As expected, staying at the 200-year-old Vinh Hung Heritage Hotel in the middle of the Ancient Town is a strange experience and completely different than our sweet little Halo Homestay.
It is literally the difference between light and dark. Halo is all white marble, concrete, tile, walls and lots of sunlight. Vinh Hung is all dark wood floors,paneling, walls, carved armoire and other heavy furniture. There are only six rooms here and it is the only place you can stay overnight right in the Ancient Town. This is an old spice merchants house, with a small two-story central courtyard, very creaky floors, doors that stick and old Asian pottery. There is AC though but a drip. So we have turned it off and hope the street noise won’t be bothersome. The cost is different too $77 a night rather than $18 but we also don’t have to ride bikes into town. We are here.
Tonight we also splurged on a fancy dinner at Co Mai but we are talking $47 for a five course tasting menu and two drinks, vs. about $8-$10 that we have been spending for street food. For lunch, we shared a crowded table at Beo Bahn, a tiny place recommended by Hanoi foodie Mark for com gai, a simple rice and shredded chicken dish.
We decided to go to Co Mai because I was curious about how a French chef would reinterpret Vietnamese food. The restaurant is also in one of the 200-year-old structures here and we sat on the second floor with the dark wood window open so we could see all the action below at a street market. 
The food went from simple (“ocean soup” that looked, tasted and smelled like the ocean – light, salty, watery, a little murky, with small pieces of seafood, veg, and maybe seaweed) to complex (a little bowl of passion fruit cake with a small scoop of curry sorbet, one of three such concoctions on our dessert plate. The server brought over what looked like a cinnamon stick the size of my forearm and grated flecks of it onto on little bowls).
Yes, he’s looking at his cellphone
In the morning we road our rickety Homestay bikes to the countryside and beach, this time choosing narrow concrete paths between the rice paddies and fish farms, encountering the occasional water buffalo or farmer. The scenes are an old/new world mashup – a farmer in a traditional pointed hat, squatting in the shade beside a water buffalo and talking on his cell phone; small villages with high rises in the distance near cui dai beach.
View from a boat of the ancient town
My parents went to Thailand back in the day, which we’ve heard has now become almost too tourist friendly. Now younger generations go to Vietnam, which has me wondering how Vietnam will change/has changed. We are searching for authenticity and in the process, destroying it…maybe. Truth be told, there are way too many tourists here. Trying to cross one of the main pedestrian bridges here brought up unpleasant memories of a similar experience in Prague. The crowd was so thick it was very uncomfortable.But I see why the tourists are here. Like Venice, it is exotic and otherworldly and so vibrant. Our Homestay family opened their business about 3-4 years ago and is seeing fewer customers because there is more competition- new homestays and hotels everywhere. But then people here seem to be competing everywhere – the street vendors, restaurants, shop keepers, spas, coffee shops, tour operators. This is the first communist country I have visited and that’s easy to forget with raw capitalism everywhere.
The weather has been very hot and humid. My clothes were drenched with sweat after our bike ride. But It suddenly got slightly cooler last night. Around 3 pm, we cooled off in the pool of a nearby resort on the river that is a sister hotel to ours and chugged along the river for a free sunlight cruise – two perks of this strange old place. Today I plan to take advantage of another perk – a free 30 minute foot massage. Dirck will pass.
We moved on. It is very easy to fritter away hours here, wandering down atmospheric old streets lined with mustard-colored, dark wood and ceramic disc roofs. We are sitting on the second floor balcony of one of the most famous, the 200 year old Vinh Hung
This morning, the street was a little quieter, which is apparently prime time for couples to pose for photos, often in elegant outfits. We made it through the night without too much noise. Our room is very dark but well air conditioned and a good mattress. I am pretty sure I felt a mouse (hoping it was a mouse) scurry down the wood hall leading to this balcony. Oh well, kind of like home.
We had a nice where-have -you-been chat with a well traveled Kent, Australia couple who were lounging in the sun next to us. They also mentioned there was torrential rain in a Hoi An for the 3 days before we arrived so we got lucky. It seems to rain once a day briefly and intensely. By the time we have gotten our raincoats out and on, it stops and we are even hotter. We got about waist deep in the crashing waves (the water is almost too warm) but I didn’t want to get my eat wet, which is on the mend thx to my antibiotics regimen.
This afternoon we peddled into Hoi An and found one of the fantastic street vendors our Hanoi food guide Mark recommended. Mark knows his stuff and it has been such a treat to know which of the many street food vendors are best. We sat on plastic stools at a very busy street food stand and had superb
We wandered to the less crowded and classier part of the ancient town, at the eastern end to visit Precious Heritage Museum, a remarkable place and effort by a French photographer who has made it his life’s work to photograph people from Vietnam’s many ethnic minorities and collect an authentic costume from each, which are on display. The photos are for sale, with proceeds going to the museum and some of the people photographed. Amazing.
