It is a dreary, rainy, and slightly chilled Sunday in Hanoi. We went out for breakfast and coffee earlier, but decided to stay in while the rain falls. We thought about walking around in our rain ponchos but the traffic here is so crazy, it seemed a bit too much to deal with.
Our time in Hanoi is coming to a close - we leave for Cambodia in 8 days.
Overview of Hanoi
In our first few days in Hanoi, we were skeptical whether or not we were going to like it here. You have to really hunt for a quiet place here. The traffic is crazy. Crossing the street is crazy. Lots of horn honking. If you want to take a leisurely walk, you are going to have to walk through 10-15 minutes of crazy to get to a place where you can relax and not worry about bumping into people or being run over by a motorcycle. We have found it is quite common here for motorcycles to get tired of the traffic on the street and simply drive on the sidewalk. Unlike other places we have been, you can actually find wide sidewalks where there are no motorcycles parked or businesses spilling out on to the walkway. The dodging things can get tiresome.
But most of that stuff we have gotten used to and actually like it here despite the poor air quality we have had the past week.
Tuesday, we are getting out of the hustle and bustle and taking a 2 night cruise in Lan Ha Bay. You may or may not remember that originally we were not going to come to Hanoi but we saw a place called Halong Bay that looked beautiful so we decided we wanted to see it. As a result, we modified our itinerary and made a month in Hanoi happen - mostly to do that cruise.
Then we started researching and found that Halong Bay is overcrowded with tourist boats and the water is not so clear (it’s a bit polluted - shocking). We learned that you can get the same views with fewer tourists and more beautiful water in Lan Ha Bay. As a result, that is where we are going.
It is about a 3-hour drive from here. We leave Tuesday morning and will get back Thursday afternoon. We decided to splurge and selected the 5-star option for our cruise. We shall see if it really is 5-star.
We booked this through one of the many local tourist shops in town. We did some online research and started to get very overwhelmed with the options and trying to figure out exactly what company to go with. That is why we stopped in the one of the local places. The lady was very helpful giving us all the information and cost for each option and let us choose what we wanted without an annoying attempt to up-sell us. It ended up being cheaper than what we found online for a 5-star experience.
We were so happy with our experience with her, we went back and booked a day-trip to Ninh Binh which is supposed to be a beautiful location in the mountains.
One last thing to note about Vietnam in general - they erect and open businesses and buildings at a speed I did not think possible. Our thought on this after much discussion is they don't have the licensing and inspections we have.
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| This building near our AirBnB was a complete wreck of a construction zone when we got here three weeks ago and two days ago, it was this and fully open for business. We went there yesterday - it was lovely. If someone had told me it would be done and open before we left, I would have called you a liar! |
Cost in Hanoi
While Hanoi is certainly more expensive than Da Nang, Vietnam, it is in no way "expensive." We spend about $8 - $10 for 2 coffees and one breakfast in the morning (Blaise doesn't eat breakfast, unless it is part of mine that I did not finish). We can get yummy coffee drinks anywhere for a total of $4 for the both of us. Dinner for both of us without drinks is usually $10-$12 and add another $4-$7 per mixed drink or wine.
We spent about $870 on our AirBnB in the heart of Hanoi's Old Quarter (prime tourist area) and that includes weekly apartment cleaning and laundry service.
How We Spend Our Days On The Road
Since we are here for a month, we don’t have to rush around and see everything. There are some days we identify something we want to see that morning and go. Other days, we wander around and see what we can find. And other days, we go to the lake in the Old Quarter, walk a few laps around, and watch the locals take their Tet pictures in traditional clothing.
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| A street we walk down nearly every day. The people along this street sell produce and a variety of meat. The woman in the green, walked from right next to our AirBnB to deliver a tray of food to someone working on this street. |
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| Some of the meat sold on the same street. If you zoom into the meat on the table at the top of the picture, you will see chicken with black feet sticking straight up. |
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| Same street. That guy sits there every single day making whatever paste that is. Some people simply pull up on their motorbike and pick up food on this street, never getting off the bike. |
Yesterday, we wandered around and found the monument for where John McCain was shot down. The monument was originally erected in 1967 but rehabbed several times since then. That is one of those places we would have never set out to go see because you really aren’t going to find it as a tourist destination on any list. And there really isn’t much to see, but it is interesting. Those are the things you are going to find when you are just walking around. If we had an itinerary every day, we would have never seen it.
