So I got the weekend off, because my host family went on a mini vacation! Which of course meant that I had to keep myself busy somehow. My host Phan suggested I take a trip to Halong BAy since it is both very famous and amazing. And since I had just met my fellow volunteers, that also wanted to go there, I wouldn’t even have to go on my own!

Last time I told you how I actually got there from Hanoi (which was an adventure in and off itself) and now I’ll finally talk about what happened in Halong Bay (since those things don’t generally have to stay there).

What should you do in Halong Bay?

Take a cruise ride

Literally everyone I talked to said we should take a cruise tour to some of the islands scattered across the bay, in order to get the best view and swimming experience. So of course we didn’t do that.

Why? There were several reasons and most of them lead back to me (no surprise there), although I cannot claim full responsibility when others are being shady. But I’ll get to that.

Go to Cái Dăm market

A recomendation by Halong locals was to go to Cái Dăm Market. Halong is famous for it’s seafood (for obvious reasons) and the market is a great way to experience that, as well as get some awesome food!

And we did actually do that one, or at least I did. It was great.

Try local dishes and street vendors

This is a recommendation from yours truly. It is tempting to stick with things you know and the much cleaner looking restaurants (To be fair, that attitude will probably save you from food poisoning at some point).

But if you are willing to get out of your comfort zone and take some risks, trying streetfood and tiny whole-in-the-wall places you will introduce you to both incredible food and amazing people.

I both ate some amazing eel soup and almost met the love of my life that way (Also a new rolemodel)

What did I actually do?

Saturday

When I woke up, it was way to early (6 a.m) and I didn’t know why, since I was still dead tired. Turns out there was a thunderstorm with heavy rain happening outside and it was loud enough to wake me up. (Not the other two though, life really is unfair).

So I tried to fall back asleep with moderate succsess and considered myself wide awake by 8 a.m, unlike my companions. When they did eventually wake up, we decided pretty quickly to extend our stay at the hotel by another night instead of checking out and finding a different one, as we had originally planned.

Why? Well it was still raining and none of us wanted to get their electronics wet. It was really easy too! I went downstair to informed who I assume was the owner and told her we would like to stay another night. (The hotel was either family owner or run and all the members of the family not currently working hung out behind a partitioning screen).

She said it was no problem, that the price per night would stay the same (100.000 dong per person and night) and that she could get us in contact with a ship if we were interested in a cruise tour, since her cousin (probably) owned one.

All of that was great news and we agreed to check out the ship the next day, since on Saturday we just wanted to relax without having to actually plan.

At this point we were getting pretty hungry, since breakfast was not included. Thankfully the rain got a lot lighter so we finally went on the hunt for some “breakfast” by noon.

Long story short, we didn’t find any food until about an hour later. What we did find almost immediatly were

• Actual real live sidewalks, which felt like an incredible luxury after the narrow busy streets without any, that we knew from Hanoi
• A completely empty gated community of pretty fancy looking appartment buildings. They were either still under internal construction, a failed investment or… idk honestly. The whole thing was made creepier by the buildings colorfil pastel facades.
• Our first contact with the Pacific Ocean! (More specifically the Eastern Sea/South China Sea) It was a pretty knarly peice of coast full of trash and next to a construction site. But it was there and we got to see a bunch of tiny crabs and what I assume to be little lung fish (the sunned themselves on stones above water so…)

Eventually we stumbled past the “district of questionmarks” and what do you know, within five minutes we found several food places. We couldn’t actually eat at most of them, since they only had meat options and Shay and Kalen don’t eat those.

I did find a lovely lady that sold Bahn Mi, Vietnams take on sandwitches (technically it only means bred, i think, but you know how it is) . She was super nice and spoke about 20 words of english, which she used very effectively.

Since I was still the only one with internet I used google translate to ask if we could have 2 bahn mi without meat. (We have had a lot of hits and misses when it comes to google translate, but so far noone got mortally offended, so I think its still a very useful tool. Shorter sentences work the best).

She looked at me a bit and then asked “Only egg?”

When I asked the other two if they wanted egg on their “sandwich” they said No.

