For some unknown reason we woke up earlier than usual on Monday morning.
We had to check out by midday today anyway, so we just got up at 7am and went upstairs for breakfast. There were a surprising number of people about. Most of them sounded vaguely Australian or American, and I think we can safely say we were the only people under 30. OK 35. OK… 40.
Once again there were too many tasty things to choose from, and once again we went out into the street afterwards and found ourselves a tea and coffee.
Back in the hotel we tidied up our room, and for a giggle I pulled everything out of my bags, laid it out on the bed, and took a photograph, then took the opportunity to put it all back in a sensible order. We wrote another day or two of journal, and eventually confronted the fact that we would have to leave our hotel room. We had looked up the hotel we were going to, and knew that it wasn’t very far from the route we had walked back from the lake. In fact it was just one extra left turn and seemed a bit too easy.
With sadness in our hearts and slow feet we said goodbye to our hotel room, and walked down into the midday heat.
I got about a block before spotting a lady set up on the footpath cooking tofu and noodles with sauce, and decided I was hungry enough to eat that. For some reason these footpath places only have tiny little stools to sit on, so I’m sure I looked a bit stoopid hunched over chop-sticking food into my mouth, but it was tasty and cost 5,000 VND. Bargain.
We only got a little bit lost finding the hotel, and it was because of the reason we suspected: in the Hanoi chapter of the Lonely Planet book it does mention that streets in the Old Quarter change names every two or three blocks. So we reached Hoan Kiem lake, which was obviously too far, and turned around to go back up the next block, where we did indeed find our street and following on from that, our hotel. And we found it without the assistance of the multiple young men who flashed out business cards and asked if we needed a hotel.
The new hotel room, although I should wish to report otherwise, was not as nice as our previous one. Or not as light, anyway. We had a room where the window opened to a view of the interior stairs, and to say that it was like a cave would be unfair to some of the caves I’ve been in. All the same it was still a pretty tidy room, and had working wireless internet.
But with this being our first ‘real’ day in Hanoi we decided it was a good day to get out and see the famous Hoan Kiem lake. Alice stopped at a tofu/noodle place on the footpath for lunch, and had almost the same thing as me for 15,000 VND. There was a bit of light rain but nothing of the monsoon variety which we expected to encounter; actually I’d be pretty disappointed if we left Vietnam without getting trapped in a huge thunderstorm, it seems like part of the charm of the place. As the rain started one of the men hanging around the footpath restaurant went and got a reaching pole, and reached up and got his two parrots in cages down off the electrical wires.
The lake is very green, and has two small pagodas in the middle. One is connected by a bridge, and charges admission, while the other is out on an island of it’s own. On the way around the back of the lake we did indeed walk past the ANZ bank, which was about 200m from where the cab driver dropped us off, but behind quite a few trees. Such a shame.
Mindful of being back at the hotel by 6pm for our next Intrepid group meeting we strolled back in that direction, and were downright shocked to find that a big of pineapple in the old quarter is 30,000 VND, not the 15,000 we were accustomed to paying.
At 6pm we got in the elevator for what we thought would be a very quick meeting, since we had seen on the Intrepid booking sheet when we checked in that there were only two other people in our tour. The two other people turned out to be a brother and sister from Geelong travelling together, just as they had done on previous trips to India as well as Alaska and Canada. So together with our new guide Tuan, Adam and Catherine and ourselves made very short work of the formalities. In fact we set off for dinner at about 6.25pm.
Tuan took us to a restaurant just around the corner where we could pick and choose our dishes from a buffet, and get them warmed up and bought to the table, for a grand total of about 30,00 VND plus whatever you wanted to drink. I couldn’t resist beer and Alice had one of those yoghurt drinks called Lassis, except unlike the ones you get in Indian restaurant this one was sour like buttermilk. Not so much sour as not particularly sweet. Very nice.
Alice: “I can confirm that I am now officially addicted to the Sour Lassi.
Greg: There was not so much to do after dinner except for check some emails and twiddle around in hotel room, and repack our bags so that we could get what we wanted into a small bag to take with us to H Long bay and Cat Ba island. We had to be in the bus at 8.30am the next morning; an early night seemed the thing to do.
Greg
