Day 12.04: Hanoi => Siem Reap

9am. Wake.

This is a lazy travel day. After breakfast at the hotel, K and I head out to the post office where we buy a postcard of Surprise Cave to mail to ourselves as a memento ^-^. We then walk along some of the lesser-traveled-by-tourists streets. It seems each street block has its own category of goods being sold. We pass the sections selling clothes, paint and random household chemicals, glass, and kitchenware, among others.


We grab some bakery goods to snack on along the way and a freshly squeezed sugar cane drink. K also buys a Vietnamese pork sandwich from one of the street stands. During our walk, I notice that for the fruits here which are the same ones we see in the states (like bananas and pineapples, for example), the ones here are smaller than the ones we see in the states. The bananas are especially tiny! Maybe they're non-genetically modified?... unlike the fruits we're used to?

Our private car arrives promptly at 2pm to take us to the airport. Though it's only a two hour flight, Vietnam Airlines still feeds us a full meal. If only we had known ahead of time, then we wouldn't have eaten a late lunch at the airport (I had a whole bowl of noodle soup!)

Day 11.6: Hanoi

After lunch on the boat, we dock and unboard. Then, a long 3-hour mini-bus ride back to Hanoi; both the other two couples and the two tour guides head back with us.

Since it's still light out when we return, we take our walk around the lake that we planned for but never got to the other day. We also head to Ngoc San Temple with B, and we see the preserved turtle in daylight.


Then, it's a semi-longish walk to a street the tour book calls a specialty foods street, with a quick stop at the Opera House, which looks entirely like it could be an opera house in SF or any other Western city. The specialty foods area is a couple of streets of all food stalls. K picks one, asks for the menu, which has English, so we sit down to eat at it. Halfway through our meal, we notice that everyone at that one stall has ordered the same exact thing... Chinese medicinal soup with chicken. We're the only people eating something else. Apparently, we missed out on the "specialty food" of this particular stall.


A walk back to our hotel... with a few stops at the shops along the way.

Sleep. 12:30am.

Day 11: Halong Bay

7:20am. Wake.

We set the alarm for 6am to try and catch the sunrise again, but the boat is pretty close to the tall islands in the east... it's unlikely we'll see a sunrise, so I go back to sleep until just a little before breakfast while K stays up and takes the camera in case a valid sunrise is spotted.

After breakfast, the boat heads to Sung Sot Cave, aka Surprise Cave, discovered not too long ago. The inside of the cave is another amazing site. The lighting is, of course, fairly low so picture-taking is quite difficult. Flash adds too much light and no flash results in a blurry picture -_-. An ok picture that Beilie took...


About 2/3 of the way through, K says to me, "I have a surprise for you in this Surprise Cave" and hands me a round box (with a cute penguin) on top. "Happy Birthday", he says. Oh right, it *is* my birthday! (Long vacation distorts conception of time.) I'm quite confused because we had been carrying the penguin box in our luggage all along... and it was a b-day present for Xiao with whom we'll meet up in Phuket... so I was led to believe.

I open the box, and inside is another smaller penguin box, and inside that one, another smaller penguin box (yes, one of "those"), and inside that, a ring. ????!!?!? (We had agreed to not have a formal proposal.........)

Emotional me, I start crying. K asks the formal question. I respond, "I guess..." (yea, I'm quite shocked at this point) and eventually manage to get out a "yes".


Actually, Surprise Cave was supposed to be in our Halong Bay Day 2 itinerary, but K apparently asked the tour guide to move it to the 3rd day to coincide with my birthday. Also turns out Beilie was in on it for the past two months... initial planning was the weekend I was in Maine for J's knot-tying.

Nothing's changed... we both knew we were getting married sometime, everyone else knew we were getting married sometime, and that sometime is still "sometime"... except I guess 'sometime' now probably has to be within something like at most three years, from a traditional standpoint (not that it wouldn't be anyways). So much for eschewing tradition and not having a proposal 'story'...

Much pamper-age this year-end, yes.

Day 10: Halong Bay

5:45am. Wake.

We wake early to catch the sunrise that never really came... there were just too many clouds and some fog... though I did get a couple of decent pictures of the area lit by the rising sun.



Breakfast is filling and then we transfer over to a smaller boat for the day. The smaller boat offers better maneuverability and the Annan Junk will go back to the dock to pick up some more people while we go off and do our thing. Smaller boat really is a smaller boat... the bathroom on it has no tissues nor does the toilet have a flush button... you scoop water from a pail into the toilet to "flush" it.