By now the lady was straight up staring at me. When I told her that they didnt want egg either she turned around and grabbed a dry breadloaf? (they look a little like tiny bagette?).

She pointed at it and said “No meat? No Egg?!”. We all laughed.

After a bit of back and forth I enden up getting a bahn mi filled with a freshly fried Omlet, (probably) pickled cucumber and sauce. It was incredible. Shay wanted one too after seeing mine and Kalen ended up getting an empty bun after all. ( I would’t have minded the meat either but it didn’t seem worth the effort it would have taken to clarify that).

After paying we decided to keep looking for somewhere else to eat, since neither of us was full yet and we might as well get lunch too. Honestly that might have been the best decision we made the entire trip.

We found this tiny noodle shop essentially right next to our Hotel. Let me set the scene for you.

Picture a single room big enough for maybe… 20 people to be in comfortably. (if not less). There are fans mounted to the walls and under each fan there is a colorfull plastic table with tiny plastic stools, like you would see in a kindergarden (whatever you are imagining is probably exactly right).

On each table you can see a big glass jar filled with plant parts floating in a dark liquid (turns out thats infusing wine and we got to try a bunch. It was an adventure). In front of all that is a cooking station and a big freezer full of all kinds or meat ( I got a freezer tour so I could pick my protein! There were whole ducks in there!)

The owner in an energwétic woman who speaks really goos english and seems delighted to meet us. As soon as we finnagle our way into some vegetarian dishes for the americans (noodle soup without any meat toppings) we sit down and she starts talking to me. The food was absolutely delicious and the owner a joy to talk to.

It starts out with some very standart Questions “where are you from? How old are you? Are you here for tourism?” etc. Almost anyone who speaks a bit of english will ask you those if you come to Vietnam. (At least thats my experience so far).

Then we get into more in depth topics like family, she gives us some travel tipps and recomendations on what to get for food (mostly seafood, which makes sense for a coastal town). She also tells us to go to Cái Dăm market if we wanted fresh fruit and/or a cool experience. (Spoilers: I went and had both)

At some point she introduced us to her sister, who did not speak english and insisted on setting me up with her nephew ( her sisters son), who was not there. Usually I would have just laughed that off and not thought further about it, but we were promised a free dinner if we came back to meet him.

After such an eventful lunch we decided to go back to our room and cool off a bit (the AC really did feel like an incredible luxury after the hot humidity we had been experiencing). A bit later I wanted to go check out the market, while the other two wanted to stay inside and get some editing done (Kalen has a youtube chanel he wants to grow)

So I went on my own!

It was about a 3 km long walk away and everyone I asked told me it was the only way to get fruit, very different from Hanoi and its abundance of street vendors. I have no idea if thats because of the cities themselves or just a matter of the parts we stayed in. (A lot of people also told me to take a taxi there, which I declined. Often dramatically to make them laugh. It was fun!)

On the way to the market I walked past a beautifull lake and got some freshly pressed sugar cane juice over ice (that stuff is waaay tastier than it has any right to be and also less sweet), so I consider it time well spent.

The market itself was great. It was the first indoor marked I went to in Vietnam (not that the motorbikes cared about that, they were still omnipresent) and it was packed full with stands selling everything from produce to streetfood to live seafood.

I might have gone a bit overboard buying probably 3-4 kilos of fruit. Including some I’d never tried befor like lanzones, who are best described as the not-so-secret lovechild of lychee and oranges. Apparently they are in the mahogany family? The more you know…

I did take a taxi back to the hotel. It took 5 minutes instead of the previous 30-40.

Dinner was great! we arrived a bit after five p.m , like promised and got greeted with a whole bag of cucumbers as a gift. We ate them all that night. (Still no idea why cucumbers, but they were delicious)

We got to sing “karaoke” with the sisters youtube account and a flatscreen mounted to the wall. The food was delicious again and free on top of that ( wel mostly, I did end up paying like… half prize? because I ate a specialty dish with eel). And best of all the son didn’t show up so I din’t have to deal with that whole… situation.

