Now that we’ve finished our tour of Laos, returned to Australia via Thailand, and flown to America, perhaps it is now time for me to write my post about our time in Vietnam? Seems reasonable.
Vietnam was the most complicated “visa” we had to get. Even with paying for a “visa approval letter” (which was the preferred route compared to mailing our passports to the Vietnam embassy in Australia before our trip) – on arrival in Ho Chi Minh City we presented our letter, photos and application and then waited patiently for 45 minutes or so to pay $25 for our visa and get our passports back. Then we walked over to the domestic terminal for our connecting flight.
One thing we quickly noticed about plane travel in Vietnam is that their airports do not have enough gates, which leads to taking a bus to the plane from the terminal. This is very annoying. Especially when the bus goes this far:
Our first stop in Vietnam was Danang. We chose this location to have some nice relaxing beach time between our temple and city touring. It did not disappoint. We had sunny hot days and miles of empty beaches.
Well, the beaches were empty during what I’d call regular beach times. Before 8am and after 4pm, it was an entirely different story, as seen below:
It took a while to get used to the constant honking of horns while walking around and also to figure out how to cross streets. The solution was to just start crossing when vaguely clear and the motorbikes and cars will sort of veer around you. Very terrifying.
Sara mentioned our food challenges when traveling and this was a bit amplified in Danang. It is not a major international tourist location as far as we could tell. Plenty of Vietnamese tourists though. They sold a lot of seafood that was presented in buckets still alive and given our lack of language skills we were not entirely certain what we’d get if we attempted to order. Also, nearly every restaurant on our beach front street was exactly the same. Additionally, google maps and the internet in general were not a great help. But hey, walking around looking for food, sometimes you find a dragon bridge.
We did a day trip to Hoi An, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It’s an old timey city that was not bombed during the war, so a lot of buildings remain from when it was a major trading port for all manors of countries.
Next stop was Cat Ba island. This was our most challenging transfer. From Danang it involved: Taxi, Plane, Uber, Bus, Bus, Boat, Bus and about 7 hours. And yes, we took an Uber in Vietnam – we were very excited it was available since we’d read a lot about dodgy taxis and various scams in Vietnam. With traffic, we were in the Uber for over an hour and the total came to about $17 for the 20 or so miles. Woo.
Once we arrived we were treated to a beautiful view from our hotel room.
Our main reason for going to Cat Ba was to do a tour of Halong / Lan Ha bay. It did not disappoint. The boat was quite dodgy, but the views were incredible (well, it could have been sunnier).
After Cat Ba, we were off to Hanoi for two nights. We did our trip back to the city in the reverse of the first one – Bus, Boat, Bus, Bus, Uber. Our time in Hanoi was spent eating good food and walking all over the city.
Vietnam was great. Upon reflection, it was surprisingly the cheapest place we were as well. Beers were only 12,000 dongs. While that may sound *really* expensive, the exchange rate was about 22,000:1.