Hanoi by night

The previous post is here..

After our long drive back from Ha Long bay, we finally got to check in to the hotel at close to 7PM. We stayed at the La Nueva Boutique hotel. Will give this hotel two thumbs up for the rooms, service and amazing breakfast as well as the location.

We checked in and immediately went down to try and do two things. See the road with railway track in the middle with the restaurants on either side (which was a landmark we only drove past in the morning) and find dinner. We went in the wrong direction to find the railroad and after 20 minutes we were still more than 1/2 a mile away. One cab driver said most of the stuff is closed.

we were hungry by then and walked through the old quarter and found “Gurajat” ! Fantastic 100% vegetarian food in the heart of Hanoi! Long may the Gujjus live! After a nice dinner we walked back to our hotel. We barely wrapped up day 1 of the trip and we had walked miles all through the day.

A video highlight reel.. the shops kept coming as far as the eye could see.. it was amazing! vibrant night life, tons of restaurants, shops, smiling people!

Our driver had talked to his boss and convinced him to be the driver for the next day as well. It was going to be an interesting day..

Ha Long Bay, Vietnam

The previous post in this series is here..

After our vegetarian lunch in Hanoi, we started off towards Ha Long Bay. It was a long drive and our attempts at telling our driver to keep his eyes on the road failed miserably. So we just braced ourselves for a potential accident and tried to look outside the window as much as possible to the side! Apparently the norm here per driver given the traffic. We even called the guy who ran the service and that person said we were with the safest driver in his fleet!

This was a local Electric Vehicle which had some ADAS. So that gave us some consolation even though I didn’t trust the ADAS in this type of traffic. Enough of the car stories..

On the way we saw the west lake and the Pagoda in it. There was no time to visit this Pagoda but we had spent a lot of time in the morning at another temple with the turtles. We prayed en route to the higher powers in that Pagoda to make it to Ha Long.

We made it to Halong bay in 2 hours. The place was empty. No tourists on the waterfront. Apparently the boats had all left for the all day tour of the rock formations and would return around sunset. So we had the place to ourselves. Walked around, took pictures, saw the Dolphin palace which was impressive and we decided to go to the beach side. It was a 20 minute ride and we spent a good 45 minutes in the beach taking pictures and just enjoying the relatively empty beach.

Ha Long bay is really beautiful with the unique rock formations. The views were the same from most places though. We were reasonably sure that our decision to see this from the shore instead of an all day boat ride was a good one given our time constraints. Here are the pics.. yoga first..

At this point we decided not to wait for the sunset. It would take us a lot more than 2 hours in evening traffic to get back. We had not even checked in to our hotel and we wanted to see the night market and old quarter by night. So we told our driver that we can start back with no breaks. He was also happy as we had started early that morning from the airport and it was a long day for him as well. More photos..

it was a good call. We drove past a glorious sunset towards Hanoi and were dropped off at hour hotel a little close to 6:30 PM. We had made it back in exactly 2 hours.

A video highlight of our visit to Ha Long bay

We checked into our room and ventured out towards the market.. that in the next post!