Travels With Dan - Part 2

     Hoi An, Vietnam was the next stop in our travels with Dan and turned out to be a foodies paradise.  When we first met Dan in Cambodia he was dealing with some stomach issues but that turned around after eating a snake on a stick.  Really?  If you are feeling under the weather with GI issues why would you eat a snake on a stick?  But it seemed to do the trick.  Dan was back and ready to go big.  He went back the next night and got a bigger snake.  By the time we got to Hoi An he was in full gear.  It was there that we started to refer to ourselves as "fathletes" or "food athletes". 

Local fishing boat found on run in Hoi An

The entire town of Hoi An is a World Heritage Site and reminded us in some ways as a Vietnamese version of Luang Prabang.  The town was clean with tidy buildings, city wide Wifi access, a huge selection of tailors (200+), and the most variety in street food we saw the entire time in SE Asia.  At times the food selection and ingestion got completely out of hand.  Dan would walk down the street and every food vendor would have something different. If we hadn't had it yet then we would have to get a serving (or 3).  Banh Bao or "White Rose"- steamed dumplings with minced shrimp, Hoanh Thanh - wontons, Cau Lau - pork, greens, bean sprouts in broth, potato crust pizza, Ban Mi - a delicious pate (I was told not to ask) sandwich with several layers of vegetable and sauce in it, fresh fruits, grilled corn, plain and coconut filled donuts, custard apple shakes, rice pudding, sweet potato cakes, and another dozen delicious treats that all blurred together into a crazy food orgy.  Every time Dan said "I'm so full!" we would turn around and he was ordering something else.

Sweet potato and coconut vendor

Peanut pastry vendor

 



It was very affordable.  Pretty much all the food was 20,000 dong ($1) per serving and draft beer in the neighborhood of our hotel was 3000 dong (15 cents) to wash it all down.  We found one little stand/restaurant in the market that we would go back to several times a day.  The lady who ran it started to love us so much that she would run over whenever she would spot us, shake our hands, and push people out of the way to make room on the bench in front of her stall.  She would then encourage us to sing her praises every time a Westerner walked by.  Between what we spent there over 3 days and the business we recruited for her she and her husband probably were able to take the rest of the month off. 

Our favorite chef in Hoi An

If you want easy living and great food then schedule a big chunk of time for Hoi An if you visit Vietnam. 

Hoi An riverside                

     From Hoi An we went to Hong Doi to visit some of the biggest caves in the world.  We visited Paradise Cave which was so large that it was hard to get perspective within some of the caverns and Phong Nha Cave which you take a boat up a river and then into the cave. 

Entering Phong Nha Cave                        

Looking out entrance to Phong Nha Cave

I have been in a number of caves over the years spelunking and these were some of the most impressive I have ever seen, especially when it comes to the size of the caverns.  Paradise Cave goes another 30km (18.5 miles) deeper into the mountain then we were allowed to go.  The town of Hong Doi blew.  Of any place in the world I have been there is a gross disproportion of hotel rooms to restaurants.  Every other building was a musty dilapidated hotel (often run by the government) but there were almost no restaurants and the few that existed were not set up for tourists.  None of the menus were in English so this was the one place the entire trip that I would randomly pick something on the menu and hope to hell that I wasn't getting dog, bat, some sort of head floating in broth, or animal entrails.  Kathleen and I seemed to get lucky though we didn't always finish everything on our plates.  Dan didn't eat much.  It was a weird town and we were happy to leave and don't think we picked up any bedbugs while we were there.

     Our next stop was Hanoi.   Kathleen and I ended up not liking it that much and found Saigon to be the better of the two "big cities".  Many travelers though say the opposite since Hanoi has so much history but at least the time of year that we were there it was constantly grey, wet, and drizzly.  The weather was way too reminiscent of Seattle but without the ocean or mountains to make it worthwhile.  It was just a large dreary city.  We did see some of the museums there and were subjected to some pretty outrageous propaganda like a militia woman taking out 5 American tanks with her knife and how the militia would shoot B-52s down with their rifles (B-52s fly almost 10x as high as an AK-47 can shoot).  It was still interesting though to see the Vietnamese perspective of the war.

