Category: Vietnam

We woke up to rain on our second day in Ninh Binh. And lots of it. I was curious if that was going to change the plans for the day and we’d be riding around inside a car instead of on the back of a scooter, but nope, our guide arrived at 8:30 am with scooters and ponchos. A little rain never hurt anybody afterall.

The rain meant we didn’t see another tourist out on the roads while we were which was pleasant. After about a half hour ride, we arrived at the Trang An entrance for the boat ride. Yes, boat ride. In the rain. Though when we arrived, they told our Toan, our guide, that we needed to wait for the rain, so we went inside to wait.

But then Toan came to get us about 15 minutes later, saying it was time to go. Who knows what we had been waiting on, but it certainly wasn’t the rain as it was still coming down strong.

We hopped into our little boat with two Vietnamese men, and the tiny Vietnamese woman in the back who would be paddling us down the river. With no current. Those little ladies must be so strong.

It was such an interesting experience because we were the only foreigners around. Everyone was Vietnamese, and no one spoke English, so we never had any idea what was going on. I didn’t need any translation to appreciate the beautiful scenery though, even through the rain.

All of a sudden, we were going through a crazy cave in which we had to basically flatten ourselves against our legs so that we didn’t hit our heads on the stalactites.

On it went like this, alternating between gorgeous mountainous scenery and going through awesome caves.

We stopped at multiple pagodas and temples along the way as well, though since we can’t understand Vietnamese, we weren’t sure exactly what they were.

One of them required a climb up a billion stairs because I hadn’t climbed up enough stairs the day before. I was sore, so I wasn’t terribly pleased about this. The worst part was that it was a climb up stairs and then down the other side, and then we had to do it AGAIN to get back to the boat.

We then reached this bizarre point where it stopped raining outside, and starting “raining” inside with water pouring down from the cave ceilings. I had decided it was safe to get the good camera out instead of using the GoPro since it wasn’t raining anymore, and then we got into a cave that decided we needed to be wetter than we already were. The next couple caves were the same way.

Once we got close to the starting point, I once again saw the benefits of being early risers. We may have had wetter weather, but there were only 2 little boats on the water, including us, when we headed out, and by the time we were getting back, they were endless. The river was so congested, and the station had what was almost like a conveyor belt of boats. Tourists would be hurried onto a boat, it’d push off, and the next boat would be there, and on and on and on. Still no westerners that we saw anywhere though.

We met back up with Toan and headed off for lunch. Again we were given more food than we could ever eat, and then we sat down with some locals to sip some ridiculously strong tea.

Our next stop was Bai Dinh, the largest complex of Buddhist temples in Vietnam. The place is massive. There was the older original temple with shrines and a fairy pool inside caves.

But the new complex is a decent walk away and covered most of the area. It started being built in 2003, and was “completed” in 2010, though they still add on to it.

It was great having Toan with us for this because he was able to explain the context, give some history, teach us some Buddhist beliefs, and share humorous anecdotes.

He also had to be translator for us, when a group of Vietnamese tourists came up wanting to take pictures with us, like we were famous. After a dozen photos, I thought we were free to go, but then they all wanted to take pictures with just me as well. So there I was, wet, messy hair, sopping wet jean shorts, hiking sandals, makeup washed off my face from the rain, posing for photos right and left.

But the stairs. I cannot express to you how sick of stairs I was at this point, after our jungle trek yesterday, and the various stairs during our morning Trang An tour, but alas, there I was climbing stairs, and more stairs, and more stairs, and more stairs, and more stairs. Just when I would think we were done climbing stairs, there were more stairs. By the end of this vacation, I’m going to have the world’s greatest butt.

We spent the whole afternoon walking around the complex.

We took a scenic route home, going along the old road instead of the new, nice road. This took us through some rural towns, and brought us to some pretty views of “Halong Bay on Land”, as the Ninh Binh area is often called.

We hung out that evening at the hotel, taking some time to relax before another day of travel.

We had a few hours the following morning before we needed to take off, so after breakfast, we borrowed some bikes from the hotel, which allowed us to take in the views a bit better than when we were racing by on a scooter.

We stopped at Bich Dong, an older Buddhist pagoda in pretty scenery.

After arriving, we discovered that we were not appropriately dressed, as you’re not supposed to wear shorts there, so we decided not to be disrespectful and go up to the sacred temple. We stayed outside, and after awhile, went back to our bikes to ride into town a bit.

We checked out of our fancy hotel at noon, and our driver came to take us the 3 hours back to Hanoi airport. Our flight got delayed three times before we could finally fly to Siem Reap, where we were met by a tuk tuk to take us to our fabulous little boutique hotel. More on that later.

