Our final stop in Vietnam was Hanoi, the captial city of Vietnam. I was pretty excited to visit Hanoi, and really explore. My aunt used to live in Hanoi, for around 10 years, so I was excited to see the ciry she called home for so long, plus eat all the goooood food!
We had a good chunk of time in Hanoi, around 7 days. We weren't sure if we'd venture elsewhere in that time, like Ha Long to visit the bay for example, so initially only booked 3 nights stay to work out what we wanted to do. We soon exteneded that stay and stuck around in Hanoi for the full 7 days! We loved it.
Shopping adventures
We'd organised to have a box of thing's sent home from Hanoi, so our first few days were a bit life adminy. We'd collected a few souvenirs from our trip so far, and also had clothes we just never wore but wanted to keep, so we decided to send a box home. It wasnt cheap, at all, and came at the standard weight of 15kg so we had loads of extra weight and room to fill to get our moneys worth. Which meant one thing... shopping! We took this as a sign to pick up some souvenir gifts from friends and family, some bits and pieces we'd been eyeing up for ourselves and also some clothes, of course! We also needed to actually source a box to actually send our stuff home in!
Hanoi is quite famous for it's shopping, notably the fact it has streets dedicated to just one thing or a theme of things. Ie, bamboo street, or paint street... so we googled away and found cardboard box street! Or I suppose more accurately postage supplies street. It was quite a fun shopping experience... we weren't sure the etiquette of buying postage supplies, do you haggle? Is it a set price? What is the going price of a cardbox anyway? So we went to this street deciding we didnt wanna spent anything more that £4 on this box, that felt like a reasonable price to us. We walked through the various shops looking for the perfect sized box. Once we found it we asked how much for the box, and if they also had any packing tape. I was all set to haggle or question the price until the owner very excitedly said "60k for both", which is £1.80, for a giant cardboaed box and a whole roll of tape. I almost fell over in shock, and happily accepted!
Once we had the box we just needed to fill it, so we spent the day wondering the streets of old qauter picking up things we'd had our eye on. We bought a few drip coffee filters, your classic asian souvenir of chopsticks ahah, some postcards, obviously some artwork and a few other bits. My favorite purchase though was of some beautiful little pottery pieces from the sweetest autie on the side of the road. She has boxes of little pottery bits and I could have spent all day digging through them. My one regret is I didnt buy more 😅
Recovering and resting while slowly taking in the sights
Ha Gaing took it out of both of us, we were exhausted! So we essentially spent most of our time in Hanoi just resting, which is also one of the reasons why we chose not to go to the Ha Long Bay tour. Also as we felt we'd seen so much similar, and maybe even more beautiful landscape, plus we'd heard tales of the tour being just super packed, touristy and disappointing. Hanoi was also incredibly cold, 10-15° most days so aswell as resting I think we were essentially hibernating!😅
Hanoi is such a beautiful city though, when we did explore we went on long walks around the old quater, taking in the sights and stopping at various delicious coffee shops. The old quarter in particular is just beautiful. Even though it was raining basically the whole time we were there. In a sense that kind of added charm to it in a way.
We made a visit to the literature temple, which is notable for being the first university to exist, even before Oxford. While there we visited a man who was hand painting calligraphy scrolls with a saying of your choice, which was not only beautiful to watch him create, its made for the mosr special souvenir (annoyingly though we visited here after having sent the box away ahaha so have been carrying around an A3 rolled up scroll since!)
We also visited the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum and the Hoa Lo Prision Relic to soak up some of the important and significant history of vietnam and more specifically Hanoi. Which were both excellent and super informative. Although, being the non-planners that we are, we didn't realise on certain days of the week you can enter Ho Chi Minhs Mausoleum and actually see his body preserved and on display. So we missed that one. Only found out about being able to do that the day we left Hanoi😅
A highlight of our visit to Hanoi was the water puppet show. This is kind of an institute in Hanoi, as been around for years and brings in big crowds everyday. For only £3 a ticket, how could we say no! And it was SO good. It was all in Vietnamese, so we couldn't we understand the songs or narration, but it was such good fun and was very impressive! We really enjoyed it.
Food, glorious foooood
Of course the main and most significant part of our visit to Hanoi centered around food and coffee. When in Hanoi and all!
While on the coffee shop tour we seemed to be doing, we stopped at the pretty Instagram famous note cafe. As a self proclaimed sticky note lover, how could I say no to a cafe covered head to toe, inside through to outside in sticky notes. I'm not sure when this started, and couldn't find it out on google, but the walls were covered in thick thick layers of sticky notes. When you go in ans order a drink, you're given a tray of stickers or sticky notes and a pen to write you're own message and stick it to literally wherever you like in the cafe. We spent about an hour in there just reading all the notes around our table, even spotting a few Norwich stickies!
We essentially did a slow food and coffee tour around Hanoi for a week, scouting out and enjoying some of favourite dished throughout vietnam like Bun Xeo, and Banh Mi, while seeking to find the best and more authentic northern vietnamese dish Bun Cha, and of course trying new foods too! Although I cant seem to handle the coffee in Vietnam, its so strong it makes me unwell😅😅 We visited plenty of coffee shops, for Chris to enjoy while I had a tea or other non-coffee drink too. To accompany those coffees we also consumed plenty of pasteries, something we hadnt expected vietnam to do so well!
I'll go into more detail about some of our food highlights and things we enjoyed in Hanoi in a (probably extended) Vietnam food highlights blog post after this post, to wrap up my Vietnam series. So not spilling any beans on that just now!
While in Hanoi we also ticked off an essential activity for us in every country we visit, a cooking class. We were a tad apprensive about doing one in Hanoi, only because many of the sample menus online list things we've made in both Cambodia and in Thailand now, such as spring rolls and Papaya or Mango Salad, but went for it anyway!
And of course, we absolutely loved it. Like we do every single time!! We also came to appreciate that although we may have made spring rolls and a salad twice already, every country does have a slightly different way of doing it and so it is new everytime. Alongside this we also made Bun Cha, our favourite, and beef Pho along with a little hack on how to make it faster and not have to stew it for 10+ hours. Then for dessert we made the famous egg coffee, and an egg chocolate for those like me who cant handle Vietnamese coffee!
Each dish was so delicious and I'm particularly excited that I can now make my own Bun Cha! Although slightly wish I'd never known just how much sugar went into it (3 table spoons per dish😱😱) no wonder we found it so sweet haha!
Oh our final day in Hanoi, and Vietnam in general, we made sure to enjoy all our favourite vietnamese food, and had Bun Cha as our final meal. Actually, the best Bun Cha we'd had yet. It came as a recommendation from someone on our cooking class and it was SO delicious!
We had a very earlt flight to the Philippines the next day, so made our way to a airport hotel, as the airport is over an hour outside of Hanoi, and settle in for our last nights sleep in Vietnam.
We absolutely loved Vietnam. The variety of landscapes, cultures, food and experiences from the south to the North of the country has been like nothing else we'd seen yet. It also really helped having 45 day/6 weeks there, as we could really take our time and soak up as much Vietnam as possible.
I will be returning, of course with an empty belly, and a refreshed energy to continue exploring. Vietnam we loved you.🫶🫶
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