Vietnam – chapter 1

Hello again – it’s been a while. After spending the last year living in Spain, I decided to quit my job, again, and fly to Vietnam to spend Christmas and who knows how many months in Asia. Let’s get right to it.

My brother, Alex, has been living in Vietnam since around June 2019. I’d been dying to see him for almost a year come November, when I had a big decision to make. Do I:
A. take two weeks vacation from my job in Madrid to spend Christmas with him and have a job to come back to
B. quit the job, because it didn’t make me happy, and fly out to Vietnam with a one-way ticket.

So, here I am, a month or two in. This is the first time I’ve visited Asia, and so I had very few expectations and a very open mind. All’s I knew was the odd story from Alex. For example, you have to get a motorbike and drive like a selfish aggressive prick to get anywhere on the roads, police bribery is the norm, and both egg coffee and eating dog are things here. Whenever I asked him to explain these or any more of his stories, his answer was a always the same: “Vietnam, init”.

Meeting Alex at the airport was quite emotional and very, very exciting. But first, the 14 hour journey from Manchester to Hanoi, Vietnam. The notable event here was the plane journey from the stopover, Prague, through to Hanoi. It was the first time I have been surrounded by Vietnamese people; taking in their language and communication style, seeing the way they interact with one another, the way they dress and how their physical builds are typically smaller than us Westerners. The notable event being the Vietnamese passenger sat in front of me on the plane who awkwardly yet sweetly turned around and made small-talk with me. His level of English was very basic, but I admired him for being brave enough to try. After some awkward question and answers, eventually, he offered me his number and address and asked me to come to his city some hundreds of kilometres south of Hanoi so he could show me his home and introduce me to the food of Vietnam and his region. I was quite flattered, what a first impression of Vietnamese people, before I’d even arrived into Asia.

Arriving
I experienced my very first Vietnamese process failure upon landing into Hanoi. After semi-successfully passing through the visa process and bagging myself a single-entry visa for three months, the next challenge was to collect my baggage. My planned two hour stopover in Prague ended up being a 45 minute one due to delays, and so I had some serious doubts my luggage would have time to transfer to the Hanoi flight. After 30 mins struggling through the visa window and passport control, I waited a further 20 mins for my baggage to no avail. Before calling it a day, I thought I’d try my luck on the Bangkok luggage carriage, and hey presto, there’s my bag. More of these experiences to come…

I knew Alex was waiting for me somewhere in the airport. It felt like forever since I last saw him and with being in a new continent where once again I can’t speak the language, I knew it would be emotional to see him for the first time and amazing to have him around.

Integrating into Hanoi
I’ve never known a country which makes it so easy to get set up as an expat. There is an abundance of rooms and apartments to rent, with the supply far outstripping the demand. I found a room within a few days and moved in after viewing five or six different options. I negotiated the contract length down from three months to a rolling one month deal, which in the end the landlord didn’t bother using a contract. The room costs £175 per month and comes with a balcony, double bed and loads more space than I need. You can get a studio for less than £230 here which seems outrageous when you consider the prices in Barcelona and Spain, not to mention London… Although the privacy of a studio would have been wonderful, I wanted to move into a shared house so I could meet people. And meet people I did. More on that later.

Next up – a sim card. Nice and easy this one. There are hundreds of little phone shops or stalls around the city selling a variety of sim card packages. I paid a little extra for one which would still have good signal outside of the city, as I planned on travelling the whole country.

Lastly – a motorbike. It’s close to impossible to live in his city without a two wheels. Every man, woman, child and their dog has a motorbike here, hence the chaotic streets. Luckily, a friend of Alex’ took me to a local bike shop and I managed to rent a manual motorbike for £30 per month. In the end they didn’t even take a deposit for the bike.

My first screw-up
The very same day, and hour, and almost minute I rented the bike, I made my first boo-boo. I was so excited. I was able to be totally independent with my new sim card and navigation abilities on the bike I just rented. But, less than five minutes after leaving the bike shop, I had discovered my mobile phone holder had failed me. Well, I had failed it. After the bike man tightened my phone into the holder with extreme tension, I loosened it a little, fearing my phone would be damaged. BIG mistake, as, my phone was now somewhere on the chaotic roads of Hanoi during rush hour. A few laps around the same roads and no phone to be seen anywhere. This disaster was made worse by the fact that I could not access Samsung’s ‘find my phone’ feature because my password manager couldn’t be opened without a second factor of authentication, my phone… More about that catastrophe here.

Motorbike culture
Talking of bikes. It is almost impossible to have an efficient lifestyle here in Vietnam without a motorbike, especially in the capital city of Hanoi. In fact, from what I’ve observed so far, a lot of the quirks which make Vietnam so Vietnamese happen on the roads. A family of five on a moped? Yup. A whole house of belongings? You bet. Gutted pigs strapped to the back seat of a moped, with the arms and legs dragging across the road? For sure (but I’ll spare you the image here).

