On to Vietnam
Management of annual leave is quite a skill, and not one that I have exactly mastered so as the tail end of the year rolled around, I had over a month's worth to take it and not a huge amount of time in which to take it. Two weeks in September would be followed by a couple of weeks in December and that was that. What I would do with it, I was less sure, but the time was booked and that prompts action, doesn't it? Necessity being the mother of all invention and all that. It would seem that some inventions are orphaned. I spent the September jaunt in Peru, but December was fast approaching and my itinerary was empty.
Through a somewhat circuitous[1] route, I ended up with flight tickets to Hanoi and coming back via Ho Chi Minh City (previously known as Saigon) - in itself, a somewhat circuitous route.
Hanoi is the capital of Vietnam and has been for some time but during the middle of the 20th century, Vietnam was split in two as one of the effective theatres of the Cold War that generated quite some heat in parts of the world that were neither Europe nor America. At that time, Hanoi was the capital of the North and Saigon was the capital of the South. Connecting these two large cities now is a 1,726 km train line informally called the Reunification line and this was pull enough for me. Further research showed that this vast distance would obviously take days to travel so I considered some stops in order to flex it to a two-week jaunt. There's the creation of a holiday right there.
An 11am flight from LHR means a rush hour journey to the airport and this wasn't something that I was looking forward to… In the end, it wasn't too bad which may be a December effect. An 11am start meant a 5am landing in Hanoi which seemed an efficient use of my time on paper. Plans like that don't always work out though.
The flight was not too bad but was pretty full so I stayed ensconced in my seat for the flight with a little bit of napping. Actually, the napping was kind of forced as the plane used central lighting control to dim[2] all the windows to help us all sleep. I have never seen that done centrally, which was also used at take off, in the other 787 flights that I have taken but it was a good idea. As a result of almost forcing us to sleep, and this reminded me a little of the opening to Battle Royale, the flight was relatively uneventful with the only event being the dropping of a cup ramen onto my lap due to the ineffective table at my seat. This didn't quite burn me as it mainly went on my jumper and jeans but it was still rather hotter than I would like...
Hanoi
Landing in Hanoi was a bit disorientating at that time but there was a fair bit of movement around and it was at least light. I ended up booking a cab to my hotel - not something I am a fan of generally as it feels a little bit removed. I was staying in the Old Quarter which was central and close to the sights so I dropped off my bags, got my camera and started to walk in the approximate direction of the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum which was open early.
The weather wasn't great but it wasn't raining and made my way to the entrance and saw a queue and so followed it to find the front. I followed the queue for a few minutes and it must have been maybe half a kilometre or so and I thought against joining it. There seemed to be so many families there too so I thought that there must be some kind of special event but was told later that this was a normal day. I walked around a little more until I found a local coffee shop for some sweet, black Vietnamese coffee and then wondered how to fill my time until I could check in. I did this by finding somewhere for a massage.
Omamori Spa is a place that I read about in the Lonely Planet that intrigued as it offered "blind massage" It was quite a nice place and they were very welcoming with fairly decent English too. I was seated and then shown the "menu" and each massage came to about £10 per hour which seemed reasonable to me. Once I was in there, the masseuse was indeed blind but very good at the massage part and I had my eyes closed for a lot of it anyway. I can highly recommend it as a place to visit as it is also for a good cause as well as being a decent massage. After that, I walked back to my hotel to check in.
Once I was checked in and sorted my bags out a little, I headed out to get a feel for the old quarter and book a tour to Halong Bay. Halong Bay is a very popular destination to visit from Hanoi as it is not too far, about 3.5 hours by minibus, and there are many options and tour companies that run trips there which range from day trips to multi-day cruises. I felt that I should stay at least one night on the boat so I had a little look around to find an appropriate tour. This is not the most efficient way of handling booking things like this it is of course much better to book ahead and not waste time at the destination but I rather like the on the ground interactions and I have a sense of how much things can cost online as a backup plan anyway. I'd had a look at the differing possibilities before but had decided to wait to book until I knew what the weather was going to be like. This ability to shift plans around the weather is what I like having flexibility for and so I ended up booking for 3 days rather than 2 and a day later than I thought. This also meant that I was staying in Hanoi for a day longer than I had thought and decided to fill that with another tour to Ninh Binh the next day. As I was walking around the area, there were loads of tour shops offering tickets and foreign exchange so it was very convenient. I ended up also joining a Street food tour.