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| Monument of where John McCain was shot down |
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| Information in English about the McCain monument |
Same for the opera house we found the day before. We went walking by the lake and decided to go down a street we had never been down and there it was - the beautiful opera house with a lovely cafe’ we stopped at for coffee.
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| Hanoi Opera House |
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| Cafe' at the Opera House |
Because we stay in one place for so long, we like to get a lay of the land, do some research and then book tours once we are at the location. I don’t think we have booked any excursion prior to arrival at a location since we have been gone.
Coffee
Vietnam has set a new bar for coffee culture! Their coffee game is even stronger than Italy. When we started looking into it, we discovered Vietnam is the second largest exporter of coffee in the world, behind Brazil. I would have never guessed they were 1 and 2 in coffee exports.
I am not a huge coffee drinker. I don’t like coffee that much. I would never drink it black and I never drink it at home but there is something about being on the road… I DO drink coffee when we travel.
And Vietnam has the best coffee drinks from coconut coffee to egg coffee to salted coffee. They like putting sweetened condensed milk in their coffee and that is delicious too.
I think the United States has really missed out by not embracing condensed milk. There is so much you can do with it and it really is tasty, in small amounts!
I am going to miss the coffee drinks when we leave Vietnam!
What Do We Do Other Than Be Tourists
When we are not exploring the city or taking a tour of someplace, I read and we watch streaming. We only watch one streaming show a day so we are really not watching much TV, although I still watch my Food Network shows. I find them comforting.
Since we have been gone we have watched all seasons of The Diplomat (Blaise had not seen the first two seasons), the latest season of Man on the Inside, and several Korean dramas: King the Land, Beyond the Bar, and we just finished Extraordinary Attorney Woo. I guess we are gearing up for our visit to South Korea.
When watching King the Land, I discovered the two main characters were in separate KPop groups. Then I went down the KPop bunny trail and now I am a fan of KPop. Whoda thunk?
I also read a great deal. In 2025 I read 73 books. In case you need/want something good to read, here are some of my favorite books in the past year: Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance (Espach), The Stationery Shop (Kamali), The Widows of Champagne (Ryan), Where the Rivers Merge (Monroe - the first in a series but the next book is not yet out), One Golden Summer (Fortune), Recursion (Crouch), and The Partisan (Worrall).
So far I have read 5 books this year and I am currently reading The Phoenix Pencil Company.
If you have read or watched something you have really enjoyed, let me know. I am always looking for something new to watch or read. (But we only have Netflix, Prime, and Philo for streaming.)
Nipah Virus
We have no concerns with the Nipah virus and have not been affected. It is not here and not easily transferable between humans. I did find out from the woman at our regular breakfast/coffee spot that their numbers are down because Vietnam is turning away travelers from India at the airport as a result of the Nipah virus.
Trip Status
We are more than halfway through this trip. We left on the cruise from L.A. to Tokyo on September 24. Our cruise from Tokyo to Alaska leaves May 9 and is 12 nights. How did we get nearly 5 months into this trip already? We are only 3 months from hopping on a boat back to the U.S. Time has flown by!
Thus far, we have been to 2 countries we had never been to before: Thailand and Vietnam.
Although we had changed planes in Japan before this trip, this is the first opportunity we have had to spend time in Japan. When we count the countries we have been to, Blaise counted Japan before this trip but I did not. My thought is you don’t count a country unless you have spent some time exploring it.
But Japan IS a bit different because before this trip we actually changed airports to change planes, which by the way is so common in Tokyo, they have a whole well-oiled system for busing between the airports. I still don't think it counts.
In this trip, we will add three more countries to the list of countries we have visited: Cambodia, Malaysia, and South Korea, bringing my count of countries visited to 56 and Blaise’s to 57 (he’s been to India and I have not).
Likely the next time you will hear from me, I will be in Cambodia where we will knock out one of our bucket list items - Angkor Wat.
We have three more bucket list items to mark off before we make it back to Texas: the DMZ in Korea, cherry blossoms in Japan, and Mt. McKinley/Denali (whatever we are calling it these days). Isn’t that a variety?!
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| Blaise LOVES these little trucks! |
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