Hong Kong and Vietnam: Scooters, Busses and Boats

We felt a pendulum of emotion as we boarded our Hong Kong bound flight from Incheon International airport. On one hand we were leaving behind an incredible 7-week Phase One of our trip, split between Japan and South Korea, characterized by long stays in amazing cities already beckoning us to return. On the other hand, we were starting Phase Two in Hong Kong and finishing somewhere in Southeast Asia, with intentions of letting the wind blow us across international borders. Our dotted line path had us from Hong Kong to Vietnam, then to Cambodia, Thailand and finally Singapore, but with plenty of flexibility built in. We sought to activate our own inner navigator, moving through the region by air, land and sea, soaking in everything there was to offer.

The first stop on the journey was Hong Kong. We stayed in the Central district based on recommendations from friends who’d lived there, with few intentions other than partying in Lan Kwai Fung (LKF), the expat eating and drinking district of the city. We boarded a classic red taxi from the Hong Kong airport indicating we were going to Hong Kong Island and set-off for our hotel. The air was warm with a tinge of salty, oceanic humidity, even just outside the terminal doors. I rode the full 40 minute taxi ride to our hotel like a golden retriever, with the window down, and an undoubtedly dumb smile on my face. The drive was beautiful. The city sits on the brink of the world and exists in spite of itself. Skyscrapers are juxtaposed against jagged mountain sides that crawl directly out of the ocean. It feels like a city couldn’t or shouldn’t exist here, but the port of Hong Kong covers 281 square miles and jams 7.5 million individuals into the stark landscape that serves as a critical, and constantly contested, entry point and port city to mainland China.

The plan was to spend our three days doing logistical work and planning for the next few weeks of the trip, then spend our nights frolicking in LKF. Specifically, logistical work meant submitting our visas to enter Vietnam, then Cambodia, and shipping our no longer needed cold weather clothes back to our families in the US. After our chores were done, we set off on foot to see the cosmopolis of Hong Kong, and it couldn’t have felt more different than the last few big cities we’d visited. The streets, sidewalks and highways are a gnarled web of paths that lead travelers up, down and around in order to navigate from any given point A to any other point B. Every bit of Hong Kong is multi-leveled and carved into the faces of the island. The city is beautiful to look at, but challenging and finicky to navigate. Stairways lead to walkways that lead to overpasses that don’t continue in intuitive directions. Often, the correct route is a staircase disguised as a street market selling fresh produce cutting diagonally from one main street to another, or better yet, a rotating door into a skyscraper’s lobby that leads to an escalator back outside. In Hong Kong, I learned it’s best to trust Google Maps and not assume the ol’ internal compass will suffice.

I’ve mentioned LKF multiple times so far without a proper introduction. It’s the primary locale for nightlife in Hong Kong. It starts at sea-level and climbs up the streets of the city and often extends its reach up into the top floors of the highrises as well. It’s a neighborhood whose diversity is only matched by its liveliness, and both of these qualities multiply with each hour that passes into the night. On multiple occasions we found ourselves sitting in a quiet dinner at the outskirts of LKF to start the night, then just a few hours later found ourselves 32 floors up surrounded by accented English speakers sucking down tequila in various forms. Needless to say, Rachael and I do well in these types of settings, we are night time chameleons that flourish both with white tablecloths and luxurious bordeaux wine, as well as we do with dance floors and picklebacks. That said, we tried to prioritize what I’d call the “responsible evening hours,” from 9pm - 1am (give or take).

The highlight for us was a slice of home that we weren’t expecting to find in Asia. Taco Super Macho. A Mexican restaurant + bar combo that served late night food and was jam-packed for the entire three hour stretch that we sat inside. After almost two months on the road, notably the longest stretch of time either Rach or myself had gone without a spot of refried beans, we realized we were jonesing hard for some Latin food. Our waiter was a man from Chihuahua, Mexico who was immediately friendly and cordial with us, but after a couple beers, when I switched over to drunken Spanish, he about lost it. Turns out, not many of his clientele and exactly zero of his co-workers speak a word of Spanish, and the boost of nostalgia he got from our conversation spurred him into a tequila shot giving spree. He was ecstatic, and kept finding reasons to walk up to our table, despite the three floors of chaos he was contending with, so he could talk shit on drunk customers or just ask us questions about where we’re from and what we’re doing so far from home. The food was also amazing; we ate quesa-birria tacos, flautas, a fiery queso dip that was definitely made with Velveeta (my favorite) and at least a few other items that came up from the kitchen as “compliments from the chef.” It was tough to leave, but we eventually did and rolled, stuffed and drunk, all the way downhill back to our hotel.

