Dodging Motorbikes in Hanoi

Setting the scene

It's currently 7:50 am and I'm writing this blog post from a sleeper bus leaving Hanoi, Vietnam! The sleeper buses are a neat form of transportation here that I haven't seen in the US. They're these big Greyhound-type buses, but instead of the traditional window, two seats, aisle, two seats window arrangement (referred to as the tourist style), the sleeper buses have three columns of reclined seats, nstacked one on top of the other bunk bed style with two aisles spanning from the front to the back of the bus. This makes long bus rides much more comfortable!

For the last three nights, Kaila and I stayed in a private room of a hostel called Central Backpackers Hanoi. The hostel was in a great location in the city's bustling old quarter.

Wednesday, March 26

After we got in late Tuesday night, we slept til 8 am then got up to get breakfast at the hostel. Breakfast was provided on the roof and consisted of fried rice, roasted potatoes, and eggs. The roof was 8 floors up so gave a good view of some of the surroundings.

The hostel offers a free walking tour of the city every day, which seemed like a good way to get started, but it became clear fast that the pace would be a bit too slow for our liking. We picked up more people from another hostel and I think we just had too many people. After we stopped with the group for some coffee, we split off with a couple folks from the tour: Nora from Finland and Andre from the States (Iowa).

We decided we'd walk to a few close sights around the city, with the first being the Temple of Literature. The temple was cool to see, basically a big walled-in park with a couple shrines in small, old buildings. There seemed to be a few graduation ceremonies happening for some young kids, which was cute to see them dressed up all fancy in suspenders and even some bow ties. One cool thing about the temple was that there were a lot of big, very old bonsai trees throughout the grounds!

Next we walked over to a street that is famous in Hanoi because the shops are along train tracks. The main section of the street was blocked off for pedestrians, but we walked around a bit and found a different section that was still open. We got some water at a cafe and found a schedule for the trains on the back of the menu, and realized there weren't any trains coming any time soon so figured we'd try again the next day. Later we read more about the street and realized the reason it was blocked off is because the street has gotten sufficiently crowded that it becomes dangerous when the trains pass. This would make a lot more sense when Kaila and I returned early the next day at one of the scheduled train times...

Once we realized we weren't gonna see any trains, we decided to try to go see the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum, where apparently Uncle Minh is preserved in some fashion. We weren't able to actually go into the mausoleum (still not sure why) but it was still impressive to see from the outside. We were pretty close to a big shrine on the edge of the big Ho Tay lake, so we decided we'd go check that out, too. After taking a circutuitous path around closed streets in this government district, we arrived at the shrine which was an impressive, multi-tiered pagoda!

At this point we were feeling pretty exhausted after walking nearly 10 miles, so we decided to call a Grab, which is the Vietnames ride share service, similar to Lyft or Uber but much cheaper. Our 15 minute ride back to the hostel ended up costing around 60,000 Vietnames Dong, equivalent to about 2.40 USD. Kaila and I went our separate ways from Nora and Andre and rested in the hostel for an hour or so until we were hungry enough to stand on our sore feet again. Kaila is celiac, so had been searching an app she has for folks with gluten allergies to review their experiences at restaurants around the world and she found one close by called Bun Cha Ta. Bun cha is a common dish in Hanoi consisting of a sweet and sour soup with meatballs (cha) that comes with some sticky rice noodles (bun) and often crispy spring rolls on the side to eat with the soup. I got bun cha with grilled pork and seafood spring rolls, which was extremely tasty.

After dinner, we walked over to a part of the city described as the "night market", which was a few streets that stayed open past dark with bright lights, some also selling their own glowing goods like paper lanterns. Very pretty to see, and close to our hostel, too! That made getting back and going to bed early easy. We ended up going to sleep at 8:15 pm.

Thursday, March 27

Since we went to bed so early on Wednesday, Kaila & I both woke up before 6 am on Thursday, so we could take our time getting up to the 8th floor for breakfast again. The first thing we wanted to do was try our luck with train street again, this time going early to try and beat the barricades that close off the street. We walked over and arrived around 8 am which gave us time to stroll around before finding a cafe to set up at before the 8:49 train. We found one & got some coffee (I tried the salt coffee and Kaila got another coconut coffee) & waited. We weren't even sure if the train was going to be coming, but there was another couple tourists at the cafe who also seemed to be eagerly waiting, and the parsed communication with the man who brought us our coffee seemed to suggest the train would be coming.

Sure enough, around 8:45 the man came back by and told us to tuck our legs to the side because the train was coming soon. He showed us where on the pavers lining the tracks the train would be overlapping, and I assumed he was exagerating for caution based on how the imaginary line was less than a full paver away from where we were sitting, but when the train came, it felt even closer than that imaginary line!

We figured this day would be good for some museums since the day before we did a lot of walking around the streets of the city, but that didn't mean we weren't going to do more walking!

Our next stop was the Hoa Lo Prison. Unsurprisingly, the prison museum is heavy. The prison was buit by the French in the 1800's to hold political prisoners, and the conditions people were held in was horrendous. During the war with the US, the prison held American pilots as well, including John McCain, until the war ended in 1973. Many of the soldiers referred to the prison as the "Hanoi Hilton".

After this museum, we grabbed some pho for lunch then walked back towards the hostel to explore some markets just on the other side that we hadn't seen yet. These shops were selling lots of produce and spices that made the street colorful and complex. We eventually got to Cho Dong Xuan which was a big indoor market selling spices and other ingredients, clothes, leather goods like wallets, bows, purses, and the spaces between stalls were only wide enough for a single person to squeeze through at a time.

We went back to the hostel to take a quick break then went off to the Museum of Ethnology, where we learned about the different ethnic groups of Vietnam. Part of the museum was indoor, but there was also outdoor grounds exhibiting some scale replicas of traditional houses belonging to different groups.

After the museum, we went to a grocery store to stock up on some foods for Kaila to bring around with us since she wasn't sure how much she'd be able to eat outside Hanoi. This also brough us close to a dedicated gluten free bakery called Hanoi GF Gourmet, where Kaila was able to get a gluten free bahn mi!

Back to the hostel after that where I got my own bahn mi from a shop across the street and we met back up with Andre from Iowa (and our walking tour yesterday). We got some free beer from the hostel, then headed off to see a water puppet show. Water puppetry is a traditonal art form in Vietnam dating back to the 11th century. It consisted of a stage that was a pool of water with a backdrop from behind which the puppeteers control the puppets. The shows are paired with traditional live music and are humuorous and light-hearted in nature. Much of the beginning of the show featured skits with animals like fish, frogs, water buffaloes, and dragons, but moved on to showcase a story of people in boats. I won't lie that I wasn't able to follow the story, which I think was mostly because it was entirely in Vietnamese but also potentially a little but because I was so exhausted that I was having a hard time staying awake... Anyway it was still fun to see & I would recommend it to anyone spending a couple days in Hanoi! After the puppets, it was back to the hostel to go to bed since we had to get up early the next day to catch our bus to Sapa (previewed at the beginning of this post). The adventure continues!

Thanks for reading!