Vietnam - North

We landed in Hanoi at 11pm on January the 31st, and eased ourselves in with a stop at the airport hotel before getting an early bus the next day into the city.

Hanoi

Hanoi is the capital of Vietnam, as the biggest city in the north and therefore the seat of the communist party. It has an urban  population of about 4 million people.

After getting off the airport bus the next day, we walked thought the tight, busy streets, and it was clear that the city was a class below even the worst of Hong Kong. Narrow, busy, scooter-filled streets are lined by thin densely stacked 4 story houses. There is however a vivid street-side life, pavements are lined with impromptu food stalls and plastic chairs.

The national flags of Vietnam and of the communist party literally fill the streets, most houses displaying their national pride, and a very immediate reminder that we are entering a country with a very different political background.

Our first main stop was the main captiol complex, which is filled with dedications, a museum, and a mausoleum for the departed leader of the independence and communist movement, Ho Chi Minh.

Ho Chi Minh Museum

Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum 

This textbook example of the Soviet Realist style quickly fades back into an even more extreme example of the bustle of the city again though, as we enter the old quarter.

Right at the centre of the city is the Ho Hoan Kiem lake, a rather green and dingy, but still beautiful lake with a pagoda atop the central island.

Food and drink in Hanoi is dominated by the aforementioned street side plastic chair scene, we kept our evenings occupied with traditional Vietnamese food, washed down with Bia Hà Nội and Bia Saigon.

The next day our main stop was the Ethnology Museum, an amazing collection of insights and examples of the many different indigenous minorities that call Vietnam their home.

The main attraction of the museum is outside the main building, where the aforementioned ethnic minorities have been allowed to construct real, full size examples of their traditional village buildings. This rather magnificent and grand longhouse is the jewel of a traditional Xo Dang village, a group which still exists and lives in mostly traditional ways today.

Ha Long Bay

Ha long bay is a limestone formation which includes hundreds, perhaps thousands, of small uninhabited islands scattered within a large bay, and is a top UNESCO natural heritage sight, it is about a 3 hour drive away from Hanoi.

The way to see the bay, as advised by a brief look on the internet, is to book a tour from one of the travel agencies in Hanoi, which arrange to take you around the bay by boat, and offer several activities, food, and a nights sleep on the boat. This we duly booked, and the next morning we set off for the bay in a small minivan full of other travelers.

When we got to the main port at 1:30pm, the van swiftly emptied of the others and just us two were led to a rickety looking boat, where about 5 other Chinese tourists were waiting. Our tour guide then told us that the boat was to be delayed, or even cancelled, and due to this, and the generally bad air we were getting from the guide, at 2:30pm we made the dramatic decision to scrap the tour and do as the other travelers did, taking the last main ferry over to the biggest island, Cat Ba.

This worked out to be a great decision , we spent three nights in total on the island, and everything went very smoothly after that. The main town of Cat Ba is a rather dingy and failing soviet style resort, although with the best possible scenery. We checked into one of the several cheap hotels that can be had from $5-10 per night, and the quality of the hotel wasn't bad itself.

The first day we first walked to see the nearest beaches, and in the afternoon rented a scooter to see the island further.

The second day was when we took on a separate tour, a full day from a company called Cat Ba Vision, which offered everything the tours from the mainland offer, and was arguably better as you see more of the untouched south side Cat Ba bay.

The first point of interest is the floating fishing villages, which are continually inhabited, and involved in both fishing for food and pearls, we also kayaked around the sea caves, had food aboard the boat, and jumped off and swam in the sea.

The main attraction, however, is clearly the bay itself. From photographs it is hard to convey, but the biggest reason this is such a major site is the absolutely vast scale of the bay, the islands go as far as the eye can see in all directions. In 4 hours of boat travel we never saw a boring sight.

The next step was to get back to Hà Nội and get on the night train south.

Hue

Hue is a city roughly in the centre of the long stretch that is Vietnam. The long southward journey we had just taken became evident, as Hue was significantly hotter than Hanoi, and was my first sight of nature of a more tropical variety (lizards!!).

Hue is most famous for its forbidden city, a former seat of the Vietnamese royal family who ruled in conjunction with the French occupation in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The main sights of the citadel are still preserved, but most of the once grand sight has been ravaged by war.

We didn't have too long to investigate anything more about the city though, as we were late on starting a grand 140km scooter ride down to Hoi An, and we only had 4 hours of daylight left...

The reason the scooter ride is a must-do is that it features a ride along the dangerous but amazing Hai Van pass, made famous by top gear, and of course because of its twisting seaside roads, and beautiful scenery.

Anyone you'll ask will tell you that the roads in Vietnam are scary, crazy and dangerous, and our trip was made even more exiting by the fact that we had to navigate the busy city of Da Nang by night...

Our trusty 110cc steed.

It was fun though, and we eventually got to Hoi An at about 7pm by carefully sticking to the side of the road and keeping to a steady speed of 40kmh.

Hoi An

Hoi An is a beautiful city, a small but bustling central town shows big Chinese and Japanese influences, and has many tailoring outlets, and plenty of nice bars and restaurants.

