[RD] Backpacking Việt Nam (2019)

[warpus]

Hoàn Kiếm Lake

This 12 hectare lake lies in the historical centre of Hanoi and acts as a popular meeting and hangout spot. There is a wide pedestrian walkway right by the water that runs all the way around the lake, and from what I could tell everything is surrounded by various cafes, restaurants, and shops.

The name of the lake translates to Lake of the Returned Sword. The origins of the name are a bit interesting. Legend has it that in the 15th century Vietnamese Emperor Lê Lợi received or found parts of a magical sword, which he later assembled and used to drive out the Ming Chinese invasion. At some point after the 10 year long war with the Ming was won, Lê Lợi was boating on this lake when a Golden Turtle God appeared and asked for the sword back. The sword was returned and the name of the lake was changed.

There is an island on this lake named Jade Island, on which The Temple of the Jade Mountain stands. It honours several people: the 13th century military leader Tran Hung Dao, who supposedly defeated 3 separate Mongolian invasions of Vietnam, the classic scholar Van Xuong, and Nguyen Van Sieu, a famous writer who undertook repairs of the temple in 1864.

Jade island is connected to the shore by Thê Húc Bridge, which is a popular attraction and lights up at night.

 

[The_J]

Lake, yet the picture on the map shows it as totally green

 

[warpus]

Lake, yet the picture on the map shows it as totally green

The old name of the lake was actually Green Water Lake. So this lake had green water even 500+ years ago.

 

[warpus]

St. Joseph's Cathedral

There are just over 7 million Catholics in Vietnam, making up about 7.4% of the population of the country. To give you an idea how this compares to other religions, Buddhism clocks in at 14.9%, and "No religion or folk belief" is represented by an overwhelming 73.7% of the country. This breaks down further to about 30% of the population not being affiliated with any religion and 44% or so practicing one of the local folk traditions. Vietnam is officially an atheist state, although it seems that the citizens are more or less free to follow whatever religion they wish. In fact, the "Triple religion", a sort of confluence of Mahayana Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, and local folk beliefs remains a strong influence in the country, although formal membership paints a slightly different picture.

As a result it's not unusual to see western style churches in Vietnamese cities, such as Hanoi's St. Joseph's Cathedral, which was one of the first structures built by the French colonial government in Indochina. The cathedral is the oldest church in Hanoi and acts as the headquarters of the Archdiocese of Vietnam. It was built in 1886 and was designed to resemble the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris.

There are several elementary and primary schools nearby, making the public space surrounding the cathedral popular with students.

Soccer/football is the most popular sport in the country. The Vietnamese are very passionate about their national football team and the sport plays an important role in Vietnamese national identity.

 

[Cutlass]

Seems like many of the Vietnamese people who have settled in this area are Catholics.

 

[warpus]

Seems like many of the Vietnamese people who have settled in this area are Catholics.

According to wikipedia there are 315,764 Catholics in the Archdiocese of Hanoi, which corresponds to about 3.7% of the population (city proper, not the metro area). There actually seem to be more catholics in the southern part of the country. Looking up the numbers, the Archdiocese of Ho Chi Minh City contains 683,988 catholics, which corresponds to about 9.2% of the population. The archdiocese of Huế (in central Vietnam) meanwhile contains about 3.1% of the local population.

Travelling through various cities and towns in Vietnam it was very common to see catholic churches and cathedrals. I wouldn't take this cathedral as a sign that many catholics happen to have settled there; it's moreso a reflection of the fact that 7%+ of Vietnamese are catholic (but also that Hanoi was the capital of French indochina for a while, so an important French colonial centre). It's also possible that the nearby schools are affiliated with the church, although I am not sure if that's the case.

 

[warpus]

The Streets of the Old Quarter

I recharged with a quick coffee & pastry at an upscale café near the cathedral and spent the rest of the day exploring the streets of the old quarter.

The Vietnamese take their coffee quite seriously, so I was pretty much stepping into random cafes every single day.. This particular café was on a strip targeting tourists visiting the cathedral, so it was a bit overpriced.. but it was quite nice inside and felt proper fancy. The coffee was definitely worth it.

You couldn't really rely on sidewalks, as they were often packed.. but getting around on foot wasn't really that bad. The motorists here are quite used to having to weave in and out of traffic, avoiding pedestrians as they do so..

