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!

A morning in Hanoi - Thanksgiving 2025 trip

We just got back from a 10 day trip to Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand. The last part of the trip was planned in January. We knew our friends son was getting married in Phuket and we were going. It was post thanksgiving week given the stars aligned for the kid and his bride to be a week after!

Having put in for the entire week after thanksgiving off, our planner in chief had plenty of time to decide what to do in the run up to the wedding in Phuket. She did change things a few times and came up with a Hanoi-> Angkor Wat -> Chiang Mai -> Phuket plan. 2 days to 2 1/2 days tops for each location. I was asked for a wish list of places to see and apparently my plan would need a month, not to mention underground caves needed permits that were not available. As usual, all I had to do was follow instructions!

One tip before going to anyplace these days. Do not bother looking at facebook feed. Had barely checked in and was waiting at gate when FB told me that Ho Chi Minh city was under water and what we need to do to prep for it. This was not a one off thing. Before we went to any place or as soon as we landed we got the worst negative fake news about each place be it floods, fires, wars, etc. Total BS! Facebook needs to do something about this nonsense soon. or folks should take them to task for this blatant misinformation. At this point these bastards maybe responsible for most wars around the world if they stream this type of fake news and create unnecessary panic. It was good I turned off my wifi and having no international data plan also helped. used the phone pretty much as a video camera for the trip.

There was no direct flight we could find. So we went SFO -> Seoul , Seoul-> Ho Chi Minh city with a very tight connection on Korean air (gladly we made it as did our luggage). We had a 6 hour wait in Ho Chi Minh city and took a taxi to a airport hotel (5 min ride from the airport). We took a shower, had some wagh bakri chai at 3AM local time and took a 45 min power nap, charged phones and were back in the airport to check in bags on a domestic flight in Vietjet to Hanoi.

Given our crazy plan, we had arranged a personal car/driver. The driver was supposed to speak English but he knew 4 words and used google translate. It was painful as he would drive and use his phone which made us really nervous throughout the trip. Our suitcases were in the back of the car and we went straight to sightseeing. The plan was to see the main places.

1. The lake area and the temple with turtles in the middle of the lake in the old quarter

2. Temple of literature built for Confusious

3. drive by Ho Chi Minh memorial

4. One pillar Pagoda

5. drive by the railroad street

The time budget for all this was 4 hours. This was to be followed by a max one hour lunch break and then we were to drive out of the city for 2 hours to HaLong bay in Vietnam traffic.

We actually did everything in spite of a 45 min waste to try and find the entrance to the one pillar pagoda. Our guide was told he cannot park near pagoda entrance. He had also said that given the security check and crowed we would only drive by the memorial. Turns out that the entrance to the pagoda is through the same complex and we had to go through the security check. We walked around all over the place and leaving voicenotes in English for the driver did not help. The cops on the roads had no idea either till we showed them the image of the pagoda. Finally a cop directed in sign language that we had to go through the check to see Pagoda! No English anywhere. These are the most interesting experiences in stretching our communication limits. The highlight of the morning was watching toddlers walk through the temple of literature as part of a school tour. They were sooo cute and adorable!

Here are two sets of pictures from the morning (haven’t edited them either). I am severely jet lagged and writing is post is keeping me awake. It is also refreshing my memory a bit. The heat and humidity, rickshaws, the lake, the agarbathies, the pagodas, the street vendors, the red sickle flags, kind of felt like a cross between Mumbai, Chennai and Cochin all at once.. Hanoi was very clean!!

First photo is an example of the bullshit fake posts that we saw at every location. Truth is dead!

Here is a video highlights reel of the morning..

Was still scared of getting allergies on day 1, so played it safe and ate pizza while san tasted local veggies cuisine. Then we were off to Halong bay!

Will write about that tomorrow..