The street food tour was not for so many people there were only 8 of us but this was then split further so I was in a group of four - the three others were friends from the US. I figured that this would be a good use of time as it would encompass a nice bit of walking around and dinner in one go. "Street food" is a phrase that annoys me but it is self-explanatory. Except it kind of isn't always, as all of the street food on this tour was not from the streets. Food from Vietnam seems to be gaining popularity in the UK of late and I have Vietnamese food fairly regularly. There is a nice area near Hoxton in London where there are quite a few restaurants ("Little Hanoi", apparently) where I rather like Hanoi Cafe and I used to, at my old office, have Vietnamese food from Sen Viet in the Kings Cross area about once a week. The food there is truly excellent. Anyway, a lot of Vietnamese food may, at first glance, look to be not massively different to the food from around these part - noodles, rice, meat and broth. The thing I feel is different to, say, Thai food, is that it tastes fresh. The accompaniment for much of the food I had on the tour, which did fall into the meat and (rice) noodles, was green. It was usually lettuce and other types of fresh veg which makes all the food taste really fresh. Another regular thing is "fish sauce" which is also a nice addition. One thing that is fun is that often the fried food is wrapped in lettuce to keep your hands dry and adds a different texture. The tour was really good and it was nice to chat with the guys from New York who seemed to be good travellers. I am not always a fan of some of the people that I have met from America when travelling as they can, sometimes, be a little "Lost in Translation"[3] in terms of not really taking new things on board with an open mind. These guys were pretty open to trying new things and not just as a novelty. They had arrived recently and reminded me that the time difference was 12 hours so they were struggling! It is interesting to think that Vietnam and the USA are so far apart when we think of how closely associated they are. This was something that I thought of a few times over the next few weeks and that distance, I feel, is so important for what happened.
I returned to my hotel via a cash machine and found myself unable to withdraw money using my credit card which then got blocked - this was pretty annoying as I had specifically got the card due to the low foreign exchange rates. Anyway, I needed to get some rest before my day trip.
[Next - day trip]
---
1. I had booked my leave and had in my mind that I would like to go somewhere further afield than Europe but as time rolled forward and I had not planned anything, I was left without much in the way of concrete ideas. My last day was on a Friday and the Thursday before was my departmental Christmas lunch/party at a local bar. During this afternoon/evening, I was asked plenty of times about what I was doing with my holiday and I was not really sure so I listed off a few places that had been of interest. Two people, specifically, told me that I should go somewhere in Southeast Asia and that they would bring a book in for me the next day to see. One person, my manager, did, which was the Lonely Planet guide to Southeast Asia which I had a look at and decided on Vietnam and Cambodia - later refined to just Vietnam. I was asked "Why Vietnam?" in a later portion of the trip and I retold my somewhat unstructured planning and was then asked "If she had brought in a book for Iraq, would you have gone there?". And you know what? I don't know.↩
2. The 787 has a rather nice electronic dimming feature on the windows rather than the standard plastic shutters. This means that you can dim the windows so that they are like sunglasses which is fantastic at altitude or darken them totally to block out most light. The windows feel larger too, so it is a pleasant flight experience.↩
3. Lost In Translation was a very popular film and was released when I was in Japan but it was not something that worked for me. I wasn't sure why, at the time, but I read an article or comment which I cannot find about how the film was a cinematic version of the George W Bush approach to the world. Basically, "why is this different to America and therefore not very good?". That comment spoke to me and I remember a lot of people being obsessed with the idea of visiting the hotel when they came to Tokyo.↩
Management of annual leave is quite a skill, and not one that I have exactly mastered so as the tail end of the year rolled around, I had over a month's worth to take it and not a huge amount of time in which to take it. Two weeks in September would be followed by a couple of weeks in December and that was that. What I would do with it, I was less sure, but the time was booked and that prompts action, doesn't it? Necessity being the mother of all invention and all that. It would seem that some inventions are orphaned. I spent the September jaunt in Peru, but December was fast approaching and my itinerary was empty.
