It was in June 2010, we had arrived in Hanoi for the first time. The city itself reminds me of Malaysia was in the early 1980s of development. As usual Lina and I went on a backpack trip. We had booked a budget hotel in Hanoi through Internet and we met a warm gentlemen the hotel manager Mr Vinh. He was helpful and very accommodating on trying to make the best out of our trip.
Lina and I started our trip by visiting Halong Bay. It was one of the places that has been named as one of UNESCO protection site because of the billion years of rock formation created in the area. It was indeed an amazing sighting. We took a one day trip and it took around 3 hours journey from the city to the Bay. We had our seafood lunch in the boat and we visited some of their communities that stays in the area.
The next day we went for some city tour. Visited the Ho Chi Minh musoleum and went to see the famous water puppet show. In the middle of their city they have the famous Ho Kiem Lake where mostly people came for some relaxing moment or some activities around the lake. One thing about their transportation that I remembered was that Motorcyclist are the Kings of the road. There were thousands of motorcyclist but its not like in Malaysia, they were well behaved and knew to give way to pedestrian first. We were not afraid to cross the road even though so many of them riding on the street.
We did some shopping but I still prefer to shop in Bangkok compare in Hanoi. Why? Its very tiresome when we need to bargain almost 80% every time we went to their shop.Most of the shopkeepers when they knew that we were tourist , the price stated was incredible crazy. So I was not really enjoying the shopping part. However we do met some very nice shop that was reasonable in price. It took a lot of hard work by then to find it. In terms of food there were not many halal food in here compare to Bangkok but we managed to find several of the restaurants which were halal. There was 1 vegetarian restaurant that we found too.
I guess I enjoyed a lot in the sight seeing part of this trip compare to shopping, but 1 thing I was grateful that I managed to see a country that once were considered the communist or very dangerous place in the 70s. What I learned from them was that even though how tough they were oppressed by US/world back then, they managed to bring back their economy, their people's development without loosing their country dignity and I salute them for that... cheers to your development Vietnam !!..
