The R&R Big Adventure

Good Night Vietnam

We needn’t have bothered to set the alarm for the next morning of our mini-cruise. Our cabin was in the port bow, and the noise of the anchor being weighed at 6am sounded like an articulated lorry being pulled slowly up the side of the boat. In any instance, we wanted to be up early to catch the sunrise, which we duly did, and were rewarded with spectacular scenery all around us. We were pleased we made the effort as, shortly afterwards, the sky hazed over again. 

More organised fun was had at 7.45am, as we took a tender to shore to explore some caves that had served a number of purposes over the years, including acting as air raid shelters for the local people during the Vietnam War. We had to really duck and contort our bodies to walk sideways through some of the narrow cave openings, making us feel like very ungainly crabs.

Back on boat, and after brunch, fun was finished, and we headed back to the Ha Long marina to catch our transfer back to Hanoi. The flotilla on water was matched by a land based convoy of mini-vans all doing the same thing, and all stopping at the same service station for their respective passengers to have a break. We got back to Hanoi in good time – a relatively new express way had halved the time it took to get to Halong when I was last in Vietnam – so we had the best part of the afternoon for further sightseeing. 

We first stopped at the ‘Hanoi Hilton’ – the infamous Hanoi prison which gained  notoriety first by the French for imprisoning Vietnamese revolutionaries, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and then for its role in the Vietnam War for incarcerating American POWs. Whilst I’m sure the French colonists didn’t treat the Vietnamese at all well, there was just the teensiest bias in the museum narrative of how well the U.S. POWs were treated (with black and white photos of smiling prisoners playing ping pong and exercising), and no mention at all of torture or solitary confinement. John McCain was featured a lot, and seen smiling and being grateful to his captors. Conditions were no doubt equally appalling for anyone who had ended up in those dark, cramped unsanitary cells.

We had booked tickets to a water puppet theatre near our hotel for an early evening performance. These puppet shows originated from rice paddy farmers who would create characters that played out popular folk stories in their paddy fields. These days the action is played out on a stage in a recreated paddy field, complete with pool of water, through which the puppets are controlled on long sticks. The puppet dialogue was in Vietnamese, so we didn’t have a clue, but the puppeteering, musicians, and traditional singing were all very good. 

Whilst many Hanoi locals ate dinner in small pop-up pavement cafes, that used primary school-sized stools as dining chairs, and where the owner would wash dishes on the street out of a giant washing up bowl, we didn’t fancy putting our backs out, or catching salmonella, so we chose a ‘normal’ restaurant specialising in Cantonese food instead, and had quite a large peking duck between us.

After dinner we made our way back to the ‘train cafes’ to see the evening express pass by. There were more tourists than there had been when we previously went in the daytime. No doubt buoyed on by some evening drinks, some of them were feeling bullish about how long they could stand on the track before the train arrived. They soon scurried off it, after being screamed at mercilessly by the cafe owners, who didn’t want a death on their doorstep. It is difficult to imagine a similar scene at Clapham Junction, with commuters lined up in seats, inches from the track, as the 8.05 to Woking hurtles past them. 

This morning we paid a visit to The Citadel, a complex of old buildings and temples that first originated in the early Vietnamese dynasties, but which had been rebuilt several times in the intervening centuries. It was another popular spot for teenage girls to be photographed in their traditional dresses, and we also saw several school parties: many of the children wanting to practice their English ‘hellos’ as we walked past. There was a very sweet school party of nursery-aged children, no more than four years old, wearing traditional outfits and tethered together to stop them running off, being assembled for group photos in the culturally significant grounds. The most interesting aspect for us was seeing the military bunkers that had been built during the Vietnam War (or, as the information boards informed us, the ‘American War’) where the generals would plan their campaigns. All ‘heroic’ and ‘victorious’, of course.

 Our final stop in Hanoi was the famous Ngoc Son Temple on Hoan Kiem Lake, which housed two enormous preserved giant turtles, animals which are spiritually significant for Vietnamese. We then headed back to our hotel to collect our bags before heading to the airport to catch our flight to Siam Reap, and the start of nearly two weeks exploring Cambodia. This is a new country for both of us, and we are looking forward  to our tour of Angkor Wat over the next few days. It was also our first flight with VietJets, a low cost regional airline, whose cabin crew uniforms seem to be a curious design mix of part Virgin Atlantic, part Viet Cong revolutionary. Thankfully there was no queue at immigration when we landed, so we are now speeding on our way to the city centre.