When our flight date finally arrived, we hadn’t heard from Vietnam’s immigration department confirming we could enter the country. Both Rach and I frantically checked our emails every hour in the morning, hoping to avoid getting stuck in the airport. I did a little Google searching as we sat in our hotel room, all packed and ready to go to the airport, and found a woman who could allegedly expedite Visa applications for a fee. Her name is Daisy, she does everything via WhatsApp message in a matter of hours, and she even had some good reviews on TripAdvisor. I reluctantly gave her our info, paid her fees in Vietnamese Dong, crossed my fingers that everything would work out, and then got in a cab to the airport. She was in constant communication with me, and very quickly was able to get my Visa processed and cleared; however, Rachael’s had an issue and needed to be resubmitted due to a very small, weird, but known flaw on her passport that inserted a space between the “Mc” and the “Whirter” in her last name. Her visa got flagged, and Daisy needed to grease a hand on the other side. She informed me there’d be an additional fee (aka bribe), and I was happy to oblige as Daisy promised we’d be good to make our 3pm flight. Thankfully, by the time we got to the airport, Rach was cleared, and more importantly I was forever armed with the line “a little bit of Dong goes a long way.”

Next stop, Hanoi - the capital city of Vietnam, and stronghold of the Northern Vietnamese during the Vietnam War (or American War as it’s called in Vietnam). It’s a landlocked city, less than 100 miles from the South China Sea, and it’s built right on the intersection of the Red and Duong Rivers. The feelings evoked by our entry into Vietnam were quite different from those of our entry into Hong Kong. The airport is relatively remote from Hanoi proper, about 40 miles north of the city, and we opted to take the bus from the airport to our hotel. The first sights and sounds of Vietnam were quite rural. It was night time, and the bus’s route was dark, and relatively quiet as we passed through small towns on the way to the capital. Then all of a sudden, we crossed a bridge spanning the Red River, and a switch flipped as the streets filled with life, energy and most of all, motorbikes. Hanoi didn’t spring up from its sharp surroundings like Hong Kong – It felt like it was supposed to be there., like it was made for the land it inhabited. It was late when we arrived, but the streets were packed with restaurants and the restaurants were packed with people enjoying the nighttime air, sitting on the sidewalks on plastic furniture, eating, drinking and talking the time away.

The closer we got to the city center, the more its radiance intensified. I’m still thinking about that first step out of the hotel, onto the streets of Hanoi’s Old Quarter where pedestrian and vehicular traffic immediately engulfed us and pushed us into the neighborhood. The amount happening at any given street corner was at first baffling, but became one of my favorite parts of the city. It was unlike anything I’d seen or experienced before. Chaos reigned at all hours of the day as motorcycles, scooters and cars all jostled for position amid streets where stop lights exist, but only in form. The function of the system eluded me.

It’s an amazing example of “organized chaos” where, as an outsider, the rules of the game aren’t clear because they're so different from our own. There is no discernible flow of traffic; pedestrians do not have the right of way, and are forced to contend with never-ending flows of motorcycles weaving in and out of cars. I thought a lot about how this came to be, and why it was so different from any other country I’d visited, and came up with a billion speculative reasons, but the longer I spent in Vietnam the more I realized the real question is how does it sustain?