We navigate to an area called "3 tunnels", where we kayak through two of the "tunnels". There's no mini boat, so Beilie has to get her first kayaking experience. The tour guide goes with her in one kayak and K and I are in the other kayak. (Our one bad experience... returning from the kayak, we discover that K's backpack was not the way we left it... i.e. someone went through it. After inspection, thankfully nothing seems to be missing. Beilie says that maybe the crew members were just curious... but still, it left a bad taste.)



After the kayaking, we head to the floating village and museum... a bunch of houses all just floating atop the water. Many of the residents make their living by catching sea creatures and selling them to tourist boats like ours. The houses are quite a sight! A few even had pets... cats and dogs running along the floating houses.


While heading back out through the floating village, the crew make a bit of commotion. I initially though someone dropped something in the water, but it turns out one of the crew spotted a fish in the water and they intend to catch the fish. After great attempts to re-spot the fish and catch it, two crew members get into a kayak, row out a bit, and actually manage to catch the fish. They cook it as part of their lunch. Our lunch is a variety of grilled seafoods. The catching of the fish and the resulting cooked caught fish...


Every day in Halong Bay is a beautiful one...


We head to Luon Cave where we transfer back onto Annan Junk for the night. There are now two more couples, so seven guests and eight crew total. K goes out to kayak a bit by himself. I opt to stay onboard since it's quite cold by now and I had left my jacket back in our Hanoi hotel.

Sleep. 10:30pm.

Day 9: Halong Bay, Vietnam

7am. Wake.

We're supposed to get picked up at 8:30 to go on a 3 day 2 night Halong Bay cruise-tour and the driver is pretty much on time. I'm frantically finishing the morning routine and getting stuff packed for the few days all the way up to when the driver arrives.

We get first class service in a SUV. The drive from Hanoi to Halong Bay is supposed to take 3-4 hours. We make one rest stop along the way... a 20-minute break at a tourist-catered stop, i.e. overpriced stuff with all the costs written in USD, not dong. Actually, it's just overpriced for Vietnam (purses for $25/$30... which would be standard if you're in the US). There's a mini sweatshop-ish area inside, but it's supposedly giving disabled people work... though the people don't look disabled in any obvious way to me.

On the drive out, people laying what seems to be large pieces of paper...


Upon arriving to Halong Bay, we spend a few minutes at the tourist dock (called so because it's where all the tour boats dock at) before our tour guide shows up. When we ask if he's from Halong Travel (the company with which we booked our tour), he answers "sure sure", which sounds flaky-ish to us. But, we soon discover that's his way of saying "yes" as he replies to every inquiry that way.

Our boat is called the Annan Junk.


It turns out we're the only people on the boat for that day (more people will join us for the 2nd & 3rd days)... so, VIP service. It feels odd with just the three of us on the boat... and the crew of eight (captain, tour guide, our driver (no clue why he's on the tour), cooks, etc). We first have lunch on the boat... practically all seafood dishes. Total pamper-age.

Halong Bay is absolutely *amazingly* beautiful. It's a series of limestone rocks just scattered about. Many of the islands have names like Dog, Man's Head, or Tortoise because some dude looked at the profile and thought that's what he saw. Over 2000 islands.


After some touring about in the boat, we pass into Luon Cave area.


K and I go in a 2-person kayak and B goes with the tour guide in a mini boat. We pass through the cave in the kayak into a lagoon. Very tranquil. K does most of the paddling while I intersperse taking pictures with paddling... we added the waterproof case to our camera just prior to getting in the kayak.



Post-kayaking, the boat heads over to Titop Island (aka Faerie Island) where we climb to the top for breathtaking views...



and the sunset...



Dinner is another fancy meal with much pamper-age.



The boat anchors near Titop Island and we basically 'flounder' at sea for the night.

Sleep. 9:40pm.

Day 8: Hanoi

7am. Wake. Beilie's off doing her own thing today, visiting rice patties.

Free breakfast at the hotel... K gets a chicken pho and I get pancakes with chocolate. The picture showed pancakes that looked like a pancake stack we're used to seeing, but what they actually served me was something akin to crepe, which was fine by me. I added a couple of sliced bananas and dipped the two in chocolate sauce. Mmmm... sinful breakfast.


We then asked the hotel receptionist about getting a taxi to go to the Temple of Literature. She said she would call one for us and negotiate a price of 30000 dong. K asked about metered taxis and she said a metered one would end up costing approx. 100000 dong. Arriving at the Temple of Lit., we noticed the meter on the taxi says 23000 dong, but we pay the guy the negotiated price of 30000 dong. So, either the rep at the hotel takes a cut of the 30k or she is right and getting a metered taxi just means the taxi drives around a lot until 100k-ish, or both =)

The temple of lit was originally the first National University and built in the 9th century. The 82 best students (passed all the exams, etc) over 200-300 years each had a stone plaque dedicated to them... the students were called "doctors" and each doctor had a stella... a stone turtle with a dedication message on a big tablet. My favorite part was looking at all the turtles with different heads.



