Shelley's Birthday Trip (Part 3) - Central & North Vietnam

From Da Nang we took a $1.75 bus ride (over an hour) to Hoi An which is said to be one of the oldest port cities in this part of the world.  Trade is still important to folks here but now it is tourists who drive the economy.  You can’t go 10 meters without being offered something.  A fake copy of ANYTHING ever made seems to for sale here...

They also have an extraordinary number of custom clothiers and shoemakers who in less than a day will make you anything your heart and pocketbook desires.   Shelley had a lady make her a lovely beach cover-up overnight for a whopping $10 US dollars...  I bought a new pair of "Adidas" running shoes for $25!

The other attraction is the food and accommodation.  You can have an awesome meal almost anywhere for less than $10, and we stayed in a lovely hotel (villa) called La Uy for about $30 per night including a full breakfast.  And if you stay one night or more you become family to Uyen (the innkeeper) who goes out of her way to make your time memorable.

A few days later we flew north to Hanoi. Upon our arrival, we were told our hotel had overbooked, so moved us to a fabulous sister property (Nova Luxury Hotel) for a night...

The next day we moved back to reality where the room we originally booked wasn’t nearly as nice.  No worries, we still really appreciated the staff at the Gem Premiere Hotel, who did all they could to make us feel welcome.

The "Lounge Area"

The "Window"!!!!

The "View"

Hanoi had some interesting places to visit, but I think we both admit this was our least favorite place in Vietnam.  Incredibly over crowded and dirty you take your life into your hands every time you venture out.  The high point of our time in Hanoi was meeting up with a young couple (Melanie and Maurice) from Germany who we first met way back in Ho Chi Minh City on our Cu Chi Tunnel trip and saw again in Hoi An. This is really one of the great things about traveling.  You get the meet amazing people from every corner of the world.

The sidewalks here are like a war zone.  Motorbikes are parked EVERYWHERE, and it seems local people refuse to walk anywhere. For the first time since coming to Vietnam, we felt unsafe and unwelcome.  That said, we made the best of things.

This is a pedestrian crosswalk...  BTW, the truck is parked....

Making the best of things...

Only grownups where helmets...???

The best thing we did here was to see a water puppet show.  Like winning the lottery we got front row seats and could see this amazing 50 minute show close up.  The story sung and said entirely in Vietnamese was easy to understand and the performers were really talented and dedicated doing 6 shows a day, 7 days a week!

When you are in Vietnam you are never very far from a reminder of the war.  Hanoi was the capital of North Vietnam.  During the war, it and the surrounding areas were relentlessly bombed by the US Air Force.  As such, folks here were not too happy with the pilots and air crews who flew overhead with those destructive payloads...  Thus, when an airman was shot down, they were so often mistreated and kept in the French jail called the Hỏa Lò Prison in Hanoi, which became known as the "Hanoi Hilton".  In recent years much of the property has been sold and developed, but what remains is a harsh reminder of the treatment of both Vietnamese prisoners under the French and American Prisoners under the Vietnamese.

The Citadel was another beautiful place that was showed two sides of a coin.  On the one hand we saw some of Vietnam's most beautiful treasures on display on top of what was known to be North Vietnam's Strategic Command Center.

Off to Cambodia on our next post (part 4) ... Hope you enjoyed this one...  Cheers!