Over time I realized there are a handful of guiding principles that prevent the system from melting down. First and foremost, no one speeds. The collective takes care of one another by adhering to a consistent, but relatively slow overall pace. It’s like the group understands that the immutable chaos can only exist if everyone’s pace allows others to react in real-time. Second, there’s a clear hierarchy on the road based on any vehicles given agility. The more easily a vehicle can move left or right, thus avoiding obstacles, the more that vehicle is subjugated. Therefore, buses and trucks reign supreme and have the closest thing to a “right of way” that exists in Vietnam, whereas motorcycles and pedestrians are at the very bottom of the totem pole, and are relegated to taking whatever space they can find amid the larger cars. Third, it’s imperative that all participants in this game keep their heads on a swivel 100% of the time. It’s not enough to look left and right before making any movements, instead each individual must constantly scan 360 degrees worth of perspective to identify all potential risks - traffic comes at you from all sides, let me emphasize: red lights mean nothing.

Building enough confidence to walk the streets was step one for a successful trip in Vietnam. Step two was walking the city and tasting its range of delectable fare. We learned from the last few countries that the best way to do this is hire a guide who’d bring us to their favorite locations, often far off the beaten path, and be able to answer our deluge of questions.

Enter Alice. Alice is a twenty-something year old woman born and raised in Hanoi, who works for a small tech company doing contract work full-time, and when she can, leads tourists on food excursions through her hometown. Similar to a lot of other places we visited, we felt intimidated by Hanoi’s bustling presence and were at a loss for how to enjoy each day and night in the city. Alice changed all of that for us!

She sent us a WhatsApp message the night before we met telling us to make sure we came hungry, because we’d be stopping at nine different restaurants over the course of our two and a half hours together. In an effort not to embarrass ourselves and tap out midway through, we skipped breakfast and headed to meet her at our appointed 2pm meet-up time. The highlights of the afternoon were some of the more unique dishes: mung bean sticky rice with a cinnamon sausage, fried fish noodles (similar to pho but served with a fresh dill, a fried fish filet and roe instead of beef), and the traditional hanoi style banh mi.

Mung Bean Sticky Rice and Cinnamon Sausage (ôi ngô+ trứng kho+ chả quế) - Our second stop on the tour, was at a small corner restaurant with an array of what looked like toddler-sized plastic tables and chairs out front, packed with Vietnamese and tourists alike. This small restaurant is called Xoi Yen and is famous for their mung bean sticky rice, a popular breakfast dish. The dish is a scoop-sized serving of sticky rice served with a thick, yellow outer layer of mung bean paste, almost like a dipped ice cream scoop. The sausage accompaniment was one of many potential enhancements and came in a small bowl dunked in a centimeter of pork broth, reminiscent of a cinnamony, tomatoey Greek pasta sauce my dad makes. The dish was light, but super rich in flavor. The earthiness of the mung bean paste paired great with the sausage and despite having 7 dishes to eat after this, Rach and I both ate the entire serving. Interestingly, we learned that mung beans and bean sprouts are not the same thing. Both are products of the soybean plant, but the bean sprout is the long, crunchy, white fibrous part of the vegetable that is often served with pho in the US. The mung bean, however, is the sprouting legume that is 5x more calorie and nutrient rich than the sprout counterpart, and actually carries the majority of the flavor.

Fried Fish Noodles (bún cá) - The next stop required a bit of a hike through the city, probably 15 minutes from our previous snack, and along the way we started to pepper Alice with questions about her life and she in turn asked us questions about the US. We learned everything from daily practices and what it’s like to live in Hanoi, to perceptions of Americans and the impact of what we call the Vietnam War (they call the American War, or the War of Independence). She told me she loves to travel around Southeast Asia and wants to go to a number of European countries, but when asked about the US, she said “I’d love to, but I’m afraid of all the mass shootings, aren’t you scared?” All I could do was agree, “we’re scared too, all the time.”

To shake us from this somber acceptance, Alice brought us through a small network of lunch joints in a tucked away alley, where only a handful of motorcycles could access due to the sharp 90 degree turns between tables and outdoor kitchens. The kitchens in this area, known as Trung Yên lane, were mostly portable, and were wheeled in every morning along with their fresh ingredients to serve patrons nearby. This one particularly was a favorite of Alice’s because it serves a unique noodle soup dish with a fortified fish broth flavored with dill, huge chunks of fried fish and fish roe, finished with a splash of green cumquat to amp up the flavor. The dill was particularly unique; it’s not a flavor we’d come across much in our travels, but it was lovely and accented the fish and broth beautifully. Rach gave this dish her Soup Queen’s stamp of approval and reluctantly moved on to the next location.