Street food options were available, but I resisted them for now.

Spoiler :

I was getting hungry, but I sort of wanted more pho, you know?

 

[FriendlyFire]

One way street or I suspect no one bothers to follow the lane rules ?
Good thing you didnt buy any of that, it looks like tourist food trap except for the skewers

 

[warpus]

The old quarter does actually have a whole bunch one way streets. It looks like the first pic is debatable, bute in the second that's definitely a one way street.

I am a sucker for street skewers Each time I've had them in other nearby countries, they were always amazing.. So I was eyeing those.. but decided to hold out for more pho.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Street skewers can be pho good! I enjoy them.

 

[warpus]

Vietnam's craft beer scene

I was very pleasantly surprised to find a booming craft beer culture in Vietnam, something that was not at all on my radar before my flight to Hanoi. In fact, there was a Craft Beer pub not too far from my hotel!

Beer has been a popular beverage in Vietnam for a while now - about 40 billion litres of beer are consumed in the country every year, making Vietnam the 2nd largest consumer of beer in all of Asia. Up until 6 or 7 years ago though, what most people drank was the iconic bia hơi, a type of light draught beer that's brewed daily and is mainly served in small bars and on street corners.

Bia hơi is still the most popular beer in the country, but American, British, and Australian ex-pats have started a craft beer scene and culture here that's really begun to take off. At first these beers were mainly targeting tourists, but it did not take long for the locals to get in on the action. Craft beers are transitioning into more of a local product and more and more microbreweries have been opening up in order to serve the expanding craft beer market and increasing demand.

Beer imports are not that common in Vietnam due to import taxes and levies that make it hard for foreign brands to compete. This has helped fuel the opening of all these new microbreweries as well.

This craft beer pub would not have been out of place in my home town in Canada. Sitting down at a table I could have easily imagined that I was back home - with IPAs, Blonde Ales, Belgian Pale Ales, etc. advertised on the board on the wall.

Vietnamese craft breweries tend to use local ingredients as more than just a marketing ploy. Everything from locally made Marou chocolate to Dalat coffee.. to passion fruit and even smelly durian fruit is used as ingredients in Vietnamese craft brews. This makes sampling the various beers on offer an adventure of its own.

In terms of quality and taste I found the IPA that I ordered to be very good, although quite a bit more expensive than a glass of Bia hơi. You can expect to pay less for a craft beer here than you would in the west - but not a lot less.

It was the end of my very first full day in the country and I just couldn't resist ending the day how it began.

Spoiler :

 

[Cutlass]

What was the language situation like? Did you have an easy enough time finding people you could speak with?

 

[warpus]

What was the language situation like? Did you have an easy enough time finding people you could speak with?

English is not that widely spoken or understood in Vietnam, but I didn't really have any problems with language. In the old quarter in Hanoi a lot of the businesses are used to English-speaking tourists, so for instance.. the waiter at this craft beer pub spoke decent English and was able to take my order with no issues.. Same thing with the first restaurant where I ate pho, although in that case it seemed that they had one specific waiter who looked after English-speaking clients.. In many other restaurants I had to point to the menu to show them what I want - especially in restaurants that tourists don't tend to frequent. In many cases I could just say what I want.. i.e. "Pho Tai" (rare beef pho).. but I would point to the item on the menu anyhow, as my Vietnamese pronunciation is probably way off.

I stayed at various guest houses on my trip and that's where I continually ran into hosts who just don't speak any English at all. It seems like this would get in the way, but it really didn't! As soon as I wanted to say something, the person behind the counter would whip out their phone and instruct me to talk into it. The phone would translate everything I said into Vietnamese.. They would read the translation, speak their response in Vietnamese, and then show me the response on the screen in English, and we'd repeat until our conversation was over. That's usually how it went down at the guest houses, although occasionally you'd run into one with a staff member who spoke some English. This helped speed up verbal exchanges. From what I gathered these guest houses were usually family owned, and it was the son or daughter of the family who learned English in school and was helping out with the family business. It does seem to be a generational thing, from what I noticed anyway - the older generation tend to not speak any English at all.. while the younger generation was eager to learn it.

