Vietnam – Day 1 | evilpencil.com

Vietnam – Day 1

February 3rd, 2008 · No Comments · 2008 Vietnam, travel

Here begins the story of my trip. I briefly summarized my flights to Hanoi in a previous POST.

Here is a quick summary of my time in Taipei during my short layover:

Then I flew to Hanoi.

After an hour wait for my bags, I met up with our local guide who had a car and driver to take me to the rest of my group, most of who had arrived a day or two earlier.

Some pics from the car:

Some arch thing

swanky houses

Ho Chi Minh’s Tomb (which is NOT in Ho Chi Minh City). The rest of my group went to this the day before so I didn’t get to see his body.

There are scooters everywhere since cars are prohibitively expensive for most people. If you have a Toyota, you are perceived as wealthy.

The transportation Hierarchy there is something like this (from lowest to highest in flash factor.):

Walking
Beast of Burden
Beast of Burden with cart
Bicycle
Scooter (Chinese made “Honga”)
Scooter (Real Hondas and Vespas)
Taxi
Tour Bus
Motorcycle – I saw maybe 3 of these.
Car (these cost about 3 times as much there and heavy taxes are levied on anyone with a car.)

A helmet law was instituted in December 2007 so there were a lot signs like this. Our guide told us that the day before the law took effect NO ONE had helmets but the day it took effect mostly all of the scooter riders had their helmets. A lot of the helmets sold were about as safe for riding as plastic colander on your head, but I guess that is better than nothing at all. It does give something for you to put cool decals on to show your creative side.

Lenin statue.

I finally get to my hotel in Hanoi: The Guoman Hotel.

The minibar.

The bathroom you can see the complementary bottles of water which is essential.

There was an odd channel on the tv. I’m sure this is not legal.

I waited for the movie to play but it never did as I watched it loop and loop.

After changing A hundred US$: I now have 1.6 million Dongs. (Yep, there were a lot of Dong jokes on the trip, half of them by me.)

The view from the hotel.

My first meal in Hanoi. I had about 45 minutes to kill and was starving. I went someplace call Cafe Pho thinking it would have Pho but I was mistaken. I ordered “Korean noodles” and a beer. The noodles were of the instant ramen variety, so I was highly disappointed. I think the meal cost about $2 total.

By the way, it was VERY humid in the 80s there. I was sweating like a pig and the spicy soup didn’t help either.

After rendezvousing with my group back at the hotel, the first order of business was to talk a walk to The Old Quarter in Hanoi and get a cyclo ride through the district. As I described in a pevious post, there is nothing like getting pedaled around standing traffic full of carbon monoxide and being passed by people on the sidewalk gawking at you. There is no way to look cool doing that.

Here is a vid of the ride. Notice the people on the street walking by us. You can also see some other tourists in cyclos in the opposite lane with a “what a waste of time” look.

Here is an example of the crazy driving in vietnam. Everyone seem to have right of way AT ALL TIMES. And traffic lights and lanes are just there as a suggestion to the drivers. This type of driving applies to all operators of everything with wheels. Remember I am essentially in a love seat propelled by a rusty bike here.

Some of the non touristy stuff they sell in the Old Quarter. This area by the way is full of tourists walking around carrying their Lonely Planet and Rough Guides and packs of French, Korean and German tour groups being lead by people with flags. And there was us of course, but we were cool and some of us had really expensive cameras with big lenses so we looked cool.

Pho (notice the different accents on the O. they result in different pronunciations and meanings. Pho with that squiggly line also means street or something which gave me false hope everywhere I turned.)

Hats

Shoes in plastic bags

and of course meat, which I felt should have been in bags.

Snacks: Very savory and sweet. I don’t think the seaweed tasted fresh though.

That night we had dinner in a restaurant that I cannot remember the name of (I need to take more notes or pics). This place was obviously a tourist place as it was full of non-vietnamese. Bummer. Food was all right but seemed more Chinese to me than anything.

Some kind of pumpkin soup.

Chicken stir fry. Ok strong on the lemongrass.

Eggplant. This was actually really good. The texture of the eggplant was firm almost like a potato wedge fry. And the sauce was slightly carmelly and perfect