Day 3 - Vietnam Discovery from Hanoi to the Meekong Delta - 'Inside Vietnam' adventure with EXPLORE

Day 3 - Hanoi to Ha Long Bay

It’s an early start this morning as we’re off to a great museum before we journey east to the enticing Ha Long Bay.  It's already rather warm and humid as we arrive at the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology as we hop off our minibus.  It's a truly fascinating museum packed full of colourful exhibits both indoors and outdoors.  The exhibits and storyboards really do delve deep into the cultures and heritage of the vast array of ethnic tribes of Vietnam.

This is the greatest of the wonders for me of travel, the main cause of my addiction with travel, is without looking it all up on the internet to go and discover amazing peoples and cultures around the world.  Visiting museums is great for the knowledge but just being in another country and culture and connecting with people is something the internet will never replace.

The Kinh tribe accounts for about 85% of the population with a further 53 much smaller tribes making up the remainder of the population, starting at just 1.8% for the second largest tribe.

Outdoors there are many buildings built in the traditional styles of varying parts of the country
which you can walk around and explore, shoes off of course.  Whilst walking around the museum complex in the rain, Joseph points out three guys crouched down, working some wooden posts, constructing a building.  These workers are brought in by the museum to maintain authenticity to the exhibits, building in their traditional style of their clan.  The three men are speaking in their unique and rare regional/clan language which Joseph says he cannot understand a single word of.

We have a mid-way stop at a rather strange rest stop.  Inside there are workers at their stations busily sewing and creating, heads down and working with precision and speed.  We are shown around by a guide while the tapestries are being made, paintings too, all to raise money for a disability charity.  As we move through the building it unexpectedly morphs into a gift shop first, then a wine and beer shop and finally a motorway cafe/restaurant at the back.  Odd but interesting.

My attempt to avoid rice and noodles for just one meal sort of backfires.  A cheese and ham toasted sandwich appears in front of me, pummeled and beaten as though it has suffered the wrath of a wannabe Michelin starred chef, who had been forcibly relegated to motorway service cooking after being kicked out in the first week of ‘Hells Kitchen – Vietnam’.

Judging by the disheveled state of the object on the plate they were outraged and disgusted at the audacity of a tourist asking for a food item so far below their talent.  The use of the word 'toasted' would be under scrutiny by trade descriptions act in the UK as I estimate its exposure to ‘toasting’ as being about 3 seconds of a cigarette lighter passing briefly over the surface of the top slice.

Back on the bus and we continue on through the rain to Ha Long Bay and arrive at our hotel, with rain still pouring down our driver kindly decides to save us the 5 yard dash through the rain and drives up the pavement to park the bus almost in the doorway.  Not really necessary but this is a little show of the kind of consideration and service we’ve received on our journey here so far. 

The pre-dinner drinks committee are meeting at 6pm to find some hostelry for drinks.  I met up with on the group on the 25th floor rooftop bar at The Watson Hotel in midtown.  The rooftop bar is the bluest lighting I have ever seen, the group photos with three of us bald guys made us look like the blue man group without the need for the face paint.

Ha Long Bay has a bit of mini-Vegas feel with all the bright lights and countless Karaoke bars and all the other 'adult attractions', that are necessarily in the guide books but you can see through the windows as we walk.

We meet the rest of the group at the base hotel and we're taken to a local restaurant for Vietnamese Hotpot dinner.  It’s noisy with many a revelling local on cheap plastic seats gesturing excitedly here and there, but sadly we’re taken to what we’ve called the tourist room out the back.

It's Vietnamese hotpot on the menu tonight.  Prawns, mussels, squid, tofu, Pak choi, plenty of ingredients go into these bubbling cauldrons.  The food is mostly raw before it goes in the bubbling broth and some, which we didn’t realise, was still alive.  We sadly see one of the little mussels moving about blissfully unaware of its pending fate.  Definitely a more communal and hearty eating style of meal.

The groups splits up after dinner and some of us head back to The Watson Hotel rooftop bar, still resplendently on the blue ambience lighting. This time we take the more relaxing indoor seating which has great views over the city.  The night draws to a close and we wander back to the group hotel after what has been a really full and rewarding day.