Sadly, I haven’t been able to capture the weird things I’ve seen on my bike. But when doing some research about the Vietnam road craziness, I found a good blog if you’d like to read more or here if you’d like to see more ridiculous pics.
Maybe a GoPro camera strapped to my helmet would be a good purchase…

$$$$$
Some of you may know I can be quite a tight-arse. As it happens, Vietnam is cheap as chips. Here are some examples:
– Beer: 17p-£1
– Coffee: 50p-£1.50
– 1 hour full body massage: £3.30 (performed by blind people, and no. No happy ending)
– Beard trim: £1 (maybe it was cheap because I can only grow half the beard of a normal man)
– Typical street food meal: 50p-£3
– 1 month accommodation, big room in a shared house: £125-200
– 1 month motorbike rental: £25-£30
– 1 month sim card with data: £3.30
– 1 night in a hotel room with breakfast: £5
– 90 min game of 7-aside football: £1.75

On the other hand, in comparison some things appear unreasonably pricey:
– Glass of wine: £5
– Seafood: £34,642
– Football boots: £1b

Working for Alex
When he first moved here, Alex started teaching English, like most other Westerners who live in Hanoi. After a few months he decided to launch his own business. An organised bar crawl in the old quarter, the most touristic area of Hanoi. It became a success – Alex often gets 10-20 crawlers on an average night, takes them to some of the coolest bars and then leaves them in a club. As I don’t have a fully packed agenda these days, I thought it would be fun and horrifying to help him out. So I became his part-time salesman. This idea was horrifying because I knew I’d have to do something I’d never done before: approach strangers and try to sell them things. I also knew that this would be good for me, increasing my confidence somewhat and improving my comfort with rejection. If we are able to become good at getting rejected, we are more likely to ask for what we want in life, and therefore more likely to get what we want out of it.

Anyhow, off I went. The first night I approached maybe 100 people, and sold 3 tickets. 3% conversion rate, pretty terrible. That night, Alex brought in 11 people.

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The second night. Again around 100 people approached, and this time 6 people. Better. I enjoyed the challenge and even made some friends. One of the three guys I sold tickets to was going on a trip to do the Ha Giang Loop in the coming days and trying to organise a group to join.

Ha Giang Loop
The Ha Giang loop (pronounced hazang) is a small region in the north of Vietnam with stunning backdrop views and plenty of countryside to help flush-out Hanoi’s pollution from your lungs. The best way to do the loop is head to Ha Giang by bus and rent motorbikes. Then spend the days riding to the various little towns and stopping to enjoy the views and eat the region’s food. So in the end there was a group of 11 of us, and that’s exactly what we did. This was a truly experience. A bunch of strangers getting to know each other day by day, riding together, falling together, eating local food and drinking rice-wine by fires and over karaoke.

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Language (barrier)
The clever ones amongst us will know that the locals don’t speak English as their native language in Vietnam. They hardly speak it at all. They are good at speaking Vietnamese, though. Basically, this means it’s easy to get into an occasional pickle. Especially when you go to a blind massage parlour, and the masseur doesn’t speak English, at all.
It can be extremely difficult when said blind masseur stands on your back and starts walking up and down your spine. I trust people too much, I was thinking at the time. The (not so small) guy also decided it would be a good idea to crack, click or snap as many of my joints as possible. Including fingers, thumbs, toes, elbows (by pulling the loose skin under the elbow), knees, back, and my not-so-favourite, my ears. Yes. Ears. He pulled them in a special way which makes the adjoining skin sound and feel like it’s being ripped off. Cheeky bastard.

You wouldn’t think you’d have to communicate with a masseur, until you remember that dreadful football tackle the day before which makes your shin feel like it’s been shot. Try attempting to communicate to a blind and basically deaf masseur that he may still have a face after the massage if he stays well clear of your injured left shin. Not happening really, is it?
At the end of this painfully pleasurable experience I got my revenge by giving the guy a 10,000 note instead of the 100,000, hoping that with him being blind and all, he wouldn’t notice the missing 0.
I joke, of course…

That said, I did manage to somehow get the masseur to perform the ear ripping trick on Alex, as he was beside me receiving a much gentler massage by a sweeter, smaller, lighter, blind and older woman. I thought it would be funny to recommend that Alex should experience the wonderful sensation. Telling him it felt amazing. After the first ear, Alex used very clear body language to ensure the second ear should stay exactly in its place, and was relaxed again after aiming some cursing at me.

Since that day, I learnt some new Vietnamese vocabulary. Notably the words ‘no’, ‘ouch’, ‘stop’, ‘let go of my ear’ and ‘thathurtslikeafuckingsonofabitchyoubloodyidiot’

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Grab
I mentioned that Hanoi is basically a motorbike-must city. Well, as we know, it isn’t always a good idea to ride a bike. Sometimes, you might want to have a tipple or two (get smashed), for example. Uber doesn’t operate here in Vietnam. But that’s OK because Grab – basically Uber’s sister, is here and it has a particularly awesome upgrade, you can hire and hop on the back of a bike-rider.

