Day 47: Hanoi

The morning was spent organising a trekking tour in Sapa and a boat tour through Bai Tu Long Bay. After spending an hour or so talking to the hostel staff about our options and trying to decide what we wanted to do, we left to get breakfast and talk to some other tour agencies.

Banh Mi for breakfast! We both had the mixed rolls (mine minus the chicken) and they were tasty as for only VD25,000 ($1.70) each.

After we’d eaten and I returned from the land of thle hangry, we walked to Lily’s tour agency which was highly rated online. We spent another hour or so here trying to decide on a plan for our tours. Finally, success! We booked to go to Sapa the following day by sleeping bus at 7am. The cruise was harder to decide because there’s not much differentiation between the difference price points, but eventually we decided to go with Viola Cruises the day after we return to Hanoi from trekking.

We spent the rest of the day exploring the streets. The train in Hanoi is infamous because the houses and cafes are right next to the tracks. There were no trains until 7pm so we went for a short walk along the tracks to soak it in.
From there we walked up to Ho Tay Lake. Walking around the edges of the lake we could see many dead fish floating in the water, killed by the heavy pollution in the lake. Regardless, there were still people fishing!
We stopped for lunch at a sushi shop to treat ourselves. It was really fresh and tasty! We both had eel sushi for the first time which was interesting, but good.
From there we continued to walk around the small portion of the lake, crossing the bridge to save us the extra two hours walk around the large section. It was scenic and enjoyable, with the lake on one side and colourful Hanoi houses lining the street on the other side.

After returning to the hostel for cold showers (it was so humid we’d both been drenched in sweat only 10 minutes after leaving on our walk) and a beer, we took the luggage we didn’t want to take trekking to the tour agency for storage and went back to the same street food corner for dinner. Kyle had the same dish (and they forgot about him so he waited a long time lol) and I had the vegetable pho. It was delicious! I also ordered some bread to eat with it which turned out to be deep fried sticks. They were really tasty once soaked in the pho. We ended up with a small discount for dinner because they felt bad for forgetting about Kyle’s food.

It was then treat yourself evening, with a visit to the bakery to get some mille feuilles and lemon and orange tarts. They were really tasty and so cheap at only $1.20 for all four items!