On the Road Again: Destination Vietnam

It is Mid-Autumn Moon Festival time in China – and all over Asia – where the full moon is celebrated and with it the Fall harvest. We share our Moon Cakes with our family and friends and wish them good fortune and blessings.  It is also a national holiday in China, which means a week off of work and school. 

Willie Nelson’s iconic song “On the Road Again” expresses one of the reasons we love international teaching – travel.  “We just can’t wait to get on the road again!” Last school year we took family vacations in China, the Philippines and Thailand and did as much sightseeing as we could in our capital city of Beijing.

Just two weeks ago, we had our “week without walls’ where all classes K-12 journey off to learn about life outside of school. My trip was one hour from Beijing where the 7th graders and I spend a week at a Chinese team building camp called “Survival Island”.  Anna and the 8th graders went to an environmental camp called Miao Liangg, about two hours from Beijing.  And Daniel and the grade 9’s went to an area of China about three hours away called ChengDe.

Our holiday this week has brought us to Vietnam.  We took a direct flight from Beijing to Hanoi and spent our first night near the old city.  We came into the city at dusk and were first amazed at the architecture, which is strikingly different from China. Daniel reminded me that the French once occupied Vietnam, so it is likely that we are seeing strong European influences.  The tall, slender homes with balconies and the colors were refreshing compared to the communist style apartments, which are more common in China (and Russia).

The Mid-Autumn Moon Festival celebrations were in full swing as our driver maneuvered the amazing amount of traffic to take us to our hotels. The traffic was more scooters than cars, and these scooters contained whole families. As we got closer to our hotel, there were street fairs, parades and masks – reminding us of Mardi Gras. Our hotel, fortunately, was lovely. We got cleaned up and headed out to find dinner at about 9:00 pm.  We wandered through the street fair, but found it too overwhelming.  So we parked ourselves at a place called Highway 4 and ordered 2 ice cold Tiger beers and 1 Sprite and celebrated in our own way. The temperature is perfect this time of year in northern Vietnam – 80s in the days and high 60s at night. We filled our bellies with catfish spring rolls, pork ribs and noodles with veggies. 

We planned for most of our trip to be in Ha Long Bay.  Our tour arrangements had us being picked up at 8:30am from our Hanoi Hotel. We headed out on our day-long journey to our island accommodations. Three hours on a bus and then three hours on a boat.  The boat was just for 15 of us, making it very comfortable and enjoyable.  We dined on a seafood lunch and enjoyed our cruise around Ha Long Bay.  It was breathtaking.  Along the way, we visited a cave, and then were dropped off on a dock in the middle of nowhere, and said goodbye to our boat mates.

This is the part of the trip where you know you are a seasoned traveler.  You book something on the internet and take it at face value, prepared to be thrilled if it all works out.  We took a bus into Catba, and then were dropped off at another dock and this time were told to get into a water taxi with 10 other Vietnamese and waved goodbye to our guide. We bounced along the water and dropped off school children at their floating boat homes. We all sat with just a bit of anxiety wondering where we would be dropped.  We traveled around island after island, looking for something called Catba Sandy Beach resort.  Our first sign was when we saw the kayakers.

We thought we read about pools, massages and several restaurants on the website.  Not quite. As we rounded the island toward to dock, I looked at Daniel and said “there is no way this place has wireless internet”.  Turns out we were at the eco-tourism spot called Yam Cat (Island) and would be living in a hut on the beach, with only a kayak to get off the island.  Our bedroom was composed of two beds and two mosquito nets.  Fortunately, we did have a bathroom with shower (very basic) and there was access to cold beer in the central dining hut.  On this primitive island (that we heard was a former burial ground for the local people), we were surrounded by about 50 other international tourists - all as lost as we were about how they got here.  Almost everyone was staying for a night or two. We had signed up for five nights.

We quickly befriended Andrea, a Canadian backpacker-type, and joined her on an all day excursion of paddling to another island, biking to a mountain and then climbing the mountain to view an old Vietnam War bunker and get an awesome view of Ha Long Bay.  The area, as you will see from photos, is a lot like the San Juan Islands near Seattle – but much taller islands!  The trip away from the Yam Cat helped us put our situation in perspective and we decided to enjoy another day of Kayaking and beach, and then make a plan to get off the island sooner than Saturday.

We returned to HaNoi on Thursday evening – enduring a rainy, long and claustrophobic daylong trip that included three boats and a bus. We were never so happy to be in an air-conditioned hotel with internet along with a city full of opportunities! We dined in a restaurant where we could choose what we wanted to eat (yeah!) and enjoyed a few cocktails.

On Friday we wandered the Old Quarter, shopped a bit (DVD, sandals and a messenger bag), sipped coffee at cafes, toured the Revolutionary Museum and saw a Water Puppet performance.  Today we plan to visit the Ho Chi Min Mausoleum and the Ethnology Museum. 

We have already decided that we love Vietnam. It is crazy busy traffic and small streets, motor scooters everywhere, shops that are mysterious, smells that range from enticing to sickening, Buddhist temples and cafes, both easy and hard to communicate. But it has that intriguing balance of traditional and developing, of old world meets new.  Perhaps this is where we will live next in our international journey.