The temple also had a statue of Confucius and four of his disciples.


We then walked to an area with six "attractions": 2 pagodas (one of the oldest surviving one pillar pagodas in Hanoi), the presidential palace (which could only be viewed from the outside), and three items devoted to Ho Chi Minh... mausoleum, his house on stilts and older residence and office, and a museum. The one pillar pagoda was one of the oldest surviving one pillar pagodas in Hanoi... it was built in 1049 and is one of the few remaining structures from the original city (tho central shrine was rebuilt in 1955)... it's said to have miraculous healing powers...


The mausoleum is closed every year from September to early December because Ho Chi Minh's body is sent to Russia to be re-conditioned. It was closed when we went, so I guess his body was still in Russia, but K didn't want to go in anyways... we just stood outside and took pictures.


Ho Chi Minh's residences weren't too exciting. The rooms were very simple... no decorations on the wall and just a few pieces of furniture. They said he liked to live a very simple existence. This particular part had a non-stop flow of different Asian tour groups, all speaking their own languages.

The museum indoors and exhibits were very artsy.


Grabbed a taxi to Bach Ma Temple. K wrote 30000 dong on a piece of paper (price suggested by Ms.Moon at the hotel), which the driver agreed to. There are four temples in the country and this is the one in the north. K pointed out that Bach Ma = Bai Ma aka White Horse.

Walked along the streets towards our next destination and ate at a restaurant along the way. The two of us ordered a chicken and corn soup, fried spring rolls, and a vermicelli. The fired spring rolls were different from the ones we in Vietnamese restaurants in the US; these were smaller and with thinner skin. K said it was the first meal he finished with all ^o^ in Hanoi so far.


Onward to "Memorial House", except our map and our tourbook disagreed on its exact location. We walked to the map location first, didn't find it, walked to the tourbook location, didn't find it, asked some guy in a travel agency on the same street, guy didn't know about it, looked around for a while, and finally found it. They called it "Ancient House"... no where was "Memorial House" displayed. It's an old preserved historical house. That whole French influence thing... all the signs we see at touristy sites have descriptions in three languages: Vietnamese, English, and French...


Walked to the lake and Ngoc Son Temple (Ngoc Son = Yu San aka Jade Mtn). It was already quite dark and the temple was closing in a few minutes so K said we'd probably come back on the last day after our Halong Bay tour. At the temple, we meet the Singapore team for the Asian University Games, who ask us to take a group picture for them... and then I ask if we can grab a picture with them too ^o^. They must have thought I was quite odd.

On the way back to the hotel, we stop at the post office to pick up stamps for Beilie... only to find her there buying an extra stamp (above what she asked us to buy for her)!

Back to the hotel for a short break.

The night market is only on Saturdays and Sundays and Ms.Moon suggests we go... but also to leave all our belongings (including camera) at the hotel because thieves and pick pockets are very common. I'm unwilling to leave my camera behind but I aslo don't want to get it stolen or make us the target of anyone, so sadly, the camera stays in the room. Beilie opts to just relax at the hotel.

All sorts of goodies are being sold at the market... sunglasses, cosmetics, clothes, purses&wallets, shoes, dried fruits, souvenirs, tableware, etc, etc. Though KL and Bangkok also had their respective markets, each country's is a different flavor and impressive in its own way. Along the market stalls, K grabs a Vietnamese pork sandwhich (10000 dong = 60c) and a sesame pork on a stick (3000 dong = 18c). Yummy yummy!! He buys a pair of gloves for 10000 dong and pants for $5 (we ran out of money at the end). We also buy a few really cute animal dudes... some glow in the dark for 12k to 15k dong each (90c). Yay!

The market is *very* crowded and after the first hour, it's so crowded that you're mushed into other people a lot. We break for dinner in the middle of our night market stroll at a restaurant listed in the tourbook... it's the first time we've gone to a restaurant listed in the book. K is happy, though the dishes were a bit oily for me.

We've been noticing that people just toss their trash on the streets. Use a tissue, toss it on the street. Finish an ice cream cone, the wrapper goes on the street. There are no public trash cans anywhere. While at the night market, we notice a few people going around with large rolling trash cans and clearing the trash off the street. I guess the streets and sidewalks *are* the public trash cans, and someone goes around "emptying" it every night.

Another note... In Vietnam, toilets/restrooms are sometimes marked "WC", which we later find out stands for "wash closet" and the term's used in Europe as well. The U.S. always does things differently from the rest of the world.


By the time we get back to the hotel, it's almost midnight. It didn't seem like we were out for that long, but I guess the time just flew.