The coast is more of a proper 'holiday' destination, framed by large-ish resorts and private beaches.

There are also the long stretches of genuine rural farmland, decorated with socialist propaganda, easily toured by bicycle or scooter.

We also visited the marble mountains, a group of entempled mountains, famous for their internal complex caves, and surrounded by a nauseating amount of Vietnamese statue merchants, offering stoneware big and small.

We stayed in Hoi An for three nights, and enjoyed the food, drink and sights, before arranging for another sleeper bus to take us on the 12 hour journey south to Na Trang...

The blog is a little behind!! We have currently just arrived in Siem Reap, Cambodia, but we are accumulating sights quicker than I can write about them! We arrived in Na Trang on the 10th of February, hopefully I will be able to catch up somewhat in the next few days, starting with my exploration of the south of Vietnam.

Hong Kong

We arrived in Hong Kong on the 29th of February, before arriving, I was expecting a stale but grand selection of western style skyscrapers and shopping malls, kind of like Yokohama. Getting off the direct train from the airport landed us in west Kowloon, and we were greeted by a giant and luxurious shopping mall, my expectations were confirmed, right until we got out into the outdoors and discovered this was on a whole new scale.

The second thing that hit me was that there was an alarming amount of development in this area. Entire city blocks had been flattened and were in the process of some grand reconstruction.

This third thing that hit me was that Hong Kong is most definitely a city of two halves, we were in  Kowloon, the mainland area to the north of the main island, and it was significantly 'chinese' and significantly rougher than what I had got used to in Japan.

I thought that Tokyo was crazy but Hong Kong takes both dramatic scale and architecture, and the run down, far eastern, blade runner cyberpunk aesthetic to a new level.

One of the most surprising things was the amount of bamboo scaffolding which was littered everywhere, seemingly propping up the vast forest of concrete.

That evening was the Chinese New Year fireworks, which lasted for over 20 minutes and was the most dramatic display I'd ever seen, beating even Preston Grasshopers' yearly event.

The next day, we took off to the site of the Kowloon walled city. Kowloon walled city was infamously the site of much outlawed activity such as gambling, prostitution and unlicensed dentistry from the 1920s-1980s until it was demolished in 1994. This was due to its status as an unadministered exclave of china, during the time Hong Kong was governed by the British.

During its peak it had a crazy density and lack of building quality, even by Hong Kong standards. All that remained was a shaky concrete foundation and the sign from the old gates, as well as the old almshouse.

The rest of the site is now a picturesque park, in traditional Chinese style, and in the almshouse is a good but small exhibition on the history of the walled city.

The most important part of the day was a visit to the south, to the main Hong Kong island.
Here we were delivered from hectic china-town, and into anonymous international business district proper.

A building that many contemporary accounts of architecture regard as important, Norman Fosters hi-tech HSBC headquarters. Is remarkably puny in this skyline nowadays, and fails to make the dramatic impact it once yearned for.

A trip up the hill took us past an amazing number of stupidly high apartment towers, named very British names such as 'Hillsborough Court'. They seemed to cling onto the edge of the hill, an extraordinary example of how market forces can push engineering to stupid lengths.

The view from the top, from the blazingly commercial peak tower, gave an exceptional view over the concrete jungle of Hong Kong; a view of a city which is more honesty and excitingly built up due to market forces and its status as a tiny country-within-a-country than the large, empty, and sterile business districts of Canary Wharf, La Defense, and Yokohama.

The third day mainly took us to museums and Chinese restaurants, but to keep the blog in its design vision, I must step aside to give attention to Zaha Hadid's Hong Kong Polytechnic Innovation Center.
The only other Hadid I have visited in person is the Glasgow Riverside museum, which is hard to criticise as it is literally just a tin shed. The Innovation centre however, finished in 2014, is a much more delectable target. Designed in the 'parametric' style, it attempts to impress us with its futuristic vision, however it is still stat in a field of rubble and porta-cabins, barely attached to the rest of the campus apart from a tiny drawbridge, a far cry from the incusive public space outlined on the concept drawings.

It is also caked in dirt, assumably it's dynamic visors are a challenge to clean, and is still pesked with that dirty reality of bamboo scaffolding that lines the site.It is also simply not good looking, from the most busy spot to see it from, it has a very awkward and unsatisfactory backwards lean.

Back on topic, Hong Kong was an amazing city to visit, I had never seen urbanism on this scale, but the compact size and good underground network made for a surprisingly walkable and humanistic city environment. However there was a sharp contrast between the pristine wealth of Hong Kong island and Kowloon, although malls and luxury condos are popping up there too.

The food was good too, a wide range of options from barely hygienic plastic-chairs-on-the-pavement food from the markets of Kowloon, to fine dining in Hong Kong city. One thing to note though is that it is actually a cuisine authenticity represented in Britain, unlike the Japanese which was very unique.


The next stop is Vietnam, a short flight dropping us in Hà Nội, where 'travelling' proper will commence.