Vietnam: Travel Notes
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A very selective and highly subjective list of useful people and places found while travelling through Vietnam in June 2003
These notes are designed to be simple addendums to the stuff you find in the usual travel guidebooks (Lonely Planet, Rough Guide etc), covering first hand experience of specific hotels, cafes et al.
Lonely Planet Vietnam
They are obviously deeply subjective and everything mentioned is subject to change without notice. These notes were made whilst travelling in Vietnam during June 2003.
Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon)
Accommodation:
Southern Hotel 216 De Tham St.
Thoroughly recommended - slambang in the middle of Saigon's backpacker area and $10 for air con room with twin beds, satellite TV and ensuite bathroom. Helpful staff make it all good.
Email: southernhotel@hcm.vnn.vn
Web: www.vngold.com/hcm/southern
Eating:
Vietnam House 93-95 Dong Khoi.
If you want a posh night out, with spectacular Vietnamese cuisine in a beautifully restored French colonial house and the staff in traditional Vietnamese costume, this is the place to come. Still relatively cheap by Western standards.
Traffic tip:
Vietnam city traffic is one of the more terrifying man-made hazards in South East Asia. Hordes of motos and cars vie for dominance of the road, coming from seemingly every direction with scant attention to traffic lights or anything else. One expat formula to cross the road is step straight into the traffic, don't look to either side and maintain the same pace all the way across the road. The traffic will then move around you. It does actually work, but sometimes you get The Fear halfway across and then the end seems terribly near.
Nha Trang
Accommodation:
Dong Phoung 1 16 Nguyen Thien Thuat
Hard to beat value - newly built, spacious, clean rooms, with two double beds in each plus ensuite bathroom (with actual bath) - $8 with fan, $10 with air con. You might get an even lower price if you bargain hard or are staying for a while. Staff are friendly and efficient too.
Don't go to 56 Hung Vuong - friendly staff but $6 rooms are noisy and have seen better days.
Eating:
Cyclo Cafe Nguyen Thien Thuat
Possibly the best cafe in Nha Trang, not only due to its chilled, quietly sophisticated ambience which is a step up from the usual garden furniture cafe chic and cracking mix of traditional Vietnamese dishes plus decent pizzas at reasonable prices. The staff are super friendly and expat locals come back here again and again.
Decent cup of coffee:
The Italian cafe, Nha Trang Sailing Club, does a decent cappuccino, though it's pricey at 22000VND, Still, if you've gone for a few days without, you'll pay any money rather than drink (shudder) Nescafe
Scuba diving:
Rainbow Divers Nha Trang Sailing Club
Well-established and deservedly acclaimed dive centre. Great staff who are knowledgable and enthusiastic, super efficient service, decent boat and equipment, good lunch, free soft drinks and water on the boat too. Hard to fault. Qualified divers: $40 for two dives on first day which covers everything (boat, gear, dive leader, food etc), $35 for each following day
Tours outside Nha Trang:
If you want to go it alone rather than on a coach tour, there are plenty of moto drivers who will take you out for the day and also do tours that last several days further into the central highlands. The best ones will have testimonial books with comments from other travellers.
We did a day trip out to Doc Let beach, which is about 90 minutes ride each way from Nha Trang. It's a great ride with lots of photo opportunities of the coastline and the countryside. The beach itself is a bit shitty but the views of the sea are magnificent and it's easy to find a deserted bit to yourself - all the tourists seem to congregate in one spot.
It was about $10 to $15 each for our drivers, Nam and Trong, to stay with us for the day. They were great - very enthusiastic, knowledgeable and keen to show us as much as possible,and their English is pretty good too.
If you want to contact Nam yourself to discuss doing something similar his details are:
Khang Nam (Nam being his actual name and Khang his family name)
Email: namji500@hotmail.com
Tel: 040516150 / (058) 883 553
Moving on:
Big up to Same Same But Different traveller cafe (also on Nguyen Thien Thuat) who organised early morning train tickets for us at the 11th hour, just as their shop was about to close at 10 in the evening.
We took the train to Danang (12 hours) and then got a 40 min taxi to Hoi An rather than enduring the overnight coach - the road is apparently pretty bad. The train is more expensive but worth the money - standard seats were about $15 each with fans and decent leg room.
Hoi An
Accommodation:
Don't stay at Trien Trung, 63 Phan Dinh Phung St - noisy, grubby, problems with AC and hot water plus distinctly unhelpful staff. We should have moved but were too lazy.
Eating:
On the waterfront, the last cafe before you arrive at the market is an excellent refuge, offering Vietnamese, Western and Swedish dishes, plus heavenly Italian coffee and beautiful views of the river. Lost entire afternoons in here. Relatively pricey but worth it. Can't remember the name but you can't miss it.
