Early in the morning of the 21st of October we were presented with an unusual and urgent problem: finding breakfast.
It was not provided by our hotel.
Even at 7am the street was getting crowded with people selling all manner of trinkets, not to mention the 40,000 motorcycles either zipping past or parked at any available spot on the footpath. We walked for a little while looking for some type of open food cooking venue, but the bakery didn’t have quite what we were looking for. Around the corner there was a fresh food market, where we bought a bag of those tiny bananas and ate a couple of them, and a dragonfruits as well. With something small from the bakery that seemed quite enough, and we stopped for coffee at a cafe. On the menu they had such a thing as bread with honey, so Alice ordered that as a snack but when it came it was quite a large bread roll. That fed two.
Upstairs in the hotel we ate chunks of dragonfruit in between shuffling our bags around, and then left our large backpacks in the room to be collected by the hotel and transferred to a baggage room. Throughout Russia, Mongolia and China we had been shunted around in a long series of minivans; but we were wondering about whether that would be economical for Intrepid with a group of 4 people. Any fears were displaced and set free when the van rolled up in front of us and it was not only a shiny white minivan but a shiny white minivan with an Intrepid logo.
Score!
We spread our stuff out around the van and gassed it out of Hanoi, from the back streets onto a main road and from the main road to a huge interchange and then out across the bridge over the Red River. The ride to Halong City, Tuan said, should be somewher between two and three hours, maybe three and a half with some traffic. We passed through larger towns and small towns and stopped along the way in a rice field to learn some things about the harvesting process and the rice itself. Vietnam is the world’s 3rd largest exporter of rice, for which the farmer at the end gets about 10,000 VND per kilogram. Yes, the farmers do get to work outdoors, but otherwise it’s a thankless task.
By midday we arrived at Halong city where we checked into the ‘Entity Hotel’. Suggestions on a postcard, please… once again I walked into the room and uttered my usual catchphrase: ‘I am never going to leave this room.’ That slightly overstates how nice the hotel rooms have been, but they have been pretty decent, and it’s great to feel like all the money we got together months ago has gone somewhere. We went straight back downstairs for lunch in one of the restaurants along the waterfront, or actually just across the road from the waterfront. Yet again it was filling, cheap, and came with filter coffee.
Having seen the beach we really wanted to go no further, and while Tuan went off to do Tuan-stuff we made straight for the deckchairs on the beach and sat there in the shade for quite some time. Large birds cruised overhead. Ships lined the bay. The palms trees resisted the breeze and we resisted the locals with shoe shine gear who thought they might be able to do something with my beat up Dunlop volleys. With that job done we walked back to the hotel, and lazed around until it felt like dinner time. Along the waterfront we went into a decent looking little restaurant and had simple fried rice and spring rolls, then promenaded onto the beach and along the pier that stretches a little way into the bay. Out there we sat for a while, looking over at the new suspension bridge and cursing the source of the karaoke which carried easily across the water.
With another relatively early morning coming tomorrow, bedtime came around again.
Greg
