Back From Halong Bay - Hanoi Hotels - Vietnam Riders

[Sunday, March 8, 2009, 10pm Hanoi Time]

We're back in Hanoi at the Stars Hotel on Batsu, right next door to the Hanoi Boutique Hotel where we stayed the other night and thought we were staying tonight. But people on the tour to Halong Bay said we were paying too much at $35 per night. So we checked at the Star and we could get the same room (balcony on the street) for just $20 with a computer in the room. The room is exactly the same size, not quite as spanking new, but also with breakfast and close enough I can use the wifi from next door. Actually, people were saying that $8-$15 was the going price for pretty much the same hotel room all over the Old Quarter. As it turned out, the old hotel didn't have any empty rooms anyway and wanted to send us to their other hotel. There are little hotels all over the old quarter of Hanoi for very little. This is one case where internet prices are much higher than you can get if you just show up and ask.

Apparently the hotels make their money selling tours. It appears to be best to go directly to the tour company itself. Halong Bay, two days, one night, prices ranged from $40 (2 star hotel on land) to $250 (private car, sleep on fancier junk) per person. If you're on a budget, you really need to bargain and check out other places.

We had a very pleasant trip to the bay. I'm going to show you the trip in photos. This first post will be of the way there through mostly motorcycle pictures. Rather than crop the motorcycle pictures, I decided to leave them as a I caught them from the bus and you can get a sense of the 3 and a half hour ride to Halong Bay from the backgrounds in the pictures.

Our tour guide Bang.

The bridge over the Red River back into the center of Hanoi. Bang got a phone call, we had to go back and pick up some more passengers. Bang said that 6 million people live in Hanoi, and 8 million in Ho Chi Minh City.

Brooms.

The highway just outside of Hanoi.

Rice fields outside of Hanoi.

Not sure what these are. First I thought they were jackfruit,
but now I think they are a big squash, but I'm not sure.

One of many factories.

The obligatory Asian pit stop at a ceramics factory.

These little piggies are going to market I suspect.

And here we are at Halong Bay, getting ready to board our junk for the ride through Halong Bay.

Here's one more motorcycle picture. This is from the bridge again, coming back into central Hanoi at rush hour.

Hanoi Traffic

We spent the day walking. I did get my ATM card back and it still works. It seems if you don't get the right pin the first time, they keep the card. I didn't get it right because I didn't push the buttons hard enough. Viet (above) whose headed to school in Texas worked out the card.




This is the headquarters of the bank whose ATM ate my card. The guard came over to tell me not to take pictures. Then when I asked Viet if I could take his picture he said sure, right in front of the guard, who got angry, so we went outside to take his picture.



We're booked on a tour to Halong Bay tomorrow. Overnight onland in a hotel, then back on the boat Sunday. Everyone assures us the water is totally calm. Prices shifted from the original recommended internet company that wanted $250 per person, to $125 per person, and finally we got it at $57 per person. Granted, we aren't staying on the boat overnight so that lowers the price, but J was worried about being seasick. And I think the first one included a private car and now were in a van with others, but that's fine.

So here's why I'm feeling a bit headachy today. The video is short, but gives you a good sense of getting across the street in the old quarter of Hanoi.

Hanoi Morning Walk

Our walk this morning. We're back at the room to get my passport. The weather is delightfully cool. I'm wearing a long sleeved shirt, though now at almost 1pm a t shirt would also be fine. So this will be mostly pictures with minimal commentary.



All was great as we learned to negotiate the motorcycles until I tried to get money from the ATM machine. I did get my receipt. But no money and no card back.




Michael, in the hotel where we found the ATM machine, was helpful. This isn't too unusual. But he couldn't get through.


We walked on to the travel agency the Australian couple at breakfast recommended. She called and got through. They are going to try to get our card and we might be able to pick it up at 2pm nearby. If yes, we'll go to Halong Bay tomorrow.






If not, we'll try to get the card tomorrow, Saturday, and go for just one day. So we slowly wondered on, using a walking guide to the Old Quarter of Hanoi as a general guide. Different streets have shop after shop of the same item. Sewing stuff, travel shops, shoes, kitchen stuff, etc.

Good Morning Vietnam!!

Here's a morning view from our balcony. The flag is part of our balcony.



I was going to add an audio from the movie Good Morning Vietnam, but when I looked for it, I got to a website that has original audio from soldiers in Vietnam, including this audio of the actual DJ Robin Williams played saying Good Morning Vietnam that someone taped off the radio. When you listen, no, it isn't broken. He just has great lungs.


And when I went onto Skype to see if I could get through to my son, the skype phone rang and it was my father's cousin in Brussels calling. I had found her skype number several months ago, but she's never on. So she must have seen my request to contact her and answered. So we talked for the first time in over a year. She must be 86 or 87 but there she was in living color. And we were still in bed. That was fun, but switching to German was a litte tricky. Fortunately, she can understand my frequent English words. It was the Thai that slipped in that confused her.

OK, we need to get up and explore Hanoi.