Army Museum, Hanoi

     From Hanoi we went to Halong Bay which is a natural World Heritage Site.  It is an area of 3000+ limestone islets that just up out of the Gulf of Tonkin.  The rock kharsts are draped with thick vegetation and this is probably one of the most photographed landscapes in Vietnam.  We ended up booking a tour that had us sleep on a boat in the bay for 2 nights.  In hindsight I would have done it how I had initially thought and traveled to Cat Ba Island and then toured Lan Ha Bay instead.  This has similar topography but is less visited.  Halong Bay is a bit overrun and the tour didn't provide the amount of kayaking that I had hoped.  We toured a scenic but commercial cave on one of the islands, spent a little time kayaking (but nowhere near enough),

Kayaking the kharsts                                          

hiked up to a very rusty unstable lookout that had a great view over Cat Ba island,

Lookout tower on verge of collapse

View from top of Ngu Lam            

and spent some time exploring Cat Ba town.  We did meet nice people on the boat.  2 Argentines (Ezekial and Thomas), another American (Bill), an older German man and his daughter who teaches in Vietnam, 3 Brits, 2 German girls from Frankfurt, a Frenchmen who seemed like a gypsy and kept us entertained with magic tricks, and a party of Israelis.  It was an entertaining group to hang out and drink with.

Halong Bay, Vietnam

Halong Bay, Vietnam

Halong Bay, Vietnam

Halong Bay, Vietnam

Halong Bay, Vietnam

     Right after getting back to Hanoi Dan got really sick.  We suspect a Ban Mi sandwich (like I said before we were told not to ask about the "pate").  We had all been eating the same meals except for that.  When Dan got to Hanoi that first night he was losing fluids from both ends and became very dehydrated to the point that we took him to the hospital.  Turns out that the Hanoi ER was only 2 blocks from our hospital.  It appeared to be a teaching hospital because the "doctors" that came and talked to him looked to be about 12 years old but there was always one older guy standing in the background watching and listening to what was going on.  They wrote him a prescription for an oral electrolyte solution and told him that he needed to go to the "foreigner hospital".  This was a French run hospital (L'hospital Francais de Hanoi) that involved a cab ride to get there.  They recommended that he be admitted overnight for fluid resuscitation but he declined that and only elected to get a quick bolus of IV fluids over a 2 hour period.  We hung out for an extra day to see if Dan would recover but he felt so spent and drained from being sick that he elected to fly home instead of going to Sapa with us.  After a fun 5 weeks of traveling together we said our good byes.  We had enough fun and Dan has a big enough travel bug that we feel pretty strongly that we have not seen the last of him on our world tour.

     Sapa was our last stop in Vietnam and it turned out to be one of our favorite spots we found in SE Asia.  As is typical we usually find the best guesthouse, restaurant, trail, or town just at the end of our time in that area.  Sapa is a old French hill station in Northwest Vietnam.  It is only 9 km as a crow flies to the summit of Fansipan which is the highest mountain in Indochina but many people take 2 nights to trek it.  The area is surrounded by Hmong hill tribe villages and is laced with trails.  We spent 5 days here exploring the lower trails of Fansipan, going a little further into the mountains each time as we figured out the trail network.  I had a rough map but there are no trail signs.  The paths have been used by the hill tribes for centuries and are a maze.  Some go to the next village but some just go to fields or fade out in the jungle. 

Cat Cat Waterfall, Sapa

Below Sapa                  

We also rented a motorcycle one day to venture further out into the scenic and rugged mountains in the area. 

Perfect road for biking 

Being high up in the mountains it was frequently socked in by fog.  This was some of the thickest fog I have been in.  The only other time like that was when I was sailing to Greenland with my Dad and the fog off Nova Scotia was so thick that I could barely see the front of the boat 36 feet away.  This was like that where seeing across the street was difficult at times.  Watching the hill tribe women fading in and out of the mist was like being in another world. 

Hmong tribeswomen

It also made crossing the street dangerous as motorcycles popped out of nowhere.  If we ever go back to Vietnam for a month the plan would be to do one week in Halong Bay (or actually Lan Ha Bay south of it) and then 3 weeks in Sapa.  The only reason we left Sapa when we did was that our visa expired so we had to leave Vietnam.

     We are now back in Thailand on the island of Ko Chang.  Our accommodation is bungalow built into the trees (treehouse) on a steep hillside with the ocean surf breaking below our porch.  We plan on spending 2 weeks here just resting up and soaking in the sun and sea before heading to Nepal and the Great Himalaya Trail.