Vietnam — the land of Pho and Ho
By: Anand A
Tags: Vietnam, Travelogue, Southeast Asia, Hanoi

My initial plan has Hanoi — Ha Long Bay/Cat Ba Island — Hoi An — Hanoi. But connections between Ha Long and Hoi An required too much time/expensive travel and with just 6 days at hand, we started considering options further north of Hanoi such as Sapa. But knowing Archana, and her low preference for mountains and hiking trails, we narrowed down on Ninh Binh, which is usually done as a day-trip from Hanoi. Since we were anyways traveling to Ha Long Bay, travelling directly to Ninh Binh from Ha Long Bay/Cat Ba and coming back to Hanoi for the last leg of travel made more sense. So this was our final route: Hanoi(2n) — Cat Ba(1n) — Ninh Bin(2n) — Hanoi(1n)

Being a foodie, Vietnam came into my travel wishlist after Phở — the iconic Vietnamese noodle soup. Numerous YouTube videos following the making of Phở and the food culture of Vietnam soon gave way to even more videos of the sprawling Ho Chi Minh City, charming Hanoi, historic Hoi An, exotic Halong Bay and I knew I had to visit this country that expelled two of the biggest imperial powers in the recent past. This year, when AirAsia Big Sale was announced, I booked a return ticket for two to Hanoi for December. Here is a recap of our trip and travel tips for those who plan to visit this beautiful nation.

Hanoi — the old world charmer

The capital city of Vietnam is a photographers delight — a city filled with vibrancy and an old world charm tracing its bygone colonial legacy. Its narrow streets lined with weathered, old buildings of French imperial days are boutique shops and stylish cafes today. Compact streets sell specialised items ranging from coffee, spices, hardware to fake apparel. At every street, hole in the wall kitchens serve Pho or Bún chả to hungry customers who relish their food served in large bowls, sitting on low plastic chairs and tables placed right on the footpath.

This is a city to be explored on foot, even though walking along the busy, chaotic streets would require us to open up all our senses in full vigil. By staying at the heart of the city- its Old Quarter you could cover most of the main attractions by walking or by a short taxi ride.

For the history buff, Hanoi is the best place to learn about Vietnam’s military past and its art and folklore traditions. A number of museums are dedicated for these but both of us are not great fans of museums so we choose to visit the best of the lot — the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology. This beautifully designed building has a well curated collection of Vietnamese tribal art, artefacts, houses and folklore representing the numerous ethnic groups across the country. Worth spending at-least 1–2 hrs here.

Inside Vietnam Museum of Ethnology

The iconic Hoàn Kiếm Lake and beautiful Huc Bridge will start attracting tourists as the day progresses, so we got up early and reached the lake by 6:00- 6:30 am to see Hanoians starting the day with Tai Chi lessons, joggers and florists and the occasional tea vendor transforming the lakeside to a vibrant activity center. The evenings here are equally charming with the lake, bridge and the surrounding cafes brightly lit attracting tourists and local crowd.

Huc Bridge and Hoan Kiem Lake

Hanoi’s street food culture also comes alive after dusk. Signing up for a food walk ($20/person with food) and geting a primer on the essential Vietnamese cuisine and cultural habits was the perfect activity on the first day in Vietnam for two foodies! An enthusiastic student/guide who spoke excellent english guided us through narrow alleys to places where the locals frequent. There are also many free tours volunteered by students, but do sign up well in advance as they fill out very quickly.

Tai Chi practitioners at the Lake

Watching a Vietnamese water puppet show was another item in my wishlist for a long time, but for lack of time and the fact that these shows are usually in Vietnamese, we decided to skip it and instead choose to watch Lang Toi — My village, a contemporary dance performance that came highly recommended by a friend. The ticket prices are a bit steep (₹1800 per person, booked well in advance online), but the experience is well worth it. This one hour show brings Vietnamese village life choreographed to life by more than 20 musicians, dancers, acrobats and jugglers and the production and sound design is top notch.

We skipped visiting the other popular tourist attractions like the Temple of Literature and Ho Chi Min Mausoleum after seeing a large number of tourists in front of them. Instead we headed out to visit the Hanoi Rock City to see a recently completed wall art project by our dear friend, Ruchi Shah who have been travelling all around Vietnam with an art project.

