Vietnam Adventures

Good morning Vietnam!
Upon arriving in Ho Chi Minh City, a very important lesson was solidified in our minds – don’t trust taxi drivers who say they know where your hotel is! Fortunately that adventure didn’t take too long, and we found a cheap hotel in the backpacker area and set off. Ho Chi Minh had a really fun feel, and so long as we didn’t worry about the 572 motorbikes whizzing past us at any given moment, we were alright.
Our next day, we took a tour to the Mekong Delta. The smaller tributaries of the river were especially beautiful, and we really enjoyed it. Our tour included seeing coconut wood products, a coconut candy factory, a bee farm, and a big boa that Mike held (Norah hates snakes!). Another highlight of the tour was that it gave Norah plenty of time to read her new knock-off copy of Harry Potter, which she bought off the street for $5. (It had only come out a few days before!) We spent the evening browsing shops at the market, eating Pho (great Vietnamese noodles and soup), and getting a cheap haircut for Mike and pedicure for Norah.
The following day we took a tour to the Cu Chi tunnels. This elaborate system of narrow, underground tunnels was one factor that allowed the Vietnamese to defeat the Americans in the war. They are very proud of how ingenious the tunnels are, but the violence and suffering that was represented was a little hard to see. In the afternoon we visited the Vietnam War museum and the Reunification Palace, saw some pretty French parts of the city, and then headed to the airport to fly to Danang.
We spent the next few days enjoying some down time, relaxing on the beaches of the central coast. It was fabulous! On our first day, after finding a particularly good tropical fruit smoothie, we hopped on some motorbikes and went to ‘China Beach’ – named by the American soldiers who went there on their days off. It was an absolutely gorgeous day on the beach. We rented chairs and an umbrella right by some bamboo fishing boats, and pretty much had the beach to ourselves for the afternoon. The water was so warm! By late afternoon, the locals began to show up – first school kids and then adults, once the work day was over. It was so fun to see the beach come alive! We ate a delicious seafood dinner at a restaurant on the water, and then headed back so that we could get to Hoi An by that evening.
Hoi An was probably our favorite little town in Vietnam. It has a really quaint little old town with a Japanese covered bridge, cute shops, and neat architecture. The hotel we stayed at had bikes, so our first morning we relaxed, then biked to the beach, and relaxed a little more! It’s hard to say which beach was more beautiful! One of the highlights of the afternoon was befriending a group of young teenage boys who became totally enamored with Mike for his gymnastic skills. We took tons of pictures of them break dancing and trying to do flips, with Mike helping! In the evening, we biked into the old city, ate a yummy dinner, and spent the night checking out the various tailor shops before settling on one - a new suit for Mike, and a couple skirts for Norah.
Our last day was taken up with a lot of fittings at the tailor shops, but we also got to enjoy the market and exploring the town a bit more. After a great lunch, and one of our favorite smoothies of the trip (mango, watermelon, dragon fruit, banana!), we drove back to the airport to fly to Hanoi.
Hanoi felt rather crazy and busy, especially compared to quaint little Hoi An. Once we re-learned how to cross the street with a million motorbikes whizzing by (walk very slowly and make eye contact with on-coming traffic so they’ll see you and drive around you), we enjoyed ourselves! Our first stop of the day was at the Ho Chi Minh museum, which was very artistic and so nicely done. We also visited the One-Pillar Pagoda, the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum, some botanical gardens, and Ho Chi Minh’s house on stilts. All in all, it was a very fun and informative day. Our lunchtime adventure landed us in an area of town not normally sought out by tourists where no one spoke English. At a restaurant there, they eventually found us a waitress who knew a little bit of English, but all we could figure out to eat was some salty pork and rice. Our pork looked more like a plate of fat, so we settled on rice and soy sauce to tie us over! We made up for it that evening by eating at a Vietnamese restaurant that was highly recommended and quite delicious. The highlight of the day was the Water Puppet show that we saw in the evening. The music was amazing, and the show was really cute, and fascinating to watch. We loved it!
The end of our time in Vietnam was one of the highlights of our whole journey. We took a tour out to Halong Bay, which is considered one of the wonders of the world (though not one of the official 7!). The name, in Vietnamese, means dragon ascending, and the name really fits; the hundreds of islands popping up out of the water sort of look like humps of a dragon! Our boat was really nice, and we loved getting to know an Irish couple and a French girl who were also on the tour. The rest of the people on the tour were local Vietnamese, which we took to be a good sign. After a great lunch on the boat, we had reached the site of some amazing caves, complete with stalagmites and tites, which we enjoyed seeing. Then we spent the evening swimming, diving off the boat, and kayaking. It was one of the most relaxing, enjoyable parts of the trip! Dinner was served after sunset, and then the locals on the boat asked us to come and join in a dance party. It was so much fun! It sort of felt like a high school dance party, but we were on this boat in a bay with a million stars up above and little cliffs and islands jutting out of the water all around.
After sleeping miraculously well (or at least OK!) on the boat that night, we got in a little more swimming and diving before heading back. The rest of the day was mostly a somewhat uncomfortable travel day, but all went well, and we made it to Hong Kong in once piece that night. Here we had our only little blip of the trip; we realized, after landing, that we had booked our hotel for the wrong nights! Fortunately a lady who ran a guesthouse found us and we were happy to just crash that night. Even though it was the hardest bed of the whole trip, we were exhausted and slept just fine.