Scout Cafe Nguyen Thai Hoc
Very pleasant courtyard and also covered restaurant area, plus internet access and world wildlife fund exhibition area. They serve all the local delicacies - White Rose dumplings, Cao Lau and fried wanton
Clothes:
There are literally scores of tailors in Hoi An - we went a bit mad, so here's the ones we used:
Ana 1D Nha Trung
Shirts $5, shorts $6, boxers $2, bags $3 - very friendly staff and great cheap basics for blokes. Boxer shorts aren't made of particularly soft cotton though, so maybe best avoided. Ouch.
Nhut 1 Tran Quy Cap Street
Shirts $5, shorts $7 - Again, good cheap basics for men.
Ngoc Ly No. 7 Hoi An Market
You have to venture into the market to find the industrious Hong and her cohorts of seamstresses, but you may well get approached by Hong's mum, Flower, in the street, inviting you to come and choose anything from the Next catalogue to be tailor made for you by the next day. I got my suit made here - $35 for jacket and trousers - and it fits extremely well. Suit shirts were $7 each, and combats were $10.
Louise also had a suit and tailored shirts made but with mixed results - the shirts weren't uniform in their fitting and the suits weren't exactly as she specified. If you want something a bit different to what's in the Next catalogue, it might take several fittings and a lot of explanations to ensure you get what you want.
Lai Phan Tru
Tailor made grey wool overcoat to go with my suit - $13. Leather jacket $18, although the leather's not premium stuff. Grey wool blouson $13. All fitted extremely well.
Tin Nha Trung
Tailor made leather shoes, again copied from the Next catalogue, for $25. My pair fitted extremely well.
Hue
Accommodation:
Hotel Binh Duong 1 10/4 Nguyen Tri Phuong Street.
$7 for a clean and spacious room with three beds, tv, air con and en suite bathroom. Bargain.
Dragonboat trip on the Perfume River - did the bog standard trip for $2 which visits Pagoda, Huc Chen Temple , Tu Duc mausoleum, Khai Dinh mausoleum and Minh Mang mausoleum, which is good fun. If you're on a budget, bear in mind that you'll need to also pay entrance fees for each of the mausoleums (around D55,000 each) and D40,000 for the pagoda and temple, plus D20000 for a moto to take you there and back to the first two mausoleums.
Hanoi
Accommodation:
We checked out several hotels in the Rough Guide that were pretty grotty despite charging $10 a room. Be sure to see what you're getting.
Lucky Star 11 Bat Dan (Old Quarter)
$15 for decent three bed room (air con, en suite bathroom, TV, clean etc) but negotiate hard on price. We got rooms for $13 and heard of lower prices from other guests.
Sharp staff try to add extra items to your bill (like 10% "government tax" and $5 service charge for using the minibar). Be sure to check every item.
Eating:
Au Lac 57 Ly Thai
They sell t-shirts here that say "Hanoi's finest coffee" and they're not wrong. A latte to die for - and a pretty good subsitute for methamphetamine.
Seasons of Hanoi 95 Quan Thunh.
Superb dining - main courses $3 - $10. Possible to eat relatively cheaply within this colonial splendour - as with Vietnam House in Saigon, Seasons is in an even larger, beautifully restored French house. The ambience makes it seem far more expensive than it actually is.
Halong Bay tours:
Don't book the Halong Bay tour with Kim Tours. Apparently, whichever traveller cafe you go to , you get put on to the same tour regardelss of what you specify - one couple with us had asked to be on a tour group of less than 20 and there were at least 40 in our party. Travelling independently from Hanoi to Haiphong and then catching one of the ferries to Cat Ba town is easy and definitely recommended over the shambles of a supposed tour that we witnessed. It culminated with the group arriving at the hotel and being told there were no rooms available.
You also might want to avoid going at the weekend and so not be lumped in with the hordes of Vietnamese package tourists.
Cat Ba island:
Once you do get to Cat Ba, be sure to visit Hoang Y, a truly superb seafood restaurant that's cheap as chips. Anh, the owner's son, can help you organise moto rides around the island and boats out to nearby secluded beaches if you want to get away from the crowds. We paid $20 each for a 2 hour moto ride around the island's spectacular scenery, a superb lunch from the restaurant and a chartered fishing boat ride out and back to an empty beach. It's definitely worth doing, especially as Cat Ba town itself is pretty squalid thanks to the huge influx of tourists in the last few years. Bugger.
Other Travelhappy stories of interest:
- Tailors And Shoe Makers In Hoi An, Vietnam
- Cheap Flights From Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi
- Vietnam On A Motorbike Part 1: Why You Should Go Biking
- How To Cross The Street In Hanoi (It’s Not For The Fainthearted)
- How To Get A Vietnam Visa In Bangkok