After another somewhat long journey, we checked into our hotel, Tam Coc Gardens, in Ninh Binh. We didn’t know what to do with ourselves, staying somewhere so fancy since we’re used to AirBnBs where we mostly just take care of ourselves. When we arrived, they gave us a warm towel to wipe our hands and a welcome cup of tea. Staff grabbed all our luggage and took it to our room, the Vietnamese woman at the front desk explained various things about the hotel to us before escorting us to the room and showing us around.

It was already 9:00 at night, and we were exhausted, so we ordered some food from the restaurant to be brought to us as room service, and I climbed into my fancy ass bath.

And then I put on my fancy ass robe, and ate my fancy ass springrolls and chili lemongrass tofu, with the fancy ass carrot flower decorations. And generally just felt fancy.

The following morning, I enjoyed the misty view from our patio before Anthony woke up.

We then walked through the lovely gardens on the way to the restaurant for our breakfast.

We had yet more pretty views while eating our breakfast.

Afterward, we met up with our guide, Toan, and his extra driver, at which point we strapped on some helmets and hopped on our motorbikes!

We had possibly the most spectacular scenery of the trip driving through Ninh Binh on our way to Cuc Phuong National Park, but I didn’t feel safe enough to take both hands off in order to take pictures until we were on better, straighter roads, which of course had less incredible views.

My driver would pat my leg and point out various things like water buffalo and goats and rice fields.

After a wonderful ride, we arrived at the park, Vietnam’s first national park and its largest nature reserve, and we met up with a new guide to show us through the nature reserve.

The nature reserve is home to well over 100 primates, including langurs, loris, and gibbons. We even got to see some baby monkeys!

They also have a 2-step process for re-introducing the primates back into the wild which made me happy. Wildlife rescue and conservation is my dream job.

After the monkeys, we got to see the turtle reserve, slightly less impressive but still cool.

We made our way back to our drivers, and off we went, riding through the cool jungle, millions of butterflies swarming us on the way.

We stopped again, this time for a long, steep climb up to a really cool “Cave of Prehistoric Man.” The cave was excavated in 1966 where it revealed human graves and various tools.

We had flashlights with us so we explored through the cave which was actually quite massive. At one point we climbed up some extremely dangerous feeling ladders. They were very, very steep, they were rounded instead of flat, and they were wet. Once we safely got to the top, we saw dozens of bats before carefully climbing back down.

We climbed back down to where we were parked, and back on the road we went.

We stopped at a restaurant, where first we had to use the restroom which was quite the experience. They didn’t have actual toilets. They had what looked like a urinal in the ground. And Anthony said the men’s one was filled with hornets and mosquitoes which sounded like even more fun.

Anyway, our guide asked us if we were vegetarian or not, we said yes, and a few minutes later, food and more food and more food and more food just kept being brought out to us. When we first got to Vietnam, I figured the reason nearly all the Vietnamese were so thin was because most of their signature dishes were simply broth based (such as pho). However, the last few days I have been fed more food than I ever have in the US. Maybe they assume since we’re Americans we eat that much, or maybe it’s the norm. I’m not sure. But it was a lot of food, and we could only eat about half of it.

It was good fuel for what we had next, though. Since Anthony and I apparently like to torture ourselves on vacation, we followed our guide on 2 to 3 hour afternoon trek through the damn jungle. It was hot. It was humid. It was dirty. There were bugs freaking EVERYWHERE, and I had not been able to find bug spray beforehand. Considering that, I didn’t get nearly as many mosquito bites as I had been expecting, probably just between 15 and 20 (I can easily get that many in my backyard summer evenings).

We did see some pretty cool trees. A giant thousand year old tree that has been damaged by recent storms, and then another giant tree that I couldn’t even get a picture that captured the whole thing.

But other than that, it was really just trekking through the jungle. And there were SO MANY STAIRS. I was not sure I was going to make it. I was recovering from my cold, so my breathing was still shallow and I was weak, and oh my gosh, the never ending stairs. Any time we stopped, my legs would be shaking.

But made it, I did. Pouring sweat and wanting nothing more than to go back to my hotel pool.

But then we hopped back on our motorbikes, and the cool breeze revived me.

We basically circled all of Ninh Binh. We took a long route back home, seeing some absolutely stunning countryside. In some of the more rural areas, the locals would get very excited at the sight of my blonde hair.

We saw many workers out farming. We saw rice paddies. We saw karst mountains. We saw lakes. We also saw a king cobra! Which we failed to grab our camera in time to photograph.

By the time we got back to the hotel, it was very late afternoon, and I was worn out, but had had a fabulous day.

We rinsed off all the dirt on us and then went over to our wonderful pool.

Nice and refreshed, all we had left for the day was dinner and drinks and relaxation.

