Vietnam

Compare to travel through Laos and Cambodia, traveling through Vietnam is so much easier. What a difference! What a beautiful country and so many different things to see in relatively small distances!
We started our trip in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) and enjoyed walking around the city. If there is something in the 2 weeks of Vietnam that I will never forget is the craziness of the traffic. I thought that driving in Israel is hectic, but my g'd, that's nothing compared to Vietnam! The only rule there is, that there is no rule. Even in big cities, you only see sometimes a traffic light, and you would say that a red light would mean to stop, right?? But no, even in red light people drive in

all directions through the junction. Can you imagine? Think about a huge traffic junction and then hundreds of people driving into it from 4 different directions at the same time and the craziest thing is that it works! We didn't see any accidents and when we drove with a motorbike through it ourselves, we noticed that when you slowly just keep driving, everyone just drives around each other, without any problems. I would say, let's start adopting it also in the rest of the world, really, without joking! Another thing is that everyone travels with their entire families on one single motorbike, I mean, a father, a mother and up to 3 little kids together on one bike. I think it's genius and it would definitely solve the problem of driving around in Tel Aviv for an hour to find a parking place ;-P
After a lot of walking and visiting the War museum (where they interesting enough don’t speak about the Vietnam War, but about the American Aggression War), we moved further north, half way Vietnam to Hoi Ann. If you ever want to visit Vietnam, make sure

that you spend enough time in Hoi Ann! It's first of all absolutely gorgeous with great food and very romantic with all the little lantern lamps that you see in the whole old city. But it's also an amazing place to make hand tailored clothes. Thanks to Yohan's amazing bargaining skills, we didn't get entirely bankrupt, but wow, in 1 day of sewing time I have now a nice addition of 6 beautiful new dresses :-D :-D :-D
After Hoi Ann time for the next place, Hue. We did some research and saw that there is a famous palace, the Imperial City, in Hue. It’s an ok place to visit, but we weren’t too impressed. Probably after visiting Siem Reap in Cambodia it ruined us a bit, as after seeing the palaces and temples there, every other place is automatically less impressive. It’s kind of like after visiting the Vatican in Rome, visiting a regular church ;-P So the same day we looked already for bus tickets to continue traveling more north, but found out that because of the typhoon a few kilometer more north than Hue, all transport was stuck for the coming 3 days…. So, no other option than flying up north to Hanoi from De Nang, not so good for our budget, but secretly kind of nice to have an hour travel instead of the 12-hour bus ride we were supposed to take ;-)
In the north of Vietnam there are so many things to do, but we decided to first go 2 day to the famous Ha Long Bay and after for another 4 days to Sapa. Like Hoi Ann, these are places you really can’t miss out on while visiting Vietnam! These are two completely different destinations as in Ha Long Bay you take a 2-day cruise on the water, where you go by boat around the hundreds of rocks in the sea, you can go to the beaches on the mini islands, go kayaking or sing karaoke under the full moon and thousands of stars. We were really lucky with our boat, because we met such nice people from all around the world and the sunset from the boat was really to die for! The pictures came out quite nice, but in real time it was even prettier, with all the pink light and all the cruises around us with little lights, it

almost looked like a fairy tale :-) After that we continued with a stop in Hanoi to Sapa. This little city is situated in the north-west mountains of Vietnam. The bus ride was another 5 hours, but worth it, with beautiful views and Sapa was everything we hoped for. It’s touristic, but I can understand why, as you can make nice hikes through the rice fields and visit little villages where you still have all the ethnic tribes that still wear all the traditional clothes. We normally don’t like to do the touristic group activities, so that’s why we rented a motorbike and drove around ourselves to visit the waterfalls and a few small villages around Sapa, but I was happy we joined a group for the 12 km walk through the rice fields as we would have gone completely lost there and I don’t think we would have seen as much. The hike was definitely not easy and the woman of the villages around Sapa know that, so what they do is really smart. They “choose” you the moment you get out of the bus in Sapa (and I am pretty sure they have their preferences on which countries and ages groups will later have more money to spend ;-p), follow you to the hotel and wait the next morning in front of the hotel without trying to sell you anything, but in order to walk next to you the entire hike. Very smart as they help you with every step down the entire hike, they were really nice, sweet and not pushy and in this 4 hours walk you start to bond with them, talk with them as much as that they speak a bit of English and get to know their traditions, like for example that when they are married they don’t wear wedding rings, but have a comb in their hear as a symbol of being married or that they carry their baby’s for the first year all day on their back. In the end of the hike they don’t ask for a tip, but want you to buy one or more of their handmade bags, bracelets or wallets. Definitely a tourist trap, because at the end you pay off course a ridiculous amount of money for something that isn’t so valuable. But it made me have a lot of respect for them. We had to work hard to do this hike and they walked it so easily, on flipflops that almost fall apart, with a baby or big basket with things on their backs and after we finish and really have to sit down, they go home, bring in the money, but besides that also take care of their kids, their husband and household. I believe that worldwide women are the driving power in the family, but I don’t how to describe it, we both felt that woman in Vietnam are even stronger, that they are really the driving power in the society. That feeling got even stronger after we visited the Women museum in Hanoi, a really nice museum to visit, that had additionally on the moment a photo show of the known photographer Rehahn C, with pictures taken of all the different kind of ethnic woman in Vietnam. So happy we got the visa in the end, because we absolutely wouldn’t have liked to miss out on Vietnam. I hope to go back one day!