The One-Bar Wi-Fi Blues

STATS: Day count=219; theft count=0; rip-off count=1; tourist screw-up count=5; Chris’ photo count=2018; Emma’s photo count=96; touch-typing char/min=238; Poi skills mastered since last post: None

Note: This post is a little out of date now – we’ve been out of wi-fi range for a while. And I didn’t want to bore people more than usual with an overly-long post!

Vietnamese coffee is really nice – very strong, with a heavy hint of chocolate, rather like a mocha coffee from Starbucks without the £4 price tag. We are starting to ‘go native’ now – drinking coffee with condensed milk (it’s an acquired taste, but is nice and guaranteed to wake you up in the morning!) in street-side cafes, noodle soup for breakfast and a ‘fresh beer’ (Bia Hoi) sat on kindergarten-sized, plastic stools on the street and watching the world go by in the evening. I tried the ‘weasel’ coffee, which allegedly (according to a guide who could have been talking rubbish) uses beans that have passed through the digestive system of a weasel. I hope they washed them. It tasted good, but I’m not sure if that was because of, or despite, the coffee beans’ journey. Judging by the amount of weasel coffee on sale in Hanoi, there must be a lot of weasels who do nothing but eat coffee beans all day. Probably all night too, as they wont get much sleep after eating coffee beans all day. But I digress…

Being dropped off at the side of the motorway at 5:30am after no more than an hour’s sleep isn’t necessarily something I would class as fun, but is probably classed as ‘character building’. The nearest guest house was also luckily one that was recommended in the guide book, and was friendly and welcoming. The town of Ninh Binh was as you would expect a town built around a motorway to be – not very interesting - but a pleasant enough stop for a couple of nights.

Our main reason for stopping here, other than to break up the long journey to Hanoi, was to visit a place called Tam Coc and to head into a nearby national park, Cuc Phuong, for a night.

Tam Coc is described as ‘The Inland Halong Bay’. That may not mean anything to those of you, like us at the time, who haven’t been to, or really heard of, Halong Bay. That description will come later. Tam Coc is a set of natural limestone outcrops rising out from a massive natural lake used by the locals for rice growing and fishing. The tourist draw is that the setting is lovely, and you can be rowed around the limestone cliffs and through small caves by one of the locals. Being such a pretty place also makes it popular, and we were a little put off with the advertising posters which seemed to delight in showing you just how popular the place is, showing long lines of tourist boats filing through the narrow channels in the rice and lilies. In an attempt to avoid the crowds, we hired bicycles and rode the 8km to the area at 6am in the morning, arriving just as the place was opening, and well before the hordes arrived on the day trips from Hanoi. An excellent decision, as we were the first boat out and saw only one other tourist boat during our really nice two hour trip amongst the massive cliffs and low caves. We even avoided the hard selling of food and (to be honest, pretty naff) embroidery that most people get on their trip, as the hawkers were only just setting out in their boats to take up their strategic selling positions on the tourist route just as we were coming back. Watching the locals rowing their boats in laid back style with just their feet was impressive and seeing the small huts where local fishermen live nestled beneath the tall, limestone crags was spectacular, even in the drizzling rain. Well worth a visit.

Our extolling the virtues of Tam Coc leads to this post’s ‘thought for the day’: we like places that are beautiful, interesting, historical etc, but we aren’t that keen on having them overrun with tourists. However, being tourists ourselves, it is hypocritical to want a place to be tourist free, and yet accessible to us.

After a very peaceful and scenic row around Tam Coc, we cycled around the area – lovely, quiet roads, a couple of temples and some water buffalo wandering aimlessly in the middle of the road. A visit to another local ‘site of interest’ – the ancient city of Hoa Lu was disappointing – the new car park they were building for the coach-loads of tourists was bigger than the site itself.

Despite our new-found mastery of the Vietnamese language, we still encounter some problems. Being impressed at the number of restaurants offering vegetarian food from the numerous “co’m chay” signs around, we stopped at one and spent a good 10 minutes trying to get ourselves understood. Emma’s insect impressions were not useful in this instance. It turns out that the word “chay” has different meanings all depending upon the accent on the letter “a”:

Chay – vegetarian

Chày – pestle

Chảy – flow

Cháy – burned rice

Chạy – to run

Chầy – later

Chấy – head louse

What we thought meant vegetarian rice was actually advertising rice cooked (‘burned’) in a clay pot, usually accompanied by goat meat, chicken or beef. Or maybe rice with head lice, I can’t be entirely sure.

Heading away from the highway towns we hired a moped for a couple of days and took off to a nearby (~50km) national park (Cuc Phuong). The ride to the park was great, the 20km ride inside the park was even better – isolated, one good road through dense forest with thousands of butterflies resting by the side of the road and taking off in unison when we rode past. We had a really good night in the middle of the park, in a decent room, spotting the fireflies, sharing a hideous apricot vodka liqueur with three guys who were riding motorbikes from Hanoi to Saigon, and making up songs to an accompanying guitar – the title of this post being one of the more impressive creations, though the credit must go to the three guys as we played little part in the composition other than moral support. We took a couple of walks into the forest – a bit sanitized, with concrete paths and steps, but it was deserted, and at least the paths meant you could look around you rather than at your feet the whole time. Emma spotted another snake which we have failed to identify, but wasn’t quite as impressive as the previously spotted one – this one only being about 30cm long, and a very colourful spider, not very big but worryingly suspended at face height from tree and very threatening-looking. At least it would have been if it had been any larger than it’s 1cm length. We later discovered it was a member of the spiny orb weaver family of spiders. Very educational, this trip.

On our return back to civilization the next day we stopped at a primate rescue centre which had some impressive and colourful monkeys and gibbons that had been rescued from poachers and were being bred and rehabilitated into the wild. Very useful place. Opposite this was a similar centre for turtles and tortoises which, whilst they were not quite as impressive at moving around their enclosures as the monkeys, was still an interesting place to visit and a worthwhile place to donate to.