Roads Less Travelled/Sights Unseen

It’s not often one is happy to get a message from their airline the night before a flight informing them of a schedule change, but when we found out our plane from Da Nang to Hanoi was going to take off two hours later, we were overjoyed.

Instead of having to leave Hoi An at 3:30 am, we now got to depart at a much more civilized 5:30 am.

When we deplaned in Hanoi, we were met by a pre-arranged car and driven straight down to Ninh Binh, where we were spending three days at a homestay in Tam Coc. We put this on our itinerary on the advice of Mitchell and Carly, whose photos of paddling down a river surrounded by towering limestone karst formations captivated us.

As we drove south, past endless high rise apartment buildings on the outskirts of Hanoi, we noticed a thick haze that hung in the air, obscuring the sun and sky. In fact, until we left Vietnam about 10 days later, we never say blue sky again.

The haze, it turns out, was the exact kind of pollution + fog that gave rise to the word ‘smog’ (a portmanteau of smoke and fog coined in the 19^th century to describe the London fog known as ‘pea soup’, which was the result of rampant burning of coal plus the damp London atmosphere.)

In Vietnam, they not only burn coal, but there are tens of millions of motorbikes and scooters on the road, very little public transportation, and I’d guess pretty non-existent air quality controls or standards. Their agricultural practices, which include a lot of burning of rice straw add to the problem.

For us, it meant perpetually irritated eyes and managing the disappointment of never fully seeing the scenery that we came to see.

As we neared Ninh Binh, we could see the ghostly outlines of the famous karst formations all around us, as well as vast fields of rice, which had been planted a couple of months earlier.

At that moment, not realizing what an intractable problem the smog was going to be, we had hopes that the following days would bring clearer weather. Alas, that was not to be, and we had to be satisfied with appreciating the scenery in the foreground and forego our longing for the vast sweeping vistas we had seen on the travel sites, taken, we presumed, during months when the smog is not as bad (though I have not idea when that might be).

Our little homestay was very nice, and the hosts/owners very friendly, helpful and interesting. A young woman and her husband ran the place, which we learned from her was owned by their families and was one of the first homestays in Tam Coc.

She was the front-facing host as she spoke pretty good English, while her husband and mother (or mother-in-law—we were never sure) did upkeep and minded the young couple’s 19 month old baby. They even provided breakfast, and tried very hard to accommodate my gf diet, though that basically meant lots of fruit and fruit smoothies for me (which was fine!) while Tom could choose pancakes, toast etc.

Our room had a lovely view of the karst mountains from its balcony on the third floor, which also looked over a very fancy resort across the road.

The afternoon we arrived, we took a walk around the town, admiring the little lake in front of the homestay and the tropical foliage all around us.

As we walked out towards the main street looking for a place to eat, we saw a group of older women enjoying some music and dancing, so I joined in for a minute while filming the dancing woman, who looked so joyful.

We decided to eat at one of the many restaurants along the main street that were roasting whole ducks over barbeques. It was tasty, but not as succulent as we had hoped it would be.

The homestay was located right on the river cove where the famous women ‘foot paddlers’ take tourists in small row boats along the Tam Coc (‘Three Caves’) river, which wends through rice fields and karst formations. These are the boats Mitchell and Carly told us about.

In one of our conversations with our host, we learned that she had once been one of the foot-paddlers, having started when she was in school at age 14 to earn extra money to eventually attend university, which she did. She got a business degree and worked at a bank in Hanoi for some time, but longed to come back to Tam Coc, eventually marrying, settling there and running the family hotel. It was a very interesting story!

We had intended to do the foot-paddle boat trip, but read some pretty negative things about how some of these women hard sell photographs, trinkets and demand tips, basically keeping you hostage in the boat until you comply (Mitch and Carly, who were in Vietnam before the pandemic did not have this issue, however).

We decided instead to take a different trip called Trang An, on a different river. This was located in a national park, so the boat operators are strictly controlled and there is not hard selling of any kind on these trips.

The boats are a bit larger and you have to share your boat with two other people. Also, the rowers do not use their feet to propel the oars, and the journey does not take you through rice fields, which was a downside. But unlike Tam Coc, the trip goes in a loop, winding through caves and karst formations and stopping at several quite old temples.

We were assigned a boat and shared it with a young Asian couple (no idea if they were Vietnamese or from somewhere else in Asia—they said very little during the entire 3 hour boat ride).

You had three itineraries to chose from, all of which visited three temples, and differed only in the number of caves you wanted to be rowed through. As neither Tom nor I is much into caves, we opted for the tour with only 3 caves (one tour had nine!).

