Vietnam trip - Part 1
The chaos and coffee of Hanoi, Sapa as a version of tourist hell and more...
Back in 2019 BP (before pandemic), when N and I decided to move to Thailand one of our top goals was to travel across SE Asia. Despite traveling frequently, often to other countries, we had seen very little of the SE Asia circuit (except for Singapore where we’ve always had family). Thailand is a great base for travel across this region, we thought. Of course, 2020 happened and like millions of other well-laid plans, ours was laid to rest as well.
Thailand has more than made up for it over last two years but itching to kick off our original goal, N and I decided to start off with a trip to Vietnam. So, late July of this year we visited Hanoi, Sapa, Halong Bay, Da Nang and Hoi An in Vietnam. This is how it went - Part 1. Part 2 and Part 3 will follow.
“It’s better to sleep on the floor in an incense shop than in a bed in a fish market.”
– Vietnamese Expression
Hanoi Old Quarter
It is said that your concentration peaks when your very survival is threatened. And so, on the morning of the first day of our trip, our concentration peaked. Having just emerged from our windowless hotel room and into blinding sunlight, we were immediately assaulted by the craziness of Hanoi’s old quarter.
Perhaps imagine the opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan.
We had deposited ourselves right onto the street where kamikaze scooters were immediately bearing into us. Almost immediately, a couple of vendors stopped to solicit us to buy from their fruit cart and while we were denying them, someone brushed past us, pushing us into the road where we jumped away from an oncoming tour van only to almost fall on a group of people having morning coffee peacefully in little lilliput stools right on the sidewalk near bags of garbage. Imagine scooters, fruit vendors on cycles, food carts, tour vans, more scooters, people walking, people milling, more scooters zipping, people eating, people having coffee and shopkeepers throwing water out of the store onto street all at the same time. It’s 9 am. The sun is up, the noise is up and the bustle is dialed up to a 11. And did I say two wheelers? Here’s the math: There are 5.6 million registered motorbikes in Hanoi while the population of Hanoi metropolitan area is 5 million.
I was inspired by the morning coffee drinkers. This I am certain of: when the world is ending, and the asphalt is melting all around, Hanoians will be perched next to it, just as nonchalantly, peacefully sipping their cà phê sữa nóng. Perhaps right next to them would be some Malayalis having chaya.
Despite the first 30 minutes of the old quarter being stimulating enough, we decided that we needed to have the popular cà phê trứng (egg coffee) and so we headed off to Cafe Giang.
Cafes in Hanoi
“Eating as in the North; clothing as in the South.”
– Vietnamese Expression
So many cafes, so little time. Hanoi is filled with cafes, especially the old quarter. Once you get used to the chaos (it takes about 5 minutes if you’ve lived in India), you start seeing cafes everywhere - some in vintage buildings, some new, some mere roadside stalls. But coffee calls to you in many tunes.
I have seen an obsession with coffee in Thailand and places like Chiang Mai are littered with cafes but much before hipster coffee brews with salted caramel and fruit juices, Vietnamese had started putting various things in their coffee.
A subset of the types of coffee you find in Hanoi:
Ca Phe Trung - Coffee with egg
Ca Phe Nau - Coffee with condensed milk
Ca Phe Sua - Milk Coffee
Ca Phe Sua Chua - Yogurt coffee
Coconut coffee, coffee with egg and milk, coffee with….on and on
So, have an open mind (and an open mouth) and dedicate (at least) a day in Hanoi just to visit the cafes. The other things can wait (I’ve heard that the Ho Chi Minh waits quite patiently in his Mausoleum).
Egg coffee definitely is the weirdest of this lot (and the tastiest?). In the week we spent there N downed at least a couple of dozen egg coffees. It was her ‘pick me up’ drink whenever she felt tired or exhausted. For me, it was hit or a miss.
