I’m not sure if it was the flight (albeit an hour long), the weeks of non-stop travelling, copious amounts of rice, going from the Lao countryside to one of the busiest cities in Vietnam or just a years worth of teacher stress catching up with me but almost the second I landed in Hanoi I was exhausted and frankly a bit down. Not just “I’ll have a nap” tired but exhausted to the point that I considered just spending one of the few days I had in Hanoi in the hotel and sad for no reason whatsoever – I wasn’t homesick and I was genuinely looking forward to exploring Hanoi – I just didn’t ~feel~ like it. I had quite a lot I wanted to see and do during my days in Hanoi thanks to recommendations from friends and people I had met so the first night I got food and went to a local bar with people from the hostel but I ended up calling it a day about 10 o’clock and heading to bed.
Hanoi is kind of hard to describe. I would describe it as completely overwhelming – there is a lot going on all the time – lots of noises, smells, people whizzing past, things in your way etc but at the same time it felt very traditional and as if the Hanoi I was seeing today was the same Hanoi from centuries ago (minus the air-con and the scooters of course). It was in many ways exactly what I imagined, there were vendors on every corner in the stereotypical rice hats selling exotic fruits from little stands, thousands of people riding scooters with plastic sandals on and a level of humidity that made it feel like you were in a sauna. Yet in many ways it was completely not what I expected – there were significantly less tourists than in Bangkok, high rise skyscrapers you’d expect to see in such a big city were few and far between and despite there being more bikes than people, it didn’t feel polluted at all.
In an attempt to see as much of Hanoi as possible from a local perspective – and to prevent myself from moping about all day – I signed onto a back-to-back walking tour and food tour. Our guide, a Hanoi local, took us to all the typical touristy spots first like the infamous Hanoi Train Street, the Presidential Palace, the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum and the French quarter. The guide was amazing at explaining the history of each area in fascinating detail, providing anecdotes and in some cases even pointing out random buildings and trees to draw our attention to the architecture and biodiversity of the city. The tour I think lasted about 2.5 hours, it might sound long but I could have spent all day listening to the guide talking about the history of everything.
I think it was around this point that I started to wonder whether I wanted to actually go on the food tour or not, I was so exhausted still, even after a good nights sleep, it was over 90% humidity and after two and a half hours of walking around Hanoi, I just felt complete sensory overload. But I was kind of hungry and if anyone is going to know good local vegan food it’s going to be a local food guide..so I went anyway. You can find out more about my Hanoi food tour on my next blog post.
One thing I had been recommended to see in Hanoi was the Thang Long water puppets show right by the Hoan Kiem lake. As soon as the food tour ended, the high humidity turned itself into monsoon rain (why am I always surprised!) and so it seemed like the perfect time to go inside and watch the show. The rain was warm and uncomfortable and made me have second thoughts about opting to spend the day outside. The water puppets were phenomenal, there was a live mini-orchestra using lots of different and unique instruments to narrate the story of the puppets through the different tones, rhythms and tempos of the music. The stories told by the puppets were closely tied to Vietnamese folklore and tradition, including dragons, snakes, buffalos and rice farmers. You can find a clip of the puppet show here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXvhVhBmk6s
It was nighttime by the time the show ended and whilst walking through a new city at night gives it a whole new aura, I hadn’t quite mastered the art of use maps.me and avoiding the scooters yet, so it was a 3$ taxi back to the hotel …. 3$ split between the I think 7 of us that somehow managed to squeeze into this poor man’s taxi. To elaborate a bit about the scooters I keep mentioning:
They are everywhere. You cannot go 5 metres in Hanoi without either nearly getting hit by one, hearing one beeping and revving or seeing one parked haphazardly across the narrow pavement. I read somewhere that there are more than 5 million scooters in the city.
They take no prisoners. The scooter drivers are by no means aggressive drivers, they are probably quite the opposite. If there is something in the way then they will weave a Mario Kart style route to avoid it, driving over pavements if need be. They will not stop for anything/anyone. I repeat, they will not stop for anything/anyone.- When it rains they look like something out of E.T. Imagine 5 million scooters with people in big colourful plastic capes from their head down to their feet zooming past at break-neck speeds. Sometimes the capes even go over the bike too with a little perspex cut out for the headlight to poke through.
Crossing the road in Vietnam (Both in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh city) takes practice. You don’t need the whole road to be clear to cross because you’ll be there all day, all week and all year. Instead you just slowly step across the road making sure that with each step you don’t get hit. It’s scary the first time but it is so much more efficient!
The next day, which was also my final day in Hanoi, I had a lie in and felt significantly better than the day before. I still didn’t feel as happy or as energetic as I did in Laos but I just came to the conclusion that it was all of the travelling, sleeping in different places, late-nights and different foods over the last few weeks that were catching up on me, plus every few days or even every day you are meeting and saying goodbye to different people that you have become rapidly close to which also takes an emotional toll. Not to mention weeks of navigating different languages, scenarios and cultures almost completely on your own – quite the mental workout!
I decided I would do the very touristy thing of paying for a hop-on-hop-off bus, that way I could see everything I wanted to in one day. I’d never done a hop-on-hop-off before as I grew to despise the big red buses that plagued York but this time it was actually quite helpful. I went to St Joseph’s Cathedral, Thang Long citadel, Tran Quoc pagoda and by far my favourite Quan Thanh temple – a Taoist temple with the most beautiful gateway painting of a tree I’ve ever seen! Finally I ended the tour by going back to the Huan Kiem lake, the Huc bridge and the Temple of the Jade Mountain.
For the final evening in Hanoi a few of us from the hostel went out to dinner to say goodbye to some friends who were ending their trip. It was a lovely evening full of hilarious anecdotes and made all the more hilarious (and kind of stressful) by the restaurant serving myself (vegan) and a couple of vegetarians:
- Cream soup
- Prawns that they then tried to say were “vegetarian prawns made of plants”
- Fish sauce
- Duck spring rolls
- Squid
- Pork belly
- Chicken
I ended the day quite happy that I had seen all I could with the energy that I had – I know that there was still a lot to see in Hanoi but sometimes you just have to take a step back and consider that if you try and jam pack every single day you will eventually burn out! Unfortunately this is how I felt for probably 75% of the time I was in Vietnam – just completely worn out and disinterested. And as disappointed as I am that I have let that impact on how much of the country I experienced and enjoyed, I don’t regret anything. I still made an effort and did as much as I could but at the same time I knew I needed my beauty sleep and I knew when to say no to trying to fit in even more things to my already jam packed trip.
thelittleworldofkaty 