This travel blog is a way for us to remember our travels better, and hopefully provide useful tips to others along the way. Any proceeds from posts with this disclaimer will go to the charity of choice for the given country we're traveling in. After some researching we've picked Vietnam Relief because of their focus on children and good results. I will personally double the final amount.
A Hanoi Welcome
On February 10th we set out on a long trip to Vietnam from Zagreb. We would be there for three weeks.
Including a mediocre layover in Doha, we landed in Hanoi a total of 16 hours later. Our first few days would be spent on Cat Ba island, but first we had to get there.
As we landed, we had to get Visas. For us, this turned out to be a pretty painless process, though usually this isn't so. However, it is unnecessary for most countries from which visitors won't be staying long or which are on the whitelist - you'll have to check for yourself, it varies wildly. Once we were done with that, we started noticing their obliviousness to how they appear to Westerners. Their official customs email is a funny gmail address - cacknobai@gmail.com, and their border signs for sorting arrivals are misspelled.
(Edit: we later learned this is not misspelled at all and that we're stupid Westerners. It's short for Association of Southeast Asian Nations)
This lack of care for how they appear to strangers would be reinforced in our travels.
Having exited the airport, we were immediately offered overpriced Taxi services. Guided by online writings of past victims, we opted for Uber instead. On the way to Hanoi's Old Quarter from where we would be taken to Cat Ba by a local tour organizer, we witnessed many a curiosity as it was Tet, the time of the Lunar New Year and the Year of the Dog was about to begin. People were driving Kumquat trees on their mopeds - their equivalent of an Xmas tree - ignoring traffic rules and generally improvising their way through the chaos.
By now we had noticed that smoking is extremely pervasive here. People smoke in cafes, in cars, on mopeds, in restaurants. As a non smoker, I thought this would be terrible. Compared to general air quality in Hanoi, however, cigarette smoke was almost like fresh air. The by now famous shroud of smog covering Hanoi was quite obvious from a distance. There's research saying it's the second worst polluted city in the world in terms of street trash and air quality, and we could both feel it and see it - almost everyone was wearing masks.
Reaching the Old Quarter, we needed a shot of caffeine. It being Tet, lots of places were closed so a big part of our Lonely Planet guidebook was useless. We opted for a small local cafe to try the local flavors, and that's when we first realized that most establishments are actually family homes - you'll often see the family's kitchen or even bedroom in the background of a restaurant or a cafe you're visiting. It was there that we had the best egg coffee to date - still undefeated after 6 more tries. Hence, our first recommendation: Cafe 76 for delicious egg coffee. It's not on the map, but it's named after the street number, it'll be easy to find.
Vietnamese coffee is absolutely delicious and you mustn't miss it if you're an aficionado and egg coffee is an upgraded version of it. It was allegedly invented during the war when they didn't have milk for coffee so they used eggs instead. The cream on top is a thick layer of whipped egg yolk, some sugar (the less the better), and condensed milk. When served right, it comes in a bowl of hot water into which your cup is placed. You're supposed to stir the cream into the coffee from the bottom, stirring upwards, making vertical columns of mixture. The brown liquid in the picture is Viet tea, it's often free in cafes.
Before setting out for Cat Ba, we wanted to get some food in us, and what better way to start than Vietnam's world famous street food. We sat onto some child-size stools next to more stools on which metal trays were placed. That's where food would come.
We had some tapioca flour dumplings and fermented pig rolls, Nem Chua. The rolls come in both raw (cold) and grilled (hot) form - these were raw. The other bowls are dipping sauces - sweet with peanuts for the dumplings, and spicy for the rolls. The total cost of the meal was 80k VND which is around 3.5 USD and it was delicious.
Almost all of Vietnam is cheap - really cheap - so even when being charged "foreigner prices" you're usually still fine.
One thing you have to get used to in Vietnam is the fact that they'll touch your food - A LOT - with unwashed hands, and you'll often find hair in it.
They will touch your food. They will touch money. They will touch your food again. They will scratch themselves, and then touch your food again. They will clean the floors and wash the dishes in water that's been there since yesterday, and then touch your food again. Sanitary inspections would have a field day here. The food is very close to the ground and street at all times, and they'll frequently smoke around it, too.
If you're squeamish, you can find some fancier places that are Westerner-oriented, but that's not really interacting with their culture. Living like a local for a few days won't kill you unless you've lived in a bubble all your life - worst case scenario, you'll come home with a renewed immune system.
New to this place and now slightly nervous about a possibly incubating stomach bug, we equipped ourselves with a Viettel SIM card of 10 GB of traffic (100k VND or less than $5 - excellent coverage Vietnam-wide, highly recommended) and set out on a long bus ride to the speedboat which would eventually take us to Cat Ba.