No doubt, the best version of it is to be had in Cafe Giang in Hanoi old quarter. Here, the egg is whisked until it is a seductive silky thing and mixed in with the coffee. It tastes like sex in your mouth. Perched on those lilliput stools in an old house with peeling walls and old vintage photos, we sipped the coffee. That’s definitely a Hanoi vibe.
Hannoying old indian uncle
“You may look up for inspiration or look down in desperation but do not look sideways for information..”
– Indian Proverb
Hanoi made short work of us with the heat and humidity. Before noon we were panting with exhaustion and finishing up yet another bottle of water. And so, we found a little haven in the Temple of Literature (Incidentally, its a beautiful place) and sat under a large tree. N and I were quiet. You know, the kind of sitting where you are just grateful for the shade and the ability to park your buttock somewhere, feeling at one with those tickles of sweat that stream through contours of your own body, a little spaced-out, staring at a distance. I am sure there is a German or Japanese word for this feeling of being happy with rest after hard work.
We were watching a couple of other white tourists getting educated by a guide and being told stories. He was explaining the five courtyards of the Temple of Literature to them. I spotted a tree full of longan fruits and had my own education on how a longan tree looked like.
Such was the situation when we heard some sounds and we spotted an Indian family - of uncle, aunty and two younger indians (younger than the uncle and aunty). Now, over the years, I’ve learnt to acknowledge Indians the way I acknowledge any other random tourist in a new country, although they tend to be in the top 25%le in terms of drawing attention (loud). If they are very close I look and then smile and nod in case they make eye contact. I hate the ‘are you from India?’ question because it is utterly useless. With more than a billion people, if someone looks Indian, they are very likely from India.
This group walked past us. The younger ones avoided eye contact and so I ignored them as well. Then went the auntie ji, quietly. Behind came the patriarch, the big-dog of Indian families, the uncle-ji, who was hobbling a bit and getting behind the rest of the group. He spotted us and his critical eye spotted some malignancy that he had to correct. With no concern on keeping to his family’s tour schedule, he approached us, his eyes glinting with the potentiality of an upcoming wisdom bomb. We smiled bracingly.
“Are you from India?”
This question, quite predictably, was asked in Hindi. First off, if we were not Indians, were we just expected to stare confused as a response? In any case, that’s what I did as well for I, as another Indian male, have taken upon myself a campaign to passive aggressively (only type of aggression I can do) inform every person who starts off in Hindi that I do not understand what they just said. (And presumably they realize the folly of their assumption, correct themselves and never do it again. My plan is foolproof). This alpha dance of potbellied Indian men was all in vain though, as N quickly responded in hindi
“Yes”
“From where?”
“From Mumbai”
Pause.
“Why are you guys not talking to each other?”
Now, that was a rather surprising turn and it threw even N a bit. Sure, we were staring off in different directions as he was walking. Sure, he was an Indian uncle who had a god-given birthright to comment on the lives of others. But, still.
“I had been seeing you from thee and you are just not talking to each other. You should talk to each other,” he repeated making the problem statement very clear.
We smiled, hoping he’d just walk away because nasty things could end up being said to him. For instance, his wife was way ahead with the rest of the family while Uncleji was commenting on two randos chilling under a tree. In any case, N says something diplomatic (surprise surprise!) and he decided to walk away but turns once more, “You should talk” and went off searching for his family whose members seemed to have disappeared with such alacrity all of a sudden.
We watched him walk away.
‘Indian uncle,’ I said.
‘Indian uncles,’ N agreed.
…and then we continued our quiet sitting.
Sapa town - valley town tourist hell
“People say that time goes by; time says that the people go by.”
– Vietnamese Expression
Like many towns in the hills, Sapa was the creation of colonialists. The French established this town in 1922. Exactly 100 years later, we took a bus to it in 2022.
The bus journey from Hanoi to Sapa turned out to be wonderful - almost luxurious. Tip: If you ever travel from Hanoi to Sapa, take the 22-seater Sapaexpress bus. After a 6 hour journey, with a couple of stops, we got deposited in Sapa Town.