I’ve had grab drivers try to rip me off, one who had a customised racing bike and rode it around like he was actually in a race, one who spent 15 minutes trying to speak the same sentence to me at 4AM on the way home from a night out about his favourite football team. My favourite story, though, is a time when Alex took a Grab bike some months back. Alex is generally quite an impatient person. And some of the Grab riders are extra cautious, meaning things can become a little frustrating if you’re in a rush. The combination of these two factors can produce some entertaining results. This one time Alex was in a rush, and his lack of patience combined with the extra cautious grab rider, resulted in Alex forcing the rider to stop, get off the bike, and get onto the back of his own back whilst Alex drove himself to the destination, where the confused and perhaps frightened driver was allowed to return to the front of his bike.

Christmas in Vietnam
Christmas was made extra special this year, not particularly because Vietnam does Christmas well, but because of the people who visited. This trip will be remembered for years to come, for many reasons. A family holiday in Asia is something I’d never had considered would ever happen – but it did. Our mum and her partner Alan visited us in December. They came for a total of 10 days, which we would split between seeing Hanoi and a trip to Ha Long Bay.
Let’s start with a beautiful reunion of my mum and Alex, who hadn’t previously seen one another for almost a year!

We spent several days showing them the unique and crazy old quarter of Hanoi city. Tasting the street food, walking around the markets, drinking 17p beers and eating more Vietnamese food. Well, three of us were, whilst my mum played it safe and stuck with pizza and chips.

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During Fridays and Saturdays, the crazy ring road around Hoàn Kiếm Lake was closed to all vehicles – which was fabulous. Not only could you walk the streets without worrying about a moped flying past you with huge poles or other dangerous items on the back, you could enjoy the recreational activities the locals did with the now open space.

Note: I did try to upload a video here of said recreational locals, but YouTube blocked the video and accused me of copyright infringement. Something about the background music. Don’t worry though, I am taking them to court next week on the grounds of ‘my millions of extremely unhappy readers’. I’m confident.

After trotting around for a few days, we headed to Ha Long Bay, which Wikipedia explains in a way that you’d expect to be written in some elegant and expensive guide book:
“Hạ Long Bay, in northeast Vietnam, is known for its emerald waters and thousands of towering limestone islands topped by rainforests. Junk boat tours and sea kayak expeditions take visitors past islands named for their shapes, including Stone Dog and Teapot islets. The region is popular for scuba diving, rock climbing and hiking, particularly in mountainous Cát Bà National Park.”

And yes I did check. Junk boats are a real thing, apparently.

Anyhow, during our trip, we spent a day on a ‘junk boat’ visiting the ‘towering limestone islands’, exploring caves, doing hikes and drinking coconuts and then chilled a few nights on a nearby island, Cat Ba. The island was soooo cheap, we could hire mopeds for $3 per day and use them to explore the island more, finding quiet beaches and hiking to viewpoints in the national park. A functioning and reasonably clean hotel room with a private bathroom and breakfast costs $6; mum and Alan leveraged this for a few evenings whilst Alex and I explored. We also found a super hippy hostel, some miles away from the main strip of the island. Imagine the pungent stench of cannabis, dreadlocks so long they are being used as skipping ropes, and, well I think that’s all there is to the hippy lifestyle.

Not for the first time, we were in a country at a very special, historic moment. A football moment. Our stay on Cat Ba coincided wonderfully with the final of the football gold medal in the Asian games (equivalent to (maybe even better than…)) the world cup. Well, it was historic because were there when Vietnam won this particular gold medal for the first time, winning 2-0. Quite a special moment, it was. The locals (and some tourists) took to the streets with their bikes, forming a parade-come-macarena in the streets, all beeping their horns. It was a noisy night.

Another historic thing happened during these evenings. My mother not only came out and partied with us, even occasionally taking to the dance floor to boogy!!! But she also did something I thought I had imagined. She went to the bar, bought a round of tequila shots, and then proceeded to drink one. In fact, in my utter shock, I spilled my shot onto the tray. She sent me to the bar to replace it. Meanwhile, she performed some special mother magic by tipping, with precision, the spilled shot from the tray into a shot glass. Then she drank that one too!

This special night also gave us another highlight. Alan, my mums partner, burst into life like an overcharged duracell once he’d had a few. He danced all night long, and his moves weren’t that bad. At one point, he even ventured onto the stage. Wanting to back him up (feeling sorry for him), I joined him for a brief moment or two, before the embarrassment was just too much.

He didn’t admit he was little tipsy, but he did manage to lose his phone that night. Luckily for him, someone handed it into the club and it was returned to him the next day. That’s two out of two cases of phones being lost and returned. Either we were both quite fortunate, or Vietnam is full of honest, good people.

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And, for fun, below are some random pictures taken over the weeks which don’t perfectly associate with the above subjects. Enjoy.

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Next post
That’s all for now. The next post will cover some more special people who came to visit us in Vietnam, plus more trips, failures, some rather odd Vietnamese traditions and what happens when you strap a camera to your motorbike helmet.