Entering Vietnam

tet

Imperial Pert Plus

Trang An

Hoa Lu

Our first week in Vietnam left us somewhere near culture-shocked.  The northern cities are louder, more aggressive, less patient, and less English-friendly than anywhere we've visited, and we were over-charged, given the wrong change (you'll be missing a few zeroes on your notes if you don't look), or plainly rejected service with regularity.  And while it is not the wet season, there is a constant thick fog settled above.  This is not high cloud in the sky: there is no sky.  What can you do but sleep, eat, and drink coffee?  Except the coffee, which I was really looking forward to (it only seemed to get better the farther north we traveled) has this bizarre and overpowering alcoholic twang to it.  Worse still, the food in the north is horrible.  We were warned by a chef in Luang Prabang, but I didn't believe him.  This is Asia, I thought, how bad could the food be?  Really bad it turns out!  One of the great joys of our time in Laos and Thailand, our mealtimes turned into sources of stress and pain.  We regularly paid two to three times more money for bland food that invariably had pork hidden in it somewhere.  (Not eating pork is my dietary thing, and I can't explain myself in Vietnamese, so who am I to get upset about the food I've ordered?  I know this.  But after several meals of surprise-pork, Christina and I took the time to write out careful instructions in Vietnamese.  "I am vegetarian.  Can I get this without meat?"  What arrived was our exact order plus a towering mound of ungarnished pork in a bowl.  It was the most expensive meal we had.)

To be fair, the first cities we saw in Vietnam, Than Hoa, Ninh Binh, and Hai Phong, are not known for their tourist attractions, or even for being pleasant.  And it wasn't all bad.  We visited Hoa Lu, the ruined capital of 10th century Vietnam.  And we took a private rowboat tour through the Trang An Grottoes outside Ninh Binh city, gently paddling through the limestone ranges, caves, and rivers that inspired the Vietnamese government to pour so much money into its tourism development.  From Hai Phong we caught a hydrofoil to Cat Ba Island.  I think we both secretly felt compelled to cut our losses and catch the train to the sunshine, cuisine, and culture of the south, but Christina had a package arriving in Hanoi nine days later, so first this.