from the buzzing streets of the real Vietnam.  (The market was a pleasant surprise, with live chickens and fish and only slightly less live pigs, or at least their heads and feet.)  With no real agenda, we accepted the offer from Mr. Trung, who cruises town carrying a book of testimonials, to join him for a tour of his village by bicycle and boat.  This was a day for the kids: making bowls on a potter’s wheel at the “pottery village,” catching tiny fish in a ditch next to the “fishing village,” and learning to cook at Mr. Trung’s house.  The bicycles are locally welded single speed beach cruisers, inexplicably constructed to be uncontrollably squirrely.  Add one hundred pounds of Ethan sitting over the back wheel, and our lazy day out was punctuated with moments of excitement on the roads.

Aaron spinning the potter’s wheel while Suzie is guided in the production of tourist trinkets

The kids’ favorite activity, it turns out, was going to art galleries.  In every city, we can’t pass by a gallery without the kids running in to look at paintings.

We spent our evenings walking beneath the town’s signature colorful lanterns with the rest of the tourists, stopping once in a while for whatever specials are on offer.  (An unintended consequence of this trip, where we are all together all the time, is that the kids have become enamored of mocktails, which are offered everywhere and are almost always more expensive than the real cocktails.)  The liveliest place was the “Dive Bar,” run by a scuba operator and showing Jacques Cousteau videos – a bit more tame than the Hanoi nightclubs, where Aaron’s comment was “I’m too young for the clubs, but I’m not too young for the music,” and the most popular vice is balloons filled with nitrous oxide.

The famous lanterns of Hoi An.  I suspect the tradition is predated by the tourists.

We took another day to visit My Son, an area of thousand year old temples from the Champa kingdom (which we’d never heard of either) set in the jungle, Indiana Jones style, in various states of decay and restoration.  Though long abandoned, the temple complex was used as a hide out for the North Vietnamese during the American war.  The bomb craters are clearly visible, as are the ancient temples intentionally destroyed by US forces.

Temples in a clearing in the jungle at My Son

Throughout Vietnam, the physical effects of the war are visible.  It’s hard to forget that everyone we see or talk to who is my age lived through it.  The museums are most critical of the French period; the suffering of the American War focuses mostly on agent orange – probably because the resulting deformities are an everyday sight on the streets here.  But there’s no grudge.  People are genuinely delighted to learn that we’re from the US; many have visited, or have relatives there, or hope to visit.  (Americans are a small minority of the tourists here.)  They love to talk and practice speaking English.  They push their kids toward ours to make friends.  Most striking to me is that, despite the outcome of the war, the only currency accepted at the border for the visa is the US dollar – they don’t even accept Vietnamese Dong.  The communists won, and are still in power, and yet, 49 years to the day after the Tet Offensive, we walked in Saigon (as the locals still call it) from the Times Square building to the Union Square building, past a KFC, a Texas Chicken, two McDonald’s, and a few Circle K convenience stores.

Ethan looking over a bomb crater among the temples

(The America centric history we are aware of misses a lot of what is locally significant – for example, in the wars after the fall of Saigon, the Russians supported Vietnam in order to maintain a second front in their anticipated war with China; China supported Cambodia – and invaded Vietnam – to artificially extend intra-Asian hostilities and prevent the emergence of a regional association that could counterbalance their influence.  It seems the Vietnam war is a much more significant driver of American history than the American war is in Vietnam.)

Leaving Hoi An, another night on the train brought us to Saigon and gave us the chance to once again escape the backpacker bubble and travel with locals.  And to finally get south of the rain, and to settle in for the Tet experience before moving on to the Mekong Delta.

Aaron, reflecting on our time in Vietnam: “The train was my favorite part.  You get to meet new friends, and I got to sleep in the middle bunk.”

Making friends on the train