Three was about right- although they provided a welcome break from the sun, they all looked pretty similar inside, with low ceilings and lots of stalactites through which our boat pilot steered expertly, never bumping into a thing, even in the longest cave, which was more than a kilometer in length.

We started at about 8 am to beat the heat—if we thought we had broiled in Hoi An, we had another think coming… It was about 38C/100F every day in Ninh Binh with very high humidity, which made doing anything after about 11 am well nigh impossible.

But the early start meant we enjoyed a couple of hours of bearable heat, made more pleasant by being on the water and having a slight breeze to cool us off. It also meant the river was not very crowded with other boats for the first half of the trip—it got a bit crowded towards the end when all three routes converged on the prettiest and most ancient temple site.

The temples were very lovely. The area had been a stronghold for the Vietnamese in the 13^th century and some of the temples dated back to that time.

Though the scenery was somewhat obscured by the ever present smog, it was still a cool thing to do and the three hours passed quickly.

We went back to the homestay immediately afterwards and pretty much stayed in our room the rest of the day. In the late afternoon, we ventured out and decided to have pedicures—Tom’s first ever!—which were great and very inexpensive.

We had one more full day in Ninh Binh, and while there are lots of great hikes and other outdoor things to do there, it was simply too hot to contemplate any of those things.

I really didn’t want to just spend a whole day in the hotel room, so we decided to ask our hostess if she could arrange a driver for us the next day to take us to Pu Luong, in the mountains west of Tam Coc where we hoped to see rice terraces and some villages of the local Muong ethnic minority, (also known as ‘White Thais’) who lived in traditional wooden stilt houses, used bamboo water wheels and farmed rice and other crops up in the mountains.

She immediately called her uncle, who had a taxi and he agreed to take us the next day for what we thought would be about a 4-5 hour round trip into the mountains.

We got another early start, at about 8 am, and spent at least two hours getting up to the mountains, driving through a number of small towns, where we observed multitudes of what are known in Vietnam as ‘tube houses’ –three or more story tall extremely narrow houses, often built in what I decided to call the ‘whimsical palatial style’.

There are numerous explanations for why Vietnamese houses are so tall and narrow, some having to do with land taxes, others with multi-family living or climate controls, but we never got a definitive answer on that one. They are very entertaining to look at though!

Although our driver spoke virtually no English, we managed to communicate with a translation app, so he understood what we were interested in seeing and the scenery was as fascinating as we had hoped it would be, with pretty river vistas in the valley and vistas that became more dramatic as we ascended the mountains.

Our driver had in mind to take us to a very remote and very, very beautiful Muong village, but it would have involved us riding on the back of a motor scooter for an hour over dirt roads, so we declined. We would have loved to have seen it, but we just weren’t prepared to spend that much time on the back of a scooter.

In fact, at one point he took us to a different village where we agreed to take a kilometer long motor scooter ride to go view a waterfall, and that was so hair-raising that we were very glad we hadn’t undertaken anything longer than that.

As it was, we did see many beautiful rice terraces, really interesting Muong villages, a couple of bamboo waterwheels, the picturesque sight of Muong women fishing in a small river, and some gorgeous rural scenery along the way, and enjoyed it all the more for being able to get back into an air-conditioned car after each brief stop and photo opp.

Our one long stop other than the waterfall was for lunch at a restaurant that overlooked a Muong village and rice terraces, which was really lovelygorgeous.

However, the day turned out to be much longer than we had anticipated. We went much further than we had expected to go, and on the way back, our driver went the wrong way on a motorway, which meant travelling  30 kilometers in the wrong direction before we could make a u-turn and head home.

We did not arrive back at the homestay until 6:30 pm—we had been in the car for nearly 10 hours— but incredibly, it only cost us only 2 million dong, just a little over $75 USD.

Despite being in a car all day, we were exhausted and hungry and decided to short-cut the dinner decision by going to a western-style restaurant that had a gluten free menu. It was a lovely setting (food not that great) but you can see from Tom’s face that we were finished by that point.  

We thoroughly enjoyed our time in Ninh Binh and especially being able to get out into the mountains to see a different side of Vietnamese life on roads less taken by tourists. In the end, we didn’t see the scenery around Ninh Binh and Pu Luong under sunny blue skies and crystal clear air, but after getting used to it, the smog seemed to cast an almost enchanting spell over some of the distant vistas. It felt somehow fitting to view those timeless scenes of rural life, straw roofed houses and terraced hillsides through the dreamy ethereal filter of the misty and sepia tinted skies.

After dinner, we called it a night as we had a very early train to catch the next morning, headed for our final stop in Vietnam—Hanoi.