Hanoi, Vietnam, Asia

We got up this morning at 7am, packed up our things and went downstairs for breakfast at 7:30am. At exactly 8:10am the bus pulled up to bring us to the pier, right on time. We were on the bus with all the same people we hiked the mountain with yesterday, so it was nice to say hi and see some familiar faces. As soon as we got to the pier though, they headed off in one direction, and Dad and I were left on our own again. We waited for about twenty minutes until another tour guide came to get us and we boarded a small ferry boat, right next to the ferry that all of the other people had gotten on. We cruised out to our respective boats at the same time, and they got onto a big boat right next to ours.

It still makes no sense to me why they kept splitting us up, but that was the last time we saw that group. We were put onto the Heritage Cruise boat with a group of completely new people we had never seen before. These people weren’t nearly as friendly or outgoing as the others we had met, so it made for a pretty quiet day. We sailed through the harbor for about two hours to get back to Halong City. Along the way we saw some full floating villages, with a school, and some famous rock formations. One was in a James Bond movie (I think it was Tomorrow Never Dies), and the other one is on the 200,000 Dong note. The morning was really hazy, but by the time we got to the marina in Halong City, the sky was starting to clear up.

We had lunch at a restaurant near the pier, and then had an extra half hour to wait around for our van to pick us up. We took a walk through a park next to the marina, and we saw something very strange. There was a Vietnamese man on his boat with a little metal bowl in front of him, with papers burning in it. I thought they looked like US Dollar bills, so I got my zoom lens out and could clearly see that they were all $100 bills, but the border around them looked too big. The only thing we could think of was that this guy was trying to counterfeit money and these had obviously been cut incorrectly, and he was burning the evidence. We found out later on that this is actually some kind of offering to their ancestors, and because they’re dead, the ancestors don’t care if it’s fake money or real.

We got on the bus and took the four hour drive back to Hanoi. Luckily I had been able to download UFC 135 – Jones vs Rampage last night, so Dad and I had something to watch on the way back. I still can’t get over how much traffic there is in this city, mainly just motorbikes. The craziest thing is that I don’t see dead people all over the roads, because the way they drive, it certainly looks like some people would be getting killed. The van dropped us off at our new hotel, Hanoi Triumphal Hotel. It is one of the nicer places we’ve stayed at, with a great location in the center of the Old Quarter. It’s much nicer than the Astoria we stayed at last time, and it’s $11 a night. Perfect.

Dad was fancying some Italian food for dinner on his last night here, so we went into town and ate at the same place as a few nights ago, right on the big round-about. What a difference it made with traffic from a Saturday night to a Tuesday night. The whole area was dead quiet compared to the last time we were here. We finished up dinner and went over to the lake to take some pictures of the bridge and temple. On our way there we ran into a bunch of the people we had been to Cat Ba Island with and tried to make a plan to meet up later on at City View Cafe.

We took our pictures by the lake and then headed up to the rooftop deck at City View Cafe. I had some good coconut ice cream and took a few pictures, but the traffic from up top would have been so much more impressive on Saturday night. We met an Australian girl named Jade who was here travelling with her mother, but she was out on her own tonight. We all sat around talking for couple of hours, and then at about 10:30pm headed back to the hotel. It really is a nice place here, and the staff are amazingly friendly. I would recommend this place to anyone!