Once it looked like they were starting to close up we left in good spirits and decided we were not ready for the day to end yet. So we went to a Karaoke bar nearby. It was lit up in what I can only describe as “spychedelic LEDs” and the staff was dressed fancy as hell. THey didn’t let us in, but Shay who just walked passed them, came out convinced it was a brothel.

It was probably to loud for that, but probably offered some sort of escort or “bottle girl” service. At least thats our guess. A bit … deflated from that experiences we agreed to just go home after all. Or at leat that was the plan until we walked past a builing with loud music, that was full of dressed-up people.

Shay was convinced it was a wedding and decided to crash it, Thankfully it wasn’t and we got invided to some kind of celebration by a bunch of business students instead. They were super fun and spoke great english, which minimized the risk of misunderstandings.

They did have a karaoke booth and we ended up livening up their party by dragging everyone to the dancefloor before they had to go on their bus home. Turns out the were from Hanoi too!

After that we were pretty powerde out and just went to bed .

Sunday

The weather was still great, so once we convinced ourselves to get out of bed we went to our hotel lady/ owner to pay and get on a boat for the afternoon. Only to be deeply disappointed to learn, that it was not only way more expensive than we expected, but also the pricing was really weird?

It was divided in multiple parts that didnt really make sense, the price itself kept changing (for the same boat from the same guy) and we called the owner of either the cruise or the company offering the tours he said something entirely different again.

I decided it sounded kind of scammy and that I didn’t want to do it. Especially not at that price point (somewhere between 400 and 750 thousand dong, so 17-33 euros. Granted that doesn’t sound like that much, but I was getting a wierd feeling and relatively it’s also a lot).

So I told the other two they could go if they wanted, I would just meet them afterwards.

They decided against that and we decided to hike up a (apparently famous?) trail up a mountain to get the best view of Halong Bay.

We took a taxi too the starting point, Kalen argued with the driver over the prce and I somehow got us a discount. When we tried to find the actual begining of the path, the actual trouble started.

First we couldn’t dind it because the stre next to it had chenged. The we did and about two minutes in an old man shood us away. He didnt speak english and either refused or didnt get my request to explain usig a translator. He just kept repeating “no”.

So we backed off thinking we had gotten it wrong and I started asking around. Shay was getting pretty frustrated and it was becoming obvious she would have prefered to go on a cruise instead of this. Which is fair, but also her choice, so I didn’t feel responsible.

Finally we decided to take a break at a coffee shop where Shay got a coffe and I got a iced green tea for free! The owner was also nice enough to let us use his (probably private) bathroom and recomend a nice beach that was abou 5 minutes away by taxi.

Fortified by that experience, we walked around some more in hopes of finding the entry to the mountain path after all, but instead found what at first seemed like a tiny (probably budhist) shrine.

It turned out to be a beautiful temple built across several platforms cut into the mountainside.

It was one of the most breathtaking places I have ever been. Neither particularly big or unusually decorated, it managed to leave all three of us speechless. We did not once dare to raise our voices above a wisper the entire time.

There was an almost otherwoldly quality to the place, like it was half a step removed from our usual reality. Despite being surrounded by bustling streets and alleyways, the temple was silent and the only thing we could smell was insence and the wet soil of the mountainside.

All three of us felt that we had been disrecpectful by just walking around taking pictures, so we actually came back exclusively to pay our respects and ask for a blessing.

Once we had torn ourselves away from the holy site, we wandered around a bit more without any real goal and what do you know? We found a path up the mountain!

Granted, it was only partially. It went up just high enough to reach another (miniscule) shrine. But it had a spektacular view and lead us along a really cool route!

First it meandered between houses. We walked through alleys so narrow that we thought more than once, we had hit a dead end. But we didn’t! And once we queezed ourselves out between the last two buildings, we had to walk over these really beautifull rocky staircases that wound themselves up the mountain in narrow serpentines.

That was certainly effort well spent! However, we were getting really hungry, so we reluctantly made our way back down and went on the hunt for some food.

