As soon as we arrived in Vietnam, we were glued to BBC Weather reports warning of not one but two typhoons heading straight for Hanoi at exactly the same time we were there. With the Philippines pretty devastated by typhoon Nesat, our excursion to the doomed Halong Bay was cancelled much to both our disappointment and relief. Our alternate trip for the day was Ninh Binh, 60K outside of Hanoi.
Leaving Hanoi, weaving in and out of traffic, the scenery very quickly changed from the urban sprawl into rice paddies and dramatically rising conical hills. Perhaps this is the inspiration for the typical Vietnamese hats?
First stop for the day, yet another big temple site built for previous emperors. Our guide for the day explained to us in more detail about the significance of the area and the mix of religion, spirituality and devotion. I particularly liked the significance of the building features such as the wavy style of roofing symbolising the ups and downs of life, the raised doorways to be stepped over to prevent bad spirits from entering and the numerous carvings of dragons, tortoises, phoenixes and unicorns. We were all fairly amused by the offerings laid in front of statues of the emporer – not just incense but packets of biscuits and cans of beers.
After a very local lunch of more spring rolls, rice, chicken, vegetables and mixed dishes of unidentified foods, we were off to Tam Coc to check out a rather stunning labyrinth of limestone hills jutting out of rice paddies.
Along with a few bus loads of other Halong-Bay-alternate tourists, we boarded small wooden fishing gondolas for two, rowed by a local farmer looking for a bit of easy extra cash. An older lady also joined our boat as an extra rower, spending most of the journey in fits of laughter, poking Jon, exclaiming in broken English how handsome he was. The scenery was beautiful, a maze of huge craggy rocks protruding into the sky out of flat green waters that seemed never-ending: one of those places where a photograph can never quite capture all it’s beauty. It didn’t seem overly-touristy until we surfaced out of the darkness of a limestone cave and our boat remained by a group of other boats selling drinks, bunches of souvenirs pushed into our face. We did buy a drink and snack for our rowers and resisted the attempts to make us buy more in our first truly pushy tourist experience of Vietnam. Armed with how to declare ‘Oh my God!’ ( pronounced something like ‘Oh Shoi Oi!’) in Vietnamese, we delighted our rowers with our language skills and feigned surprised looks at the cost of the merchandise on offer so it was a more amusing experience than annoying. Our hostess continued to chuckle and shout ‘Oh Shoi Oi’ all the way back to Tam Coc particularly enjoying swapping her conical hat for Jon’s baseball cap.
This was a perfect Halong Bay substitute: similar style countryside and peaks bursting out of huge river systems akin to the sea. As for Nesat, well, for my first typhoon, I have to say I was pretty disappointed by its lack of force. I’ve seen bigger badder storms in KL, Manchester even! There wasn’t even much rain just a little windy. The second typhoon hit us a few days later and once again failed to live up to BBC expectations. Scare culture news tactics has permeated the weather updates.
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