Through a somewhat circuitous[1] route, I ended up with flight tickets to Hanoi and coming back via Ho Chi Minh City (previously known as Saigon) - in itself, a somewhat circuitous route.
Hanoi is the capital of Vietnam and has been for some time but during the middle of the 20th century, Vietnam was split in two as one of the effective theatres of the Cold War that generated quite some heat in parts of the world that were neither Europe nor America. At that time, Hanoi was the capital of the North and Saigon was the capital of the South. Connecting these two large cities now is a 1,726 km train line informally called the Reunification line and this was pull enough for me. Further research showed that this vast distance would obviously take days to travel so I considered some stops in order to flex it to a two-week jaunt. There's the creation of a holiday right there.
An 11am flight from LHR means a rush hour journey to the airport and this wasn't something that I was looking forward to… In the end, it wasn't too bad which may be a December effect. An 11am start meant a 5am landing in Hanoi which seemed an efficient use of my time on paper. Plans like that don't always work out though.
The flight was not too bad but was pretty full so I stayed ensconced in my seat for the flight with a little bit of napping. Actually, the napping was kind of forced as the plane used central lighting control to dim[2] all the windows to help us all sleep. I have never seen that done centrally, which was also used at take off, in the other 787 flights that I have taken but it was a good idea. As a result of almost forcing us to sleep, and this reminded me a little of the opening to Battle Royale, the flight was relatively uneventful with the only event being the dropping of a cup ramen onto my lap due to the ineffective table at my seat. This didn't quite burn me as it mainly went on my jumper and jeans but it was still rather hotter than I would like...
Hanoi
Landing in Hanoi was a bit disorientating at that time but there was a fair bit of movement around and it was at least light. I ended up booking a cab to my hotel - not something I am a fan of generally as it feels a little bit removed. I was staying in the Old Quarter which was central and close to the sights so I dropped off my bags, got my camera and started to walk in the approximate direction of the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum which was open early.
The weather wasn't great but it wasn't raining and made my way to the entrance and saw a queue and so followed it to find the front. I followed the queue for a few minutes and it must have been maybe half a kilometre or so and I thought against joining it. There seemed to be so many families there too so I thought that there must be some kind of special event but was told later that this was a normal day. I walked around a little more until I found a local coffee shop for some sweet, black Vietnamese coffee and then wondered how to fill my time until I could check in. I did this by finding somewhere for a massage.
Omamori Spa is a place that I read about in the Lonely Planet that intrigued as it offered "blind massage" It was quite a nice place and they were very welcoming with fairly decent English too. I was seated and then shown the "menu" and each massage came to about £10 per hour which seemed reasonable to me. Once I was in there, the masseuse was indeed blind but very good at the massage part and I had my eyes closed for a lot of it anyway. I can highly recommend it as a place to visit as it is also for a good cause as well as being a decent massage. After that, I walked back to my hotel to check in.
Once I was checked in and sorted my bags out a little, I headed out to get a feel for the old quarter and book a tour to Halong Bay. Halong Bay is a very popular destination to visit from Hanoi as it is not too far, about 3.5 hours by minibus, and there are many options and tour companies that run trips there which range from day trips to multi-day cruises. I felt that I should stay at least one night on the boat so I had a little look around to find an appropriate tour. This is not the most efficient way of handling booking things like this it is of course much better to book ahead and not waste time at the destination but I rather like the on the ground interactions and I have a sense of how much things can cost online as a backup plan anyway. I'd had a look at the differing possibilities before but had decided to wait to book until I knew what the weather was going to be like. This ability to shift plans around the weather is what I like having flexibility for and so I ended up booking for 3 days rather than 2 and a day later than I thought. This also meant that I was staying in Hanoi for a day longer than I had thought and decided to fill that with another tour to Ninh Binh the next day. As I was walking around the area, there were loads of tour shops offering tickets and foreign exchange so it was very convenient. I ended up also joining a Street food tour.
