Hanoi, Vietnam – March 4th – 9th, 2017

After a very pleasant bus ride from Ba Be National Park, we arrived in Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam. For once, I am not being sarcastic, the bus ride was actually pleasant! The bus was a new sleeper bus with individual reclined seats stacked on top of each other like little bunk beds. Our only complaint with the Asian-sized bus was that we did not exactly fit in the seats. Since our feet outsize the feet of infants, they had to be fully turned to one side in order to fit inside the foot cubby. Still, a mostly comfortable, clean, and safe trip exceeded our expectations (fair to say our expectations are quite low at this point). 

Sleeper bus trip during the day. 

After about three weeks without western comforts, we basked in the glory of our clean comfortable room at a fancy hotel. We sprung the $20/night to stay at a nice place near the city center with the caveat that our room was tiny and did not have any windows. We didn’t mind though, the dark interior room allowed us to catch up on much needed quality sleep and the hotel service was incredible!

We spent four full days walking the streets of Hanoi. We frequented delicious restaurants and coffee shops to catch up on the blog, travel research, and start the dreaded job search (waaa waaaa!). Our favorite coffee shop ended up being a place called “The Note.” This local shop provided multi-colored sticky notes to leave messages on the walls. Given that my attention span is only slightly better than a monkey’s, I enjoyed the distraction of reading the inspirational and funny messages left by locals and tourists. After devouring lots of tea and coffee, upscale Indian food (twice), Banh Mi sandwiches, crème caramel desserts, and fresh bakery bread, we felt the need to even out the calorie differential and went to a local gym to work out. With ex-pats a-plenty we were not even gawked at! Although Hanoi is massive and busy, we surprisingly really liked it. There are interesting alleys and old picturesque French architecture throughout the city making it feel smaller than it really is. The large population of tourists and ex-pats made getting around, communicating, and finding the creature comforts easy. Don’t get me wrong, it was still very much Asia, which we were reminded of when stumbling across tall pyramids of barbecued dogs. That’s right folks, dogs are a delicacy in Vietnam.  

The streets of Hanoi.

Restaurants and cafes around Hanoi. 

In addition to eating (not dogs) and working out, we also had a few clothes crises while in Hanoi. Freezing over the previous week made it very apparent that we did not have enough warm clothes, especially considering that the next country in Dandy’s Grand Adventure is New Zealand in autumn. To remedy the situation, we must have visited 30 different knock-off outdoor gear shops, attempting to find decent quality warm clothing. This was pretty much a fail because the selection was repetitive, the quality was crap, and/or the clothes did not fit (again, pesky Asian sizing). Resigning to the fact that finding long enough pants was an impossible task, we found a seamstress that put minimal effort into patching my pants which had been destroyed from a protruding nail on a bench in Sapa. Our clothes are actually wearing out from too much use (now that’s a problem seldomly experienced in the first world)! Our last clothing crisis almost gave Andy a hard attack. In order to avoid the expense of doing laundry through our nice (and reliable) hotel, we brought all of our dirty clothes to a hostel in town for half the price. When we came to pick the clothes up the first time, they said that they were not done yet and to come back later. So, we did. Andy came back the next morning, only to be told that they had lost the clothes! They did not even apologize, just stated matter-of-fact that they had a mix up at the laundromat and had lost our clothes. After spending four days in Hanoi failing to find quality clothes that fit and now being the proud owners of just the clothes on our backs, we were flabbergasted by the lack of concern shown by the hostel staff! This is a perfect example of what we have begun calling the “give-a-damn” factor – meaning that the rest of the world just doesn’t “give-a-damn” compared to the western world. After two hours of pure terror, someone finally showed up with our clothes – which were still dirty and now damp too. After Andy accounted for all of the clothes, the hostel staff attempted to take them back to wash them. There was no chance in hell we were leaving our clothes with them again. They had them for 48-hours the first time around and didn’t even wash them! We settled on the reliable, expensive, laundry service from our hotel… lesson learned.   

More photos from around Hanoi. Rather than break you neck by standing on a hover-boards, some clever person conversed into seated toys and rents them on the street (middle-right). Trash collection services (bottom-middle). Andy wearing lipstick after we did a TV news interview about Women's Day (bottom-right). We were on Vietnamese TV!   

Perhaps the only touristy thing we did in Hanoi (besides shopping and eating) was to visit a large military history museum and crashed B52 bomber plane. Although the war museum was interesting, most of the captions were written in Vietnamese and we struggled to know what we were looking at. What we were able to gleam is that the Vietnamese are very proud of their military successes. I suppose you cannot fault them for this, especially after the tumultuous century that they have had fighting the French for Independence and a civil war between the communist north and democratic south (the Vietnam war or as they call it, the American war). Regardless, perhaps a more apt name for the museum would be the “Military Propaganda Museum.”

War memorials in Hanoi.