In Hanoi

J went back to the embassy while I was reviewing the paper, then came back to get me because she hadn’t taken the receipt. By 2:15 pm we had the passports back with new visas. The street looked pretty jammed, so we bagged the idea of going to see the farmers who are demonstrating at Government House and grabbed a cab back to the airport. While we were in the cab, after the driver and I chatted a while, I asked if he could explain the red shirts and yellow shirts to me. Basically he said:

The yellow shirts go to demonstrations with guns and sticks and they stay, like they did when the shut down the airport. They hurt the economy. They don’t believe in democracy [they do support the government that came in through a coups]. When they break the law, nothing happens to them. But when the red shirts break the law they get punished right away. The yellow shirts are communists. [Has he been looking at the pictures on my blog?]

Well, that’s certainly the opposite of the story I get at work. But then, in Bangkok, the majority support the government and it is a yellow shirt stronghold. In Chiang Mai it’s the other way around.

Here are the early birds already at the gate.

Our plane waiting as the sun sets in Bangkok.

We made it to the airport fine and I’m now typing on the flight to Vietnam.
Flying out of Bangkok

Later - it's now almost 11pm March 5, 2009 in Hanoi.

All went well. But at the customs the guy took my passport and walked away. Then came back. Then he wrote down 5/3 and pointed to the visa that said 6/3. I turned the page and showed him the new visa. He really didn't know what to do with that. He took the passport over to someone else who came back to me and spoke some English. I explained about the two visas. He said, one day, no problem. Yeah, thanks, tell that to Air Asia. Anyway, we got through. Then trying to change money. The ATM didn't work. The airport rate was 17,000 dong to the US dollar. Well it wasn't that rounded off. They had told us to get a mini-bus but warned us of touts getting us into a taxi. After getting pointed in the wrong direction and told the minibus wouldn't leave for two hours, we found out that we were in the wrong place. The minibus driver wanted double the price they told us in the airport. Then people moved us to the public bus and we ended up on that going to town. It was full. Joan had a seat, then people pointed to a seat in back. The man next to me spoke great English. He works for a Japanese electronic company and was visiting his girlfriend who checks passports at the airport. That's him in the back of the dark bus as it bounces along.

He got us to the end of the line - in the old quarter where our hotel is
- and into a cab for the next 2 km.

Here's Thu, the lady I'd been communicating with by email about the room, getting the info she needs from our passports. The lady in the back was making us a fruit plate and tea for J and lemonade for me.

And here's the view from our little balcony.

And here's our room from the balcony.

So now we have to figure out what to do for the next few days. There's pressure to get out on a tour. I don't think we're going to Halong Bay - everyone's recommendation - because of J's tendency to get seasick. The info comes back that the water is flat and calm, but J's pretty sensitive. We'll see. Anyway, your up to date in real time almost.

The Man Without Qualities - A Chapter that May be Skipped . . .

Some time ago I said I’d try to post excerpts from this book by Richard Musil, and Austrian novelist who died in 1942. The more I read, the more I’m struck by the insights Musil has. But it is also a strange novel as the characters seem all to be more generalized figures that Musil can use to talk about human behavior in general, than real, specific people. But I find Musil to be insightful, over and over again. Of course when someone thinks someone else is insightful, it just means they agree.

The other night I read a chapter with this title:

28 A chapter that may be skipped by anyone not particularly impressed by thinking as an occupation (p. 115)

Unfortunately, nothing is so hard to achieve as a literary representation of a man thinking. When someone asked a great scientist how he managed to come up with so much that was new, he replied: “Because I never stop thinking about it” And it is surely safe to say that unexpected insights turn up for no other reason than that they are expected. They are in no small part a success of character, emotional stability, unflagging ambition, and unremitting work. What a bore such constancy must be? Looking at it another way, the solution of an intellectual problem comes about not very differently from a dog with a stick in his mouth trying to get through a narrow door; he will turn his head left and right until the stick slips through. We do much the same thing, but with the difference that we don’t make indiscriminate attempts but already know from experience approximately how it’s done. And if a clever fellow natural has far more skill and experience with these twistings and turnings than a dim one, the slipping-through takes the clever fellow just as much by surprise; it is suddenly there, and one perceptibly feels slightly disconcerted because one’s ideas seem to have come of their own accord instead of waiting for their creator. This disconcerted feeling is nowadays called intuition by many people who formerly, believing that it must be regarded as something suprapersonal, have called it inspiration; but it is only something impersonal, namely the affinity and coherence of the things themselves, meeting inside a head.

It goes on, and I hope my daughter is reading this part:

The better the head, the less evident its presence in this process. As long as the process of thinking is in motion it is a quite wretched state, as if all the brain’s convolutions were suffering from colic; and when it is finished it no longer has the form of the thinking process as one experiences it but already that of what has been thought, which is regrettably impersonal, for the thought then faces outward and is dressed for communication to the world. When a man is in the process of thinking, there is no way to catch the moment between the personal and the impersonal, and this is manifestly why thinking is such an embarrassment for writers that they gladly avoid it.