We have just a few more days in Vietnam before I go home: Today in Hanoi, and then the next two in Halong Bay. But let me catch you up on our trip in Vietnam so far.
We spent a couple of days in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, seeing the few sights around there. It's a crazy, intense, dirty, underdeveloped city. I tried to imagine it was once great and stately, but it's in such disrepair it's hard to picture. We saw some of the memorials/museums dedicated to the genocide, which were educational but horribly depressing. The Killing Fields of Choeung Ek were an execution site out of town, and the Tuol Sleng Museum was an old torture and interrogation prison. I'll talk more about those in a later post.
After Phnom Penh it was onto Vietnam. We trucked straight through the border and Saigon, heading straight to the lovely beach town of Mui Ne for a bit of chill out time. It was great to have just a couple days to relax at the beach right in the middle of our trip (and after crazy Cambodia). The beach was gorgeous, and we also ended up renting a scooter to see some of the nearby sand dunes, of which there were both red and white. Renting a scooter/motorbike in Vietnam is only for the experienced or the foolhardy. You can guess which one we were. Still, it was fun, and we didn't crash!
From Mui Ne we traveled 17 hours by bus up to Hoi An, on the central coast. Hoi An is an old trading port that was active until the French colonialists came in and moved the port to Danang, which is about an hour north by car. The old town of Hoi An is cute and sweet, and clearly a big tourist draw. It's very nice, but there's not a lot of sights to see, so we spent a lot of our time wandering the little lanes and alleys and eating a lot, which was great because Hoi An is known for its food as well. We skipped out on seeing the Cham ruins at My Son because it was so hot while we were there, and sitting in the sun on the back of a motorbike for an hour just didn't sound like fun. Plus we're sort of ruins-ed out after Angkor Wat and we need SOMETHING to see when we come back.
And now we're in Hanoi. We caught a flight up here yesterday rather than endure another looooong and overnight bus journey again -- we would've arrived just a few hours ago this morning instead of having yesterday afternoon and evening to explore. I like Hanoi already, and so does Haisun. It feels like we're finally in real Vietnam, after the beach paradise of Mui Ne and tourist-focused Hoi An. We spent yesterday evening walking around the Old Quarter, eating food from stalls and drinking bia hoi -- basically a cup of cheap beer from a keg -- on little plastic stools on the sidewalk. Think like really cheap beer garden.
Anyway, time to get started on our adventures for today!
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