For art lovers and designers, Hanoi’s propoganda poster shops are a must visit. These shops sell reprints of posters created by Vietnamese Art students during the war to mobilise and motivate the civilians. With such strong visual/political imagery, these are some of the finest examples of Lenin’s Monumental Propaganda Strategy and its influence in shaping the war.

A shop selling re-prints of war time propaganda posters. At $3 a piece, these are absolutely brilliant works of political art.

Getting around Hanoi — Uber and Grab are the go to services for getting around in Hanoi. Grab even has a cheap scooter taxi, so if you are fine with riding behind someone who keeps his smartphone on one hand while zipping past bigger vehicles and randomly changing lanes, go for it! We used Grab to get through everywhere away from the Old Quarter and the prices were quite cheap. If you want to explore the old quarter like a tourist, you may also try taking a Cyclo for a one hour ride. The rates can be bargained, but we did not feel like taking one and walked around most of the time.

Cat Ba — poor man’s Ha Long Bay

Ha Long Bay is the crown jewel of Vietnam’s tourism map. Predictably it is also notorious for scams, over-priced cruises and loud tourists. You could book day tours to the bay from Hanoi staring from $60/person, which usually involve pick up from your Hotel in Hanoi and drop back. If the cruise involve overnight stay in a wooden junk, expect the costs to go up significantly depending on your luxury expectations. To us, it felt like too much of a spend so we choose to visit Cat Ba, the largest island in the Ha Long Bay with significantly lesser crowd and tourists. Cat Ba is also has a unique floating fishing village and has a National Park, with significantly more things to explore than spending half a day and the night on a cruise boat. You could book day trips from Cat Ba town for as low as $30 -50 on regular fishing boats and visit the Ha Long bay and comeback to the town on a half day trip.

We hired a scooter and drove around the town visiting the nearby landmarks like the Hospital Cave (a cave that was made into a hospital for the Viet Cong army during the war), The cannon fort and trekked Ngu Lam peak located inside the Cat Ba National park for spectacular view of the mountain ranges.

At the national park, there are two trails you can choose. The shorter one leads to Ngu Lam peak (2kms) and the longer one (about 5hrs trek) to Viet Hai village and beyond to a harbour, from where you have to take a boat back to Cat Ba town. We choose the short one, which itself involved a fair amount of trekking through the jungle.

Few tips for this trek — Good walking shoes is highly recommended as there are parts of the trek where you have to climb sharp, limestone rocks. It takes about 30–60 minutes to trek to the peak. Since the park closes by 5pm, start elarly to avoid poor visibility when climbing down.

Ngu Lam Peak, Cat Ba National Park. Unfortunately the mist masked much of the great view.

We had made a booking with Cat Ba Package Tours, who offered a whole package with pick up from Hanoi, a half day cruise to Ha Long which included kayaking, lunch, swimming, hiking at the monkey island and an onward bus ticket to Ninh Binh, our next destination — all for $72 per head. Smiley(+84 97 128 23 62), the contact person was prompt to respond to our queries though Whatsapp and she ensured a really smooth experience without even taking a single dollar in advance till we finish the trip!

We started our boat ride to Ha Long from the nearby Lan Ha Bay. To our surprise, we got a whole boat all for ourselves! By starting early, we got a great view of Ha Long bay when there were lesser tourists and boats and had a great time kayaking though the hidden lagoons.

Around lunchtime, our captain Dan, anchored the boat at the bay to cook our delicious lunch while we spent the time angling. The food was delicious and fresh and Dan amazed us with his fine vegetable carving skills. The flowers you see on the image above are carved by him! Just when we thought his bag of tricks stopped there, he pulled out a guitar from somewhere and started singing for us!

Thank you Dan, you truly are a rock star!

This was certainly the high point in our trip. I cannot thank Smiley and Dan enough for what they are doing and highly recommend them if you are treveling to Cat Ba.

Getting in and out: We left some of our luggage at the hotel in Hanoi since we had booked the same hotel for our last leg. We got picked up at 7:30am from Hanoi and a 3hr journey on a comfortable mini bus brought us to Hai Phong ferry, from where a Hydrofoil boat took us across the bay and to board another bus to Cat Ba town. The entire journey takes 4 hrs and the tour operator coordinated everything right until dropping us at our hotel in Cat Ba Town. There are many private operators in Hanoi who organises the entire trip to Cat Ba. Prices usually range between $10–13.