Soon, having evaded scammy cab pricing, we found ourselves in the back of two scooter taxis winding through the town to get to our hotel. The air was nice and cool, the vista had misty mountains and we were moving along a nice picturesque lake. It all looked idyllic. ‘Looks like a nice alpine town’ I thought. Howwrong would I turn out to be.
At the center of Sapa town loomed a monstrosity that seemed to have been spit out from a parallel universe where Disney world was run by European colonialists. Sapa station, read the board. Station? I had imagined a quaint little mountain train that chugged through scenic valleys but alas, it turned out to be the station for a funicular that ran to a the mountain top of Fansipan and pretty much a mall otherwise. On the other side of the town square was an old church. A huge central open air amphitheatre type place occupied most of the area. This is where, seeing the tourist crowds, I had the first inkling that this wasn’t going to be a nice quiet mountain town. Once past the centre, we passed through little lanes filled with loud, flashy restaurants on both side, backed up with traffic and filled with hawking guides and tour operators. Any illusions of quiet and quaint were completely shattered.
Eventually we made it to the hotel which had pretty views out into the valley. When made it to center of Sapa town later that day and the next and it had turned into a version of tourist hell that we typically run away from screaming. Tourists packed every square inch of the space, tour vans honked and jammed up the roads and there was such an insane bustle that we decided to find a quiet cafe to just sit and stare at this breathless version of touristry.
Thanks for all the rice
“The educated man precedes the farmer. But when the rice begins to run short, it’s the farmer who comes first.”
– Vietnam Quotes and Expression
In Sapa there’s Sapadu. Tourists (mostly young white tourists) come to Sapa to walk through the beautiful valleys carpeted with rice cultivations, stay a night in a Hmong hut and admire the poverty a bit (sorry, ‘have a life changing experience immersing in their simple lives’). We planned to do the valley trek minus the Hmong home stay. Walking around Sapa, it would be difficult not get accosted by guides trying to sell a package trek.
Park yourself in any cafe in Sapa and you’ll watch the following:
Loads of tour vans and buses zipping through the narrow streets
Troops of white tourists going with Hmong guides in traditional costumes heading into the valleys.
The occasional cluster of cows or buffalos jogging at quite a healthy pace down the road (making one wonder why is it that cows in the middle of bangalore roads are so lethargic?).
On our day long trek, a cherubic local turned up at our hotel with two Hmong women in traditional attire. She spoke good English. And by god, she spoke. In the few hours of trekking, we heard her life story, she got our life story, discussed women’s rights with N, talked some philosophy, all the while completely winging the route. The views were spectacular. Dreamy landscapes of rice terraces with some spectacular views of rivers and waterfalls, green valleys and folds of mountains all around made this the highlight of Sapa trip.
In any case by 1 pm, the sun was making a mockery of any weather forecast that predicted rains in Sapa originally. I probably ate a kilogram of longans that the guide had brought with her. We stopped for lunch at a small hut restaurant in the village and they cooked us some vegetarian stuff with a whole load of rice. After lunch, we continued on, now in peak heat.
About 30 minutes after, the guide declared that she did not quite know the route to the village we were heading to. Eventually she found some Hmong children who after tying to hawk their trinkets at us were bribed with a potential lollypop if they could guide us in the right route. So they led the way, one boy, two girls, the oldest not more than 10 years old, through valleys and mountains for the next hour or so. Occasionally we would stop to catch a breath or water and the children would impatiently egg us weaklings on. Eventually, they pointed the way and peeled off - all for 10,000 dong ( INR 30).
Occasionally, the sun would go behind the clouds and everything turned gloriously pleasant. Amazing views continued throughout and the route wound through multiple little Hmong villages.
