We booked a few tours through Ethnic Travel, which were generally pretty good and very affordable. It was nice to have transportation arranged and not have to spend time figuring out where to go and how to get there. Everyone we interacted with through that company was super friendly, although the guides' English was not always fantastic. The manager, Khanh, spoke great English and was helpful in arranging everything in advance.
We learned that in Vietnamese, every word is only one syllable. So while some city names are squished into one word in English (Ha Noi -> Hanoi), the Vietnamese spelling might be multiple words. I'll probably use both here and there, but it threw me off on occasion.
Showed up jet lagged, dropped our bags at the hostel and went out to find some coffee. We stood for a while looking at the first busy street with non-stop scooter traffic that we came across, trying to figure out what to do, until we saw an old lady put her hand up to stop traffic and shuffle across. From then on, we used that strategy and rarely had any trouble.
Click here for Ho Chi Minh, Obama, John McCain, and more.
Picked up from our hostel by our driver, Trinh, and guide, Cam, from Ethnic Travel. Then we picked up two more folks from another hotel, our soon-to-be friends Alice and Umair from Manchester, and headed East toward the bay. The famous one is Ha Long Bay, but we were recommended either Bai Tu Long Bay or Lan Ha Bay since they are the same thing but less crowded.
We waited an hour to catch a ferry to Cat Ba National Park, then drove to the pier where we would take a smaller boat to the large boat where we would sleep the next two nights.
See some photos here.
Ha Giang ("ha zong") is a rural area in the far North of Vietnam near the Chinese border. There is a long loop that has become popular (through social media, as best we can tell) in the past 5-6 years for riding on motorbikes over three or four days. We didn't see this mentioned much in any guide books, but my cousin Anjali did it the previous year and told us to go. It was one of our favorite experiences of the whole trip.
Ninh Binh is a province south of Hanoi that is sometimes called "Ha Long Bay on land." We this was our third and last tour (2-days, 1-night) with Ethnic Travel. We were a bit worn out from the past week, but would be more worn out after this.
See how we exhausted ourselves here.
By now we were really beat. When we got to Hoi An, we had changed locations each of the past eight nights:
We were mentally prepared plus we didn't take all our stuff on the loop, so packing was simpler, but man we were tired. The only thing we would have changed was the single night in the 5-star hotel in Hanoi. That could have been two.
Anyway here's Hoi An.
Our final stop was the big one, Saigon. We loved it and I would absolutely stop through here for a few days next time I'm in that part of the world.