K treats our clothes with mosquito-killing permethrin spray in preparation for Siem Reap.

1:30am. Sleep.

Day 7: Hanoi, Vietnam

Hanoi - cooler weather... yay! Goodbye hot & humid ^o^

The hotel had a driver pick us up from the airport for $5. It was a 'real' car (vs taxi) and the driver opened and closed our car doors for us! Leaving the airport... lots of farms and fields and billboards... B said it was just like China, except the billboards were in a different language. Drivers drive on the right hand side of the road and the driver's seat is on the left hand side of the car like we're used to (unlike Malaysia and Thailand). Still no seatbelts in the backseat though.

There's a bunch of French influence in the architecture since the country was colonized by the French for a while. Many of the buildings are concrete with painted fronts but with the sides and back left bare. K speculates that maybe it's like in The Sims when you want to save money so you leave stuff unpainted until later... or maybe they expect other houses to be built right up next to them, so why paint it when it'll just be covered up.


Upon arrival at our hotel, the receptionist informs us that she can no longer give us the 3-person room we reserved because she has a group of 11 people arriving the same day as us and she needs the room for them. She gives us a choice of two 2-person rooms, one with two twins and one with one queen... she's going to add a fold-out mattress to the room and cut our per night price to $22 (was $24).

This is definitely the newest-feeling and cleanest hotel we've stayed at thus far. The bathroom is pretty close to sparkling clean and they offer free internet on three computers in the lobby with a decent connection; the previous two hotels had internet but you had to pay for it... and the connect at the Bangkok hotel was quite slow). Also included is free breakfast, fairly low-cost laundry service ($1/kg vs. Bangkok's per item charge... pair of jeans = $1.20), the private car, the receptionist helping us with random bits (like getting tickets to a water puppet show or offering to mail Beilie's postcards for her). The only downside is the room is quite small.

We eat lunch at a place across the street and then get driven to the Museum of Ethnology (same dude that picked us up from the airport). The museum focuses on the many different ethnic groups in Vietnam. There's an outdoor exhibit of the different types of houses throughout parts of Vietnam... full-sized versions. One of them even had pictures showing the phases of constructing that particular house. Some have straw roofs, some wooden. Some houses and insides of houses...




The indoor exhibits are two floors of various artifacts from the different ethnic groups... clothing, musical instruments, pottery, etc. Very interesting and we quickly use up our 1.5 hours before the museum closes at 5pm.

I saw people carrying crazy loads on their motorcycles, but I'd love to see a person actually riding this bike. The sign said it was used by someone from 1982 to 1997, and he would frequently carry more than 800 fish traps at once...


Our driver takes us back to the hotel where Beilie decides to just chill while K and I go out for a walk along the street stalls. A few blocks takes us quite a while as we navigate slowly by the many vehicles... a few cars, some cyclos, some bicycles, and many many motorcycles. There are no sidewalks and where there are, it's occupied by stalls selling goods... so we need to walk on the busy-with-traffic streets. The air pollution in Hanoi is much worse than Bangkok (which was already worse than KL)... every hour I feel like I'm shortening my lifespan as my lungs fill with smoke.

People of all ages are riding motorcycles... a couple of schoolgirls/boys, a mother with her 5-year-old son, a woman in a nice blouse and skirt, an old man... everyone. It was somewhat true in Bangkok & KL as well, but there cars outnumbered motorcycles... here there's by far many more motorcycles.

For the most part, there are no traffic lights; where there is one, it's sometimes accompanied by a red or green countdown clock to when the light will change color).


Vehicles just weave through each other, beeping all along. The beeps of vehicles continue non-stop throughout the day. To cross the street, you just walk slowly across as the vehicles navigate around you. Running would surely get you killed. And a red light (or ok to walk green signal) doesn't mean traffic stops, but that it's maybe 50% less heavy. (After getting back to the States, we found out that Seymour Papert from the Media Lab was here in Hanoi a few days before us, during which he got hit by a motorcycle, sustained head injuries, and fell into a coma. So no, those motorcycles are not just *perceived* danger.)

After our walk, we head out to dinner with B. K's been having ill luck with Vietnamese food... he ordered a spicy crab fried rice at lunch, only to discover it was soft shell crab with the shell. His dinner ordering didn't fare too much better either. A lot of the food has either French or Chinese influences... so probably the most non-defining of the countries we've visited thus far. Many of the cafes have what we would call Vietnamese food (from our experiences in the States) as well as Chinesey dishes and things like quiche.

Water puppet show. An hour long show which turns out to be quite interesting and amazing. It is given in the water and the controllers are behind a screen, controlling the puppets with a series of rods and/or wires from below the water. The shows were originally given in the rice patties and the puppets are accompanied by a series of musicians.



12 midnight. Sleep.