Good morning Vietnam!

NOTE: I'm having problems uploading pictures again. I will add more soon.

The Hanoi guesthouse I had booked online sent a driver to pick us up. We had the ride from hell. The pavement was wet and he was driving like a maniac, overtaking on the wrong side of the street. I’m sure we reached the hotel reception in record time. The attendant told us that since “we were VIP”, we had been transferred to the “nicer, sister hotel”. We walked over to the other hotel only to learn that there was only one room available, with 3 beds and one mattress on the ground. I had booked four rooms with double-beds and even sent a message to the hotel to confirm this. We weren’t too happy, but settled for it. We started discussing booking a trip to Halong Bay with the hotel, and realized that they were trying to take advantage of us. We then walked across the street to another hotel, and the lady was extremely helpful and arranging the trip to Halong Bay at a reasonable price. When we walked back to our hotel, the attendant did not recognize the deposit I had paid with my credit card ($0.90 per person, 10% of the room cost…) and hiked the price of the room. I got pretty upset, and since we knew there were rooms four available across the street, I simply said that we were leaving. We grabbed our bags, and when we came back down, the guy had brought down the iron curtain and we were locked inside the hotel. He said we weren’t allowed to leave until we paid for the rooms. We argued with him for about 10 minutes, after which time he called his boss. I spoke with her very briefly and she agreed to free us. It’s the first time I ever get kidnapped in a hotel. We dropped our bag in our much nicer hotel, and tried to guess where the other INSEAD group would be hanging out. We opted for the fanciest, most trendy club in town: The New Century. Sure enough, we ran into our friends and had a blast. That’s where rich Vietnamese kids go to show off their big “dong”. (The Vietnamese currency) There were essentially three large types of people in that place: tourists, homosexuals and prostitutes… A conservatively-dressed girl approached me and asked me to dance. We did for a moment, but not being a big/great dancer, I came back to sit down shortly after. The only thing she said for the first 10 minutes were “My name Ling”. When we came back to sit, she said her only other English words: “Ling for Sale” I jumped out of my seat and ran away. We closed to club down around 3am and headed home to sleep a few hours.

The next morning, we sat in a minibus for 3-4 hours to get to Halong Bay, a beautiful archipelago of small islands in North Vietnam. We got onto our boat immediately and headed out to the bay. We visited a grotto and floated around for a while. We then anchored the boat and put down the kayaks on the South China Sea. Our guide, Bac, gave us the impression that he was on the Vietnamese kayak team. Tapan and I jumped into the fist kayak, while Leonardo sat down in the back of another kayak, with the guide at the front. (the person in the back steers the boat) Tapan’s paddle broke so he exchanged it with the Bac’s. We paddle to a fisherman’s village to check out the sharks they were raising. We then went around the island. It was getting quite dark by the time we went around the island, and the guide started looking very worried. I asked him “where are we going? where are we going?” and he did not respond anything. I then asked “Are we lost?” and he said “yes…” We finally spotted a light on the water in the general direction we expected the boat would be, and headed that way. We guessed correctly, and by the time we got back to our boat, it was pitched black. After dinner, we snuck out of our boat with Bac on a tiny dinghy and motored over to Catba, a 10,000 person town on a small island. We jumped onto motorbikes to reach a high-end bar. We drank rum and coke while smoking shisha and talking with a Montreal couple, both young doctors. We then tried to go to a nightclub, but when we showed up, we were the only ones there; literally! They turned the music on when they saw us arrive. We turned right around and went for Bia Hoy and snake wine. We also ate snails and quail eggs. We went back to the main ship on motorbikes and the same watercraft around 1am.

The next morning, we headed back to Halong City, with an incredibly fun stop on the way, jumping off the boat’s roof into the bay. The roof must have been at least 8 meters high! There was a certain rush to dive from this height into the South China Sea. After a quick lunch, we took the minivan back to Hanoi. Upon our arrival, we followed the Lonely Planet walking tour until we reached the St-Joseph’s Cathedral. We then had our very best meal of the trip at Hanoi Garden. That night, we caught the “Water Puppet” show, a thousand-year-old tradition invented by fishermen. They are basically puppets at the end of sticks that “float” on water. We got ripped off by our hotel, because we had paid for the VIP tickets, and sat way at the back. After the show, we toured a few bars and finished the night at Le Maquis bar.

The final day of our trip, we visited the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum, the one-pillar pagoda, the temple of literature and the central lake. We collected our bags at the hotel with the firm intention to eat dog for lunch. Yes, dog! Most dog restaurants are located outside the city, but we managed to find a street corner where they sold dog. We had dog “bouddin”, dog liver, dog leg, and dog shish kebabs. Dog tastes something between lamb and rabbit. Enjoy the picture. We grabbed a cab to the airport, loaded up on Duty Free, and headed home.

Wouf wouf!