Before we actually acquired that, we went on a whole scavenger hunt: pet a cute dog, asked some local girls for directions towards “good food”, got sent to a mall (that didn’t even have food) for some reason, change directions twice (!) because google maps clearly has it out for us and finally stumble upon a market.

I’m not sure if it qualifies as a streetmarket, since part of it was under a roof, but it sure had delicious fruit!

And it seems that the universe was smiling upon us after all, because the second we had walked through the market, we stood before an incredible view of Halong Bay!

Of course we immediatly walked closer and found a viewing platform/pier going into the bay. This way people could both enjoy the best view of the ocean, as well as boat watch, without disturbing trafic. Because of course there was a road right next to the shore! What kind of world do you think we live in?

We could have probably spent hours there. Getting to see this view after all the previous chaos probably made it seem even better than it already was. A truly well earned reward.

Sadly common sense decided to kick in and remind us that it was getting late, that we had still not eaten, that we needed snacks for the drive back home to Hanoi and that the later would take 3 -4 hours. By then it was almost 5p.m and we still didn’t know how we were actually going to back.

First things first: food. The mall (did I mention that it had 0 eateries? Why did they send us there?) at least had a supermarket, so we went there. And spent way too much time looking at stuff, only to end up with a bunch of rice crackers, tofu and avocado as a meal for the vegetarians and a pair of shorts for Kalen, who had ripped his.

I opted to only buy a bag of said rice crackers and get my actual food from the streetvendors instead. Since I just walked in without a plan and randomly pointed at things that looked good, I did not exactly get a cohesive meal. It was good anyways.

What I ended up with was:

• a banging chicken soup with bloodcakes and some sort of herb that gave it an delectable aftertaste
• a mystery leaf bundle full of rice and filling ( that I didn’t end up eating until the next day. It was filled with braised pork belly and more rice. Delicious!)
• A bag of (what I think was) whole dried calamari in a sweet sauce. Incredibly chewy.

By the time we were all done eating we had not only chatted up a group of tourists and probably deeply tistrbed some vietnamese couple,that were just trying to take some pictures of each other in peace, by applauding them everytime they struck a pose, but also lamented thoroughly the fact that we already had to leave.

It was already getting dark, so we went on our way to find a ride.

Thankfully, we had gotten into the habit of just greeting everyone we walked by, that seemed to even marginally notice us (and some that didn’t). So we complimented the dinner of a vietnamese family camped out at the end of the pier.

Turns out they spoke great English and were happy to chat with us for a bit. And, as things do when everyone can peg you as a foreighner at first glance, they soon asked where we were staying.

When we answered that we were all currently working in Hanoi, but weren’t quite sure how to get back there yet, they offered to help.

This turned out to be a godsent, because every bus they called was full! They ended up finding us a private bus service with a much smaller car. Granted it was a bit more expensive than a regular bus, but it got us home.

We did have to wait over two hours for that car and I had to confirm with the actual driver via phonecall, but it worked out!
I spent some time chatting with the family (since Shay and Kalen diched me for a stroll back and forth across the pier), introducing them to workaway and getting recomendations for a great dinner spott.

They did have to leave us eventually to go home, so we went towards the recomended noodle shop (not that we actually made it there) since the americans were hungry. Clearly getting some actual food from the market had been a great idea!

The trip back home was pretty eventless, except for the one random bit of waiting near the end, beforw we had to switch cars. (Not that I didn’t get anxious before we got into the car. I really did not want to miss our ride).

Of course their route didn’t actually go by our residence, so we still had over 5 km to go beforw we could go to sleep. I had just intended to order a car via Grab, but apparently thats way more expensive at night.

Now it was the other two that did not want to pay. And since turnabout is fair play, I easily agreed to walk home.

It took us over an hour, so it was well past midnight by the time we actually fell into bed, after taking a cold shower.

To be fair, it was a nice walk and it took us to parts of Hanoi I would have probably never seen otherwise, but it was pretty late and it did not cool down after dark. You can imagine how relieved I was to arrive. Not that the other two didn’t feel the same.

And thats how my weekend adventure ended. “To Halong and back again” so to say.