The street food tour was not for so many people there were only 8 of us but this was then split further so I was in a group of four - the three others were friends from the US. I figured that this would be a good use of time as it would encompass a nice bit of walking around and dinner in one go. "Street food" is a phrase that annoys me but it is self-explanatory. Except it kind of isn't always, as all of the street food on this tour was not from the streets. Food from Vietnam seems to be gaining popularity in the UK of late and I have Vietnamese food fairly regularly. There is a nice area near Hoxton in London where there are quite a few restaurants ("Little Hanoi", apparently) where I rather like Hanoi Cafe and I used to, at my old office, have Vietnamese food from Sen Viet in the Kings Cross area about once a week. The food there is truly excellent. Anyway, a lot of Vietnamese food may, at first glance, look to be not massively different to the food from around these part - noodles, rice, meat and broth. The thing I feel is different to, say, Thai food, is that it tastes fresh. The accompaniment for much of the food I had on the tour, which did fall into the meat and (rice) noodles, was green. It was usually lettuce and other types of fresh veg which makes all the food taste really fresh. Another regular thing is "fish sauce" which is also a nice addition. One thing that is fun is that often the fried food is wrapped in lettuce to keep your hands dry and adds a different texture. The tour was really good and it was nice to chat with the guys from New York who seemed to be good travellers. I am not always a fan of some of the people that I have met from America when travelling as they can, sometimes, be a little "Lost in Translation"[3] in terms of not really taking new things on board with an open mind. These guys were pretty open to trying new things and not just as a novelty. They had arrived recently and reminded me that the time difference was 12 hours so they were struggling! It is interesting to think that Vietnam and the USA are so far apart when we think of how closely associated they are. This was something that I thought of a few times over the next few weeks and that distance, I feel, is so important for what happened.
I returned to my hotel via a cash machine and found myself unable to withdraw money using my credit card which then got blocked - this was pretty annoying as I had specifically got the card due to the low foreign exchange rates. Anyway, I needed to get some rest before my day trip.
[Next - day trip]
---
1. I had booked my leave and had in my mind that I would like to go somewhere further afield than Europe but as time rolled forward and I had not planned anything, I was left without much in the way of concrete ideas. My last day was on a Friday and the Thursday before was my departmental Christmas lunch/party at a local bar. During this afternoon/evening, I was asked plenty of times about what I was doing with my holiday and I was not really sure so I listed off a few places that had been of interest. Two people, specifically, told me that I should go somewhere in Southeast Asia and that they would bring a book in for me the next day to see. One person, my manager, did, which was the Lonely Planet guide to Southeast Asia which I had a look at and decided on Vietnam and Cambodia - later refined to just Vietnam. I was asked "Why Vietnam?" in a later portion of the trip and I retold my somewhat unstructured planning and was then asked "If she had brought in a book for Iraq, would you have gone there?". And you know what? I don't know.↩
2. The 787 has a rather nice electronic dimming feature on the windows rather than the standard plastic shutters. This means that you can dim the windows so that they are like sunglasses which is fantastic at altitude or darken them totally to block out most light. The windows feel larger too, so it is a pleasant flight experience.↩
3. Lost In Translation was a very popular film and was released when I was in Japan but it was not something that worked for me. I wasn't sure why, at the time, but I read an article or comment which I cannot find about how the film was a cinematic version of the George W Bush approach to the world. Basically, "why is this different to America and therefore not very good?". That comment spoke to me and I remember a lot of people being obsessed with the idea of visiting the hotel when they came to Tokyo.↩
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