First a brief bit about our last days in Ha Noi. As a tourist in Ha Noi, especially in Ha Noi I think, you have to be viligant about negotiations. Unless of course you just don't care, like many tourists. We decided to have lunch at a grilled fish restaurant where the food is cooked and prepared at your table. We made the mistake of not seeing the prices up front. We saw the drink prices and they looked resonable so we assumed (oh, this is the dangerous part!) that the prices for the food would be the same. The manager seemed (more danger!) like a nice enough man. After the lunch, which I have to say rated about a 3 on a scale of 10, we were presented with the bill for an amount more than double what it should have cost. Iqbal figured he would resolve the situation by asking to see a menu, but the menu reflected the same high price as the bill. So we were stuck. Screwed. Caveat here is to always be clear about any price for any service in Vietnam before you owe anybody anything. I imagine many merchants pounce like cats on any tourist negligent enough to forget this. Other than this type of exploitation I've seen or heard almost nothing regarding crime in Vietnam. As long as one is clear about the terms of a business transaction, I've found the Vietnamese to be completely honest. Haggling for bottles of water has become a daily diversion for me. Why pay 70 cents when it can be easily had for 45? You don't learn this type of useful skill at Harvard Business School.
The day before leaving for Vietnam, I intended to get a haircut, but the salon was closed and I had to proceed the next day sporting my shaggy mane. I had seen numerous haircutters at work in Vietnam, many operating on the sidewalk with a mirror dangling from a treebranch, and found a small salon in Ha Noi with staff more than willing to accomodate me. See below for before and after pics.
Iqbal came up with the idea of renting motorbikes and striking out for the more open country to the west of Ha Noi for a couple of days. This would have been instead of going to Ha Long Bay. We thought it just might be an interesting and different (I've been described with just these words many times) adventure to embark upon, but alas, some locals strongly advised us against it, at least against the idea of doing it our own. Problem is once you leave the cities, English becomes a language rarely spoken, and if we were to run into any problems we could quickly find ourselves in a bit a of a predicament. That said, I've read other blogs of foreigners who've traveled from Ha Noi to Sapa by motorbike and lived to blog colorfully about the experience, so it is possible but maybe requires more of a sense of adventure than we had. By adventure, I mean slogging though waist-high mud and repairing or negotiating repairs for a broken down Russian Minsk bike, the motorbike of choice for such journeys. The option of paying a modest sum to sit on buses and boats and have our itineraries pre-planned for us suddenly took on a new and intriguing novelty. So that's what we did. And no regrets as Ha Long Bay, as touristy and as on the highly beaten path as it is, is not to be missed and has beauty enough that even sharing it with thousands of others is a worthwhile experience.
This is inside the Temple of Literature in Ha Noi, an ancient university. The names of the doctors who graduated each year and their home towns were inscribed on stone stelae. This one is from 1442. Their 600 year reunion is coming up soon. If it's anything like the 500 year bash, Ha Noi better start preparing now.
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