Our first internal flight in Vietnam, a quick and cheap Vietjet flight from Hanoi to Hue, was surprisingly pleasant. We left and arrived on time. Our small luggage was too heavy to carry on so we had to check it– at no extra cost, which was surprising. (Other budget airlines really stick it to you for this.) The plane was easy in and out (with two entrances/ exits) and it cost $94 for the two of us.
Hue instantly felt different than Hanoi. Lively but not as chaotic, mellower, with wide boulevards lined with grassy parks dotted with sculpture along the narrow river; and what looked like government buildings. And of course the grand Imperial compound called The Citadel, which has a huge imposing stone wall enclosure.
We had an excellent grilled pork (Bun thit) at a place Mark, our Hanoi street tour guide, recommended and some stranger fare at Hanh restaurant for dinner.
Not to worry. Not another broken arm (that was last year in Norway.) But I did have a bad enough earache, of all things, to visit a private hospital here in Hoi An and sure enough, I have an ear infection, which I am guessing came from my brief swim 🏊♀️ in Halong Bay a few days ago.
The impressive thing is that I was in and out of the hospital in about a half an hour and the doctor visit and antibiotics, pain killers ( giant ibuprofen) and ear drops cost about $50. I was ushered into an exam room within minutes of my arrival and attended to by no less than four men, whose jobs were unclear, and a female nurse who drifted in and out. The young hipster doctor in Levi’s and a crisp white shirt quickly arrived, looked in my ear and declared a minor infection requiring meds. After he left, one young man told us we had been seen by the hospital’s second best doc. The first, if we were understood him correctly, left to become something akin to a monk in Thailand.
We arrived at the Halo Homestay on the edge of Hoi An at about 2 pm after a very scenic 2-3 hour drive from Hue, with the same driver we hired yesterday from our hotel, the excellent Hue Riverside Villa, a five room eco-conscious, well-designed place perched on the Perfume River in the old Imperial city of Hue. This morning, after a passion fruit pancake ( more of a crepe) for me and scrambled eggs for Dirck, we toured the massive citadel/ imperial city, a bit daunting in the heat with an achy ear. Then our driver took the scenic route to Hoi An over a mountain pass, with quick visits to a fish farm and a gorgeous lagoon and a drive past high rises and resorts in Danang that reminded us a bit of Miami.
Th Halo Homestay, recommended by a young friend (20-something Emma C.) is a family home that lets a few rooms. We walked nearby for street food for lunch (Excellent grilled pork served on wood skewers, then rolled with greens into a wrap with dipping sauce) and later for dinner (at a place with lots of men drinking lots of beer.) we aren’t really sure what we ate but it was unusual and delicious, chosen by the woman serving us. One dish was made with what appeared to be wide noodles but was really some sort of veg, plus bits of pork and little shrimp, served with a plate size shrimp cracker and a salty sauce. The other dish was almost like a pork meat loaf or pate with a tomatoey sauce.
What a day. At 6 am, I stood on the sun deck of the La Paci cruise boat and took in the spectacular scene. Moon dropping on one side of the South China sea, sun rising on the other. Clearer blue skies than the day before showed the massive jagged rock formations in the Bay in even greater relief. We set out in the little “tender” motor boat to La Hah Bay, a more secluded part of Halong Bay (and the reason I chose this particular cruise.)
After lunch (not good), we ferried back to land and waited amidst a sea of international travelers for our bus back to Hanoi. Reminded me of our long gone days as young travelers and I can see how this trip might be a little strenuous for older folks (older than us 😚) although we have seen several hardly older European travelers.
I swam in the South China Sea this afternoon. The water was surprisingly warm and very salty and a dark murky green. Huge jagged limestone rock formations surrounded us then and now, popping up out of the sea like steep mountains, yellow and black limestone and covered at the tops in thick green vegetation resembling kudzu.
We drove out of the hectic city into countryside that was both old world and very new – rice fields, water buffalo, Palm trees, bicyclists on dirt lanes and then huge new high rise developments and the occasional modern factory.
This was my kind of day. Lots of adventures, Fantastic street food, a foot/arm massage /paraffin foot wrap and mani/pedi ($24), a beguiling water puppet show and we did not get run over by a motorcycle, motorbike, bike, truck or car (seemingly defying the odds). As expected, Hanoi is a chaotic, exotic place, full of commotion and life and energy.
We appear to have the only room with a balcony at the sweet little Hotel Anise, just north of the market on the northern edge of the Old District and it is a kick to sit on it, looking down and out from the 7th floor at the rush of activity day and night on the streets.
After all that, I stumbled into one of the many, many massage/nail salons and found it full of very nice American tourists from Philly, Chicago and Tampa. I had some sort of foot treatment that was very involved – I soaked my feet in a bucket with brown powder I was told (by the Chicagoan) is cinnamon, then the woman started cutting and scrapping in a podiatrist-like fashion, and placed each foot in a vat of very hot paraffin wax and each waxed foot was wrapped in cellophane (to soften the skin.)
TakeBetsywithyou 