Anthony and I caught the 6am train from Hanoi to Haiphong, which was actually my first train experience. It was comfortable, though not as “steady” feeling as I had expected. Once we arrived at the train station, we had 20 minutes to find a taxi, get taxi’d over to the harbor, buy hydrofoil tickets, and get on the hydrofoil. Fortunately, there were dozens of taxis clamoring for our business. The first one we chose, however, showed us over to his little scooter. We’ve been in Vietnam long enough to realize that the Vietnamese can fit as much as they damn well want on a scooter, but we weren’t so sure the two of us and our luggage wanted to go through that experience. So we found a car taxi instead and were on our way, getting onto the hydrofoil on time, and without getting scammed as I had been forewarned. Hurray!

We pulled up to Cat Ba Island, which is beautiful, though like most of Vietnam, it’s at this weird stage of rapid growth. Plenty of poverty around, but also a lot of hotels and restaurants and bars being built.

Our tour guide met us at the hydrofoil, and after some prep at the office and a drive down to the water, we were loaded up on our Junk. We had chosen to do a private tour along the bays (Lan Ha, Ha Long, and Bai Tu Long bays) with Cat Ba Ventures. I had read mixed reviews on Ha Long Bay due to it being overrun by tourists and filled with boats and litter, so I chose to do the tour out of Cat Ba Island rather than Halong City. I was super pleased with that decision.

It was a bit cloudy and foggy for the first part of the tour, but it was still obviously gorgeous. The karst mountains had a smoky look through the fog, and the water was just so calm and peaceful. There was an occasional other boat, but it never once felt overrun, and I also noticed hardly any litter.

We stopped at a floating fish farm which just completely boggles my mind. These fish farms were everywhere in Lan Ha Bay. The farmers build these little floating shacks right on the water, and they grow and catch fish there. Sometimes boats bring them food and such from the markets, or every now and then they’ll go back to the island for their shopping. But mostly, their days are just spent there. I can’t imagine being that immobile. And all of them had dogs living there too, and somehow the dogs looked happy enough.

After that brief visit, we were back on the Junk, enjoying our beautiful views and chatting with our tour guide.

We were served a delicious feast for lunch, just SO MUCH food.  We’re not ones to waste food, so we somehow ate it all.

Eventually, we stopped to do some kayaking. The kayaking was amazing. We went through a long cave that came out to this beautiful, peaceful lagoon.

We then went through another cave to another lagoon. And then another.

Our guide was a kayaking machine, and so after all that, we kayaked some more to an empty beach to swim. It was a bit too chilly to swim, though, so then we kayaked all the way back to the junk.

We watched a beautiful, if somewhat foggy, sunset over the water while hanging out with our guide.

We then went down for yet another massive feast, this one even bigger to where we couldn’t finish it all. We drank a bottle of wine with it and then went off to bed, where we slept through the whole night for the first time since arriving in Vietnam. And by slept all the way through the night, I mean we slept til around 5:30.

I was feeling pretty miserable because of my cold, so I napped up on top a bit more until we were called down for breakfast and coffee.

Afterward, I tried to wake myself up by taking in some morning views.

I still felt lousy, but it was time for some kayaking, so I sucked it up and put my swimsuit on. Fortunately, the kayaking was so much fun, I completely forgot about how terrible I felt.

We first went through Bat Cave, which had a message above it telling us not to enter. It’s very dark in the cave, so it’s easy to get lost and hurt. It also goes under water at high tide. But lucky for us, we had a knowledgeable guide.

We did end up seeing a dozen bats while in bat cave, and then out we came out the other end of the cave to a calm lake. We sat there in silence, listening to the birds and cicadas. All of a sudden, we heard a new sound, and our guide sort of gasped “monkey!”. So we rowed over to the sound, but were never able to actually see the monkey, just hear him.

We gave up and went back through the cave and continued kayaking on, going through a few more caves to a few more lagoons.

We had everywhere all to ourselves, and it was magical. On our way back out, we saw the hordes of tourists with other companies heading our way, so getting out on the water early was the way to go. We stopped in one final lagoon, and once we got in there, Anthony pointed a ways away, and I looked over, and monkeys! A bunch of them, with babies! They were down on some rocks at the water, but by the time we got close enough for pictures, they had climbed up into the trees. But we sat there for awhile, watching them jump between trees, and eat.

We came back to the junk for long enough to cruise over to a little beach. We grabbed some snorkel gear, hopped into the water, and swam over to it. On the way, Anthony apparently ran into a jellyfish. Said jellyfish retaliated by stinging the crap out of his leg. Anthony thought “meh” and kept swimming over. We snorkeled and swam for around half an hour before swimming back to the boat. Upon arrival, we pointed out the bright red jellyfish stings on Anthony’s leg, and the boat crew quickly jumped into action to apply some natural remedy to it, giving him the “tough tourist” award because anyone else they had had get stung came back to the boat immediately. Anthony was pretty proud after that.

After another massive lunch, we just relaxed on top of the junk all the way back to Cat Ba Island.

Such a fabulous two days. 10/10 would recommend.