Cat ba is an island, so you have to reach to Hai Phong again to continue your trip to Nin Binh or to return to Hanoi. We were told that last Hydrofoil boat to Hai Phong leave Cat Ba at 4:00pm. Ninh Binh/Tam Coc is about 5hr journey from Cat Ba. Our Limousine minibus picked us from our hotel at 3:00pm, the same bus crossed the bay on a junker ferry and continued the trip to Ninh Binh. With ample legroom, wifi and charging ports the long journey was pretty comfortable. The cost of this trip was $15 per person.

Tam Coc — Go pagoda hopping!

Tam Coc is a small village about 5 kms from Ninh Bin town, famous for its vast paddy fields and stunning karst landscape. Because of its similarity to the more famous Ha Long bay, they have even branded this place ‘Ha Long Bay on Land’. A two hour boat ride along the waterways that passes through stunning limestone karst formations, paddy fields, caves and numerous small temples situated along the way will give an unforgettable experience of this pristine landscape. Most tourists head over to the Tam Coc pier making it much crowded throughout the day. By November, with the harvest over, the green paddy fields would turn yellow making the views slightly less exciting at Tam Coc, so we opted to take a similar boat ride from the nearby Trang An Grottoes — a huge UNESCO landscape complex with karst rock formations, caves, and temples. The Hollywood blockbuster — Kong- Skull Island was shot here.

Serene Karst Landscapes of Trang An Grottoes

The best way to explore Tam Coc is on bicycle or on a scooter. Most hotels rent out scooters and bicycles to visitors and the ride around the countryside in itself is a wonderful experience. We kept stopping all along the picturesque countryside for photographs and stopped to visit the beautiful Bich Dong Pagoda and the Bái Đính temple — an imposing complex of Buddist temples spread over 700 hectors. However, we skipped another important landmark — Hoa Lu Ancient Capital complex (Previous capital of Vietnam during the 10th and 11th centuries) as the place was getting crowded with tourists. On our way back from Ha Lu, we stopped at Tam Coc Grottoes.

Getting in and out: Although we reached here from Cat Ba, Ninh Bin is easily accessible from Hanoi by bus or train. Tam Coc is still 5kms further from Ninh Bin, but most buses from Cat Ba takes travellers all the way till Tam Coc (It is recommended that you check with the driver about this). Ninh Binh province still had a lot more places of interest to explore, yet we decided to go back to Hanoi early morning on the 6th day to spend some more time exploring the beautiful city. This was the only stretch we did not book tickets in advance. A taxi ride took us from the hotel to the railway station in time to catch the train #SE20 arriving Ninh Binh at 9:30am from Ho Chi Min City. We purchased the tickets from the counter and boarded the train which had comfortable AC chair cars. The train reached Hanoi by 11:30 and we checked into our hotel after lunch and spent the last day loitering around the streets of Old Quarter.

A school teacher helping children to improve their communication skills by making them interact with travellers at the Nin Binh Railway station.

Visa and documentation

You must get an e-Visa before landing in Vietnam. The process is fairly simple, there are many online agencies that will do this for you. We have used one such service and the process was pretty painless. We opted for their complete package that included visa stamping fees and express processing (someone from their company will assist you with all the paperwork once you land at the airport). To be honest, you wouldn’t need that since Hanoi is typically a less crowded airport and the whole process from Submitting the invitation letters and Visa application, and paying for the Visa Stamp and getting the stamp on your passport doesn’t take more than 15 minutes.

Accomodation

Considering we had very less time on each location, we made sure the hotels are centrally located to main attractions and transport hubs. Room sizes in Hanoi’s old quarter could be very tiny though. We stayed at the excellent Hanoi Comfort Hotel, which is just a few minutes walk from the Hoan Kiem lake. At Cat Ba, we booked at the Sea Pearl Hotel which is bang opposite to the Cat Ba boat pier and the rooms were quite big with a great views of the bay. At Ninh Binh, we booked the cozy Tam Coc Bungalow, which is right next to the Tam Coc pier and has excellent views of the river and the karst mountains.