Halong Bay and Hanoi Part II

I hopped in the van provided by the hotel at about 8am and introduced myself to my fellow travelers: a Canadian girl from Edmonton and two Israeli guys. After about three hours we arrived at the port and hopped on our Chinese junk sailboat where we ate lunch and set off for the bay.

There's nothing I can really say to go into detail about this place. It was MUCH nicer than I had expected it to be - 1,000 times more beautiful and peaceful that what I had read and seen in pictures. For the next two days, our boat chugged along through an endless sea of karst rock islands, passing small floating fishing villages and fellow tourists. We did some kayaking the first evening and spent about an hour diving off the top of the boat into the refreshing, emerald green water below. That night we all hung out on the roof deck and had some great conversation over a few cool beers. We were dropped off at the harbor again the next afternoon and shuttled back into Hanoi.

Now I had to figure out how to spend the next five days in the capital, already feeling like I had seen everything there was to see. I explored every last inch of the Old Quarter, and went to see a water puppet show, which was actually fantastic! If it were in New York, I could easily see paying 100 bucks for the show, but of course this being Vietnam, I paid a little over a dollar.

I spent a few days lounging around hopping from cafe to cafe reading a book I picked up called The Catfish and the Mandala. I got a counterfit street copy for $2.50 after haggling it down from 15 bucks. It's about a Vietnamese guy who escapes from the south with his family as a child during the war and decides to do a bicycle trip back to his homeland to explore his roots as an adult. It's a teriffic book in general, but what I love most is that it takes everything I have seen in this country and articulates it back to me through the understanding of an American-Vietnamese person, giving depth and meaning to all the crazy phenomena I see every day but can't figure out how to describe.

I befriended a slightly insane Vietnamese girl who is living indefinitely in the bed across from me at my hostel, and have been listening to her ramblings non-stop ever since. I've spent plenty of my nights at the bia hoi corner, befriending travelers, drinking 10 cent beers and getting a kick out of their abundant stories of Southeast Asian antics. I met some Canadians and an English girl when I went to see the perfume pagoda, and we have had some interesting Hanoi adventures.

Last night for example, we were hanging out at one of the beer stands on the corner when the fun police shut it down at 11pm. We went to a bar down by the lake, which was known to stay open illegally until the wee hours of the morning. Around 2am, the not-so-fun police showed up and started screaming at everyone in Vietnamese to leave immediately. Not wanting to mess with the intimidation Socialist police, we obediently left - I don't even want to know what happened to the owners of the bar.

Time to hop on my train though, I'll add a final post about Vietnam when I arrive in Beijing.