I guess the biggest problem with language was whenever I walked into one of those restaurants where only locals eat.. and looked at a menu that did not have an English translation. It meant that I had to google the names to figure out what I want.. or order blindly. The one benefit of Vietnamese over other east Asian languages though is that it uses a variant of the Latin alphabet. It's a lot easier to remember that "Pho Tai" means rare beef pho VS trying to do the same thing w/ Japanese, Chinese, Thai, or Korean symbols. It also made it easier to walk down the street and sort of figure out what some establishments specialize in. Cà Phê means coffee, so if I was walking past a place with that sign out front and the windows were tinted, I did not have to stop and google the place to see what it was. I would know right away that they serve coffee.

 

[warpus]

A Walk to the Mausoleum
Tuesday, March 5, 2019

I woke up well refreshed and ready to hit the town. Since the weather forecast seemed to be cooperating I decided to go on a walk around town, hoping to eventually arrive at the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum. It was about a 30 minute walk away, but the rough route I was planning would take me on several detours first.

Peeking into occasional stores was an opportunity to get a look at the local economy. It is said that the Vietnamese people have a cultural inclination for work and entrepreneurship. From what I understand the Vietnamese government encourages this with tax breaks & other benefits for local businesses, which has created a lot of stability and made things appealing to foreign investors.

On my walk I encountered an example of a Vietnamese cultural practice that is now illegal.. but still allowed during traditional festivals that have been going on for centuries.

Spoiler :

 

[Birdjaguar]

Phone translations were common for me in China too. they made conversations possible even if slow and a bit.

 

[FriendlyFire]

You can ask for extras you know, its kinda late but normally can purchase additional meat, meat balls, or beef brisket with your Pho
Traditionally though most in the south stack their Pho with vietnamese basil, soy sprouts and some lemon.
But I like mine with extra slice of meat and Vietnamese basil. Koreans like to pile on the chillis. Plenty of combinations to find what you like and no one will look down on you.

 

[warpus]

"Decide to die, for the country to live"

I've done more research on this quote, as it is the same quote as the one on the martyrs monument from the previous day. It appears to be attributed to Ho Chi Minh, who the Vietnamese call "Uncle Ho". The quote is from a letter he wrote to national guard soldiers in Hanoi during the early stages of the First Indochina War, or the French War as it is known in Vietnam.

The soldier is holding a device used in a sort of suicide attack on a tank. It has 3 prongs (not seen here), which I assume are used to strike the side of the tank, causing the device to explode. From what I understand it was not always fatal, but most who used it did not survive.

The inclusion of a woman on these monuments is not an accident. Vietnamese women played a significant role in the Indochina Wars (1945 to 1975). During and after these wars the ruling communist party of Vietnam made efforts to increase women's rights and representation in government. Landmark job quotas requiring a certain percentage of women were implemented in the 1960s. Today Vietnam has one of the highest female labour-participation rates in the world.

The women on these monuments are also a nod to the Vietnamese intellectuals who played a role in the fight, many of them being women.

 

[FriendlyFire]

No your pretty much dead, those were originally Japanese anti tank weapons
Because they were meant to be deployed against the flat surfaces of tanks and were activated by compressing the prongs one had to get in close to ensure a hit. The shaped charged was supposed to direct the most of the blast inwards but it was pretty much fatal for the infantry. The Germans built something similar in the form of magnetic shape charges with a timer. This at least gave the soldier a chance to live

E: The allies after capturing a number of these, uparmoured their tanks with improvised field improvements. The Australia attached a layer of wood onto their matildas and the Americans added cement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunge_mine

 

[Samson]

A Walk to the Mausoleum
Tuesday, March 5, 2019

I woke up well refreshed and ready to hit the town. Since the weather forecast seemed to be cooperating I decided to go on a walk around town, hoping to eventually arrive at the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum. It was about a 30 minute walk away, but the rough route I was planning would take me on several detours first.

Peeking into occasional stores was an opportunity to get a look at the local economy. It is said that the Vietnamese people have a cultural inclination for work and entrepreneurship. From what I understand the Vietnamese government encourages this with tax breaks & other benefits for local businesses, which has created a lot of stability and made things appealing to foreign investors.

On my walk I encountered an example of a Vietnamese cultural practice that is now illegal.. but still allowed during traditional festivals that have been going on for centuries.

Spoiler :

Did you see a fight?

 

[warpus]

Did you see a fight?

I did not, there was nothing else around to suggest that there would be one happening soon, it was just that one guy, so I continued walking.