In April, in between travelling up and down the UK for work, I boarded a plane that would take me to Asia. For the first time in my life! The destination was Vietnam – or Việt Nam, another one of my “always wanted to see”-places and it did not disappoint. But let’s get to that later…
I travelled with my friends Louisa, Petra, Kathrin and Elaine – neither of us has been to Vietnam before but also neither of us had had enough time to properly research all the places we could visit in this extremely long country. We all had some places in our heads that would be a nice-to-do but other than the first 2 nights in Hanoi, nothing was planned, let alone booked. I’ve never travelled like this before but having experienced backpackers in our group, I didn’t worry about it.
So the first destination was Hanoi, the capitol of Vietnam. When we arrived, we had been up for over 24hours – I couldn’t sleep on any of our flights so I was relatively knackered. When we arrived in Hanoi, everything seemed a bit too much at first – too many cars and motorbikes, too many peple, too much noise. However, it was only early afternoon so we set out to explore the Old Quarter and check our food options. During the next day I got used to the sounds of Hanoi a bit more. More exploration had to be done, and more food to be eaten. Oh, the food!
We spent 2 days in Hanoi before flying south to Da Nang, which is about halfway down the coast, in order to get to Hội An. All of us fell in love with this beautiful place the moment our taxi pulled into the lively old town. The law forces shop owners to have lanterns outside of their houses, which gives Hội An a wonderful calm and colourful flair.
After Hội An we travelled back north, taking a night train from Hanoi to Lao Cai to get to Sa Pa. Sa Pa did not impress us at all, it feels like a European Ski resort so for our second night we chose a homestay in the middle of the beautiful and famous rice terraces, rather than spending another night in a hotel in town. Our host “Crazy John” took us on a 19km trek through the rice fields, where sadly my camera died. It had started to act up before I even came to Vietnam and the heat probably took all life out of it. So from then on I had to rely on my phone for photos. Picture a sad Anja…
