Monkey Balmed
Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008Rod and I flew north from Hue to Hanoi. Hanoi is quite different from Saigon as is north Vietnam compared to the south. Hanoi is a smaller city with very few tall buildings and it has an older feel about it due to the architecture and lack of modernity. Oddly, we are finding that north Vietnam has many hip coffee cafes, but there is no such creativity for the food establishments. Of course, it similarly has the million plus motorbikes racing everywhere and basically everything spoken and written is in Vietnamese. There is a central lake and it appears the same motorbikes go around it non-stop – Vietnam’s Le Mans! As with Saigon, there is basically no street parking in Hanoi so that every inch of the roads can be used for traffic. “Sidewalks” is a joke because the sidewalks are used as parking lots for the motorbikes and many businesses flow out of their buildings and onto the sidewalks for display, seating and cooking areas. The next morning we took a car and a hydrofoil to Cat Ba Island in Halong Bay to try and find one of the rarest primates in the world – the Cat Ba Langur.
vagabondrick