Ninh Binh

We're in North Vietnam 🤩 After a long coach up from Phong Nha, we arrived in the Ninh Binh region just south of Hanoi. That means we've finally reached somewhere less than 30⁰C... we never thought we'd be so excited for the respite of clouds and mild drizzle!

Even more excitingly: we are joined by Jess & Jason, friends from the UK who have coordinated their holiday to coincide with ours for six days. Lovely to catch up 🙌🏼

Meeting friends has also forced us to be more active in planning excursions. The pace of a two-week holiday is much faster, so we're cramming more activities into each day. The four of us took a rowboat tour around the Trang An river, where ancient ladies manoeuvre the boats with just their feet. We caught an electric bus to the local temples, on which two boys insisted on sitting up front with the driver, and were treated to a beautiful view of a mutt getting railed by a labradoodle in the middle of the road. One of the temples had a poster with a long list of sins and their consequences. Unfortunately for us, apparently too much frivolous travelling leads to mobility problems. Damn.

In the afternoon, we walked up 500 steps to the Lying Dragon Mountain (not sure if the dragon is resting or just dishonest), and Dan pretended to jump in a lotus pond, which temporarily caused Chelsea’s soul to leave her body. In the evening we found the cheapest beers in all of Southeast Asia so far, by quite a big margin—just đ7,000, or 20p 🤯—and Chelsea took a chance on an 'egg beer', with mixed results.

On day two, we took a crazy taxi to Hoa Lu old town. This was honestly a bit unimpressive, with recently built 'old' facades for tourist shops underwhelming, until we realised that there is a difference between 'old town' and 'ancient city', the latter of which is a much more credible historic site a few kilometres away. This was the capital of Vietnam between 968-1010, and had some REAL old structures to see.

The same F1-aspiring driver took us to Bai Dinh pagoda, which we thought would be just one building but turns out to be an enormous temple complex, built way back in the mists of time (2003-2010). The infrastructure at Bai Dinh is like a theme park: there's a colossal parking area, hundreds of electric shuttle buses, cavernous dining areas, etc. Disney land for Buddhists. Unlike Disney Land, the food courts were totally shut, and it was very quiet, as well as being down season and rainy. This gave us plenty of time to enjoy the bizarre Buddha statues, humongous iron bell, and giant pagoda in peace. We eventually convinced a few listless ballroom staff to rustle up some lunch around 3.30pm, and were served the most enormous bowls of rice in an entirely empty wedding/conference venue, our hysterical laughter bouncing off the gold-plated furnishings.

Our taxi driver was late picking us up, so we nicknamed him Sleepy Joe Bai-Dinh (a pun that makes much more sense out loud than written down), though unlike his namesake he very energetically attempted to aqua-plane on the backroads of rural Ninh Binh. Surprisingly safely back in Tam Coc, the drizzle pushed the four of us indoors for hot stone massages. We forgot to mention to Jess and Jason that this would include the SEA tradition of getting bopped repeatedly on the forehead. After, we went for pizza at a place in the rice paddies with loads of motivational posters exhorting 'be number one in your field'. They clearly followed their own advice: it was definitely the number one pizza in that particular field.Läs mer