Hello all. A short flight from KL and we've arrived safely in Vietnam. Our travels in Nam were planned to take us from North to South so we kicked off with the capital "Hanio". This was an eye opener for both of us as there were so many mopeds and to make things busier Hanio is celebrating being a city for 1000 years so every night around Hoan Kiem Lake was just one big traffic jam of mopeds with a great carnival atmosphere and the odd car trying to get through the carnage. Crossing the road was interesting but after a while we just stopped looking and every time we were lucky enough to make it to the other side J .
The city was very interesting with lots of war history and temples dedicated to great warriors in tailed with mythical stories about giant turtles and golden swords, also the city offered many restaurants with fantastic food and all so cheap but we wanted to find out about the war so we could understand Vietnam better. War museum it was, for our first history lesson.
The museum was very interesting highlighting the French Colonialism and then about the North South division within Vietnam and then the force America used to try and stop the communists, I'm talking Napalm force. It was interesting seeing the amount of US Marine equipment that was captured by the Viet Cong.
In our pictures you'll see Hoa La prison that the French had to contain the Vietnamese, the conditions were not pretty in the slightest. Later the Vietnamese ran it to keep the American pilots and conditions were completely different with the pilots calling it the "Little Hilton"
Now we have got our heads around some of the history we decided it was time for a little break away from the busy city so off we headed to Halong Bay (East of Hanio) for a 3day boat trip. Halong Bay had amazing scenery and was littered with 1969 different Islands. From the boat we got a chance to go kayaking around some of the Islands and it was pretty chilled out. After this it was time to check out a massive natural cave that we got to explore around before heading back to the boat to spend the night on board and we introduced some fun drinking games to new friends we made on board.
Next day we set sail towards Cat Ba Island where the plan was to do a trek but due to weather conditions we were left to our own devices. As we didn't want to waste our day and after a little bit of scoping around we got a fisher man to lend us some bamboo rods and shrimp bait and with a small bribe he took us out on his boat to drop us out on a rock to spend a few hours trying to catch our tea. Sad to say we caught no fish but John did catch a fake 500,000 Dong note which made our day until we realised it was fake.
The trip was fun and we meet lots of nice people on the boat and on Cat Ba but it was now time to look at heading further south to Hue. Our cheapest option was a 12hr overnight sleeper bus so once we've done our sight seeing we'll update you again J
Thanks for reading.
Colin & John