There were little annoyances though. During lunch break, the two women dressed in traditional hmong attire that had joined us at the beginning started selling stuff to us and we were cornered to buy some of it. Occasionally, when we neared a village, hordes of hmong children would descend on us with little trinkets to sell and they’d stick to us incessantly for next kilometre or so. Their drone-like chants of ‘please buy from me, only 10,000’ would persist for a long time even if you do not want to buy yet another trinket - those drones still haunts my dreams.
In general, it’s hard not to notice the hard life and occasionally it all feels rather exploitative. Hmong children would be roaming the streets of Sapa selling stuff all the time. I even saw 6 year olds carrying 2 year olds with them and really tiny children selling stuff late into the night on the road side. This along with all the hoards of tourists in sapa town who were loud and obnoxious made the whole Sapa experience pretty mixed.
Tip:
Avoid the sapa town completely and just do the treks
Spend some time researching routes and do the treks yourself.
My troubles with Vietnamese currency
“You catch fish with both hands.”
– Vietnamese Proverb
I had immense trouble coming up with the right combination of currency notes of VND throughout the trip. There are several issues which I would like to bring up to the currency authority of that country:
First off, why so many zeros? I mean, can’t you just mnemonic it and put a K or something at the end. I had a hard time trying to figure out if the note in my purse was a 10,000 or a 100,000 or a 1,000,000 because all the zeros just seemed to merge into each other.
So many denominations. We used all of the following: 1000, 2000, 10,000, 20,000, 50,000, 100,000, 200,000, 500,000, 1,000,000. Apparently there are 100, 200 and 500 as well - thank god they didn’t make their way into my hands.
The colors are all kind of subtle and could never link the right color to the right denomination
What this meant was that I looked like a complete moron everytime I had to pay someone. And Vietnam is not a polite place that tolerates morons. You know, in Thailand, the counter lady would smile patiently while you fiddle around with the wallet, making you feel less like a moron. But not in Vietnam. I was met with frowning, bustling shopkeepers who could not bear this level of moron-ness. More than one person literally plucked the right currency from my hand as I pulled out all the notes I had in my wallet and kept peeling through them trying to make sense of the matrix of currency notes in front of me. Embarrassing for the first few instances but after a while I was like ‘just take what you need to, I have failed this monetary system’
Lilliput sleeper bus
“Young bamboo trees are easy to bend.”
– Vietnamese Expression
There are times when N complains about being small. She is annoyed when the chair is built so the foot can’t touch the floor, or when the chair-to-table ratio is off. Then there are times where she smirks at me with happiness like when she puts her feet up on a cattle class seating in a plane like it’s a bloody hotel bed and drifts off into magical sleep while squirm into odd positions to ensure my hip to knee fits into the space provided.
The bus journey that took us from Sapa back to Hanoi was one more in this ‘friendly for little people’ bucket. In complete contrast to the bus journey that brought us here, this was an exercise in utter discomfort.
Technically it was a sleeper bus but the moment I boarded it (with my shoes removed and in a plastic bag), I realised a few things:
This was nothing like a KPN sleeper bus
This was built specifically for little people.
This was going to be a long 6 hours.
Rickety 5’5 bunk beds, in a matrix two rows high and three column-wide filled up the bus. There were 48 such bunks in quite a regular-sized bus with hardly any space to move between them. As I shuffled between the bunks, trying not to stare awkwardly at the bodies already semi-sprawled in it in various contortions, my only thought was that I am too old to slum it this way anymore.
Over the next 6 hours I sat on level 2 of a sleeper bunk bent in a pose wherein I could neither lie down fully nor sit properly (cause the seat was permanently at a 20 degree angle) counting down minutes and watching N enviously as she read, slept and generally sprawled in what was to her a palatial bunk.
It was fine - things always could be worse.
More to come in part 2:
The time when I worked for the restaurant at the end of Cat Bi airport
Coffee culture ftw!
A disappointing cruise that turned into a school picnic
N finding BARC people even in the middle of an ocean in a foreign place
The mythical concept of customer service in Vietnam
And more…
Could be worse,
Tyag
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