Banh mi - As I mentioned, there were nine stops on this food marathon, and we were truly stuffed by the end, but the most memorable and the best bite of food I had in Hanoi was the banh mi sandwich from a tiny, outdoor shop where the owner toasted the final product on a single George Foreman grill on the front door step. Most people have had a banh mi sandwich, one of the most prolific culinary exports from Vietnam, but you’ve never had it like this. This double protein sandwich featured a pork pate cooked together with an egg into a pseudo omelette that was then folded with long slices of cucumber and a bit of fresh cilantro inside one of the softest, flakiest French baguettes I’ve ever had. Then to bring it all together, it was toasted and served in a brown paper lunch bag. It was small, simple, but the entire thing melted in your mouth with every bite and the cucumber gave just enough crunch and freshness to counter the richness of the pate + egg combo. I ate mine in three bites then finished Rachael’s in a self-flagellating move that I knew would come back to bite me when it was time for dessert. Still worth it. I think about this sandwich daily.

At the end of the tour, we got recommendations on all the other staples of local Hanoi food that we didn’t get to sample on the tour. Most important were Bun Cha and Pho. Bun Cha is a staple in Hanoi and there are tons of restaurants serving up this dish of grilled pork, rice noodles and accoutrement of green leafy veggies late into the night. It’s really the perfect, late night meal as it’s not too heavy and goes great with 4 to 5 cold Hanoi Beers. Of course, I’d be remiss to mention the fact that we had pho for breakfast nearly every morning. Not much is better with a mild hangover than a rich bowl of beefy soup, with some rice noodles to soak up the remaining beer in my gut and some thinly sliced rare protein to kick start the day. We learned from Alice that pho is a north Vietnamese dish and the pho we often eat in the US is the adapted south Vietnamese version made popular in Saigon after the war. What we eat in the US is often sweet and served with sriracha and hoisin, which Alice quickly scoffed at, indicating “why would you insult the chef by pouring some sweet sauce into the broth they’ve been working all day to perfect?” I’m not joking when I say we ate this every day.

The final stop in north Vietnam was a trip to Ha Long Bay. We needed to round out our air, land and sea adventure with a bit of swashbuckling merriment, so we climbed aboard our vessel, the Elite of the Seas, with about 50 other seafaring guests and set sail for the night. The vessel was a luxurious 25 room, 95 meter long, four-story ship with enough crew members aboard to restart humankind if a catastrophic flood hit back on shore. No joke, the staff outnumbered the guests 2:1 and ushered us through a jam packed menu of activities from kayaking the eerily still waters of the bay, to a guided tour of the cave network, to some late night squid fishing off the back of the boat, and even sunrise tai-chi for the early risers.

Ha Long Bay sits about 100 miles east of Hanoi and is a small port city located in the Van Don district. Its bay is characterized by almost 2000 limestone islets that jut out of the still, greenish water and create an archipelago setting that could only exist on an amphibious planet out of another galaxy. Each of these islets are sheer rock for the first few meters above the water, and then immediately become lush and green as they rise sharply into the sky. They seem to be uninhabitable, but are actually ripe with monkeys and other small fauna that feed on the sea life abundant in the small salt water coves.

The weather wasn’t particularly great while we were on the boat, it was in the high 50s with overcast skies, but that didn’t dampen the experience one bit. The natural beauty in every direction was jaw dropping, and best experienced from the water’s surface in a kayak where we saw jellyfish and tons of black kites soaring overhead. Rach and I rowed our boat for a couple hours exploring the nooks and crannies of the bay, until it was high time for a cocktail. Martinis quickly pivoted into a seated 8 course seafood dinner with all the passengers, and much of the crew, in one large dining room on the second floor. Then, immediately following the feast, a four piece band appeared on stage and started playing a mix of cross-culture cover band classics aimed to please the guest list of touring Canadians, honeymooning Koreans, and family reunioning Vietnamese folks.

In a previous post, I joked about feeling innately connected to Korean culture and Korean people. This boat cruise sealed the deal on that notion. After a few songs, the band began beckoning people on stage to sing any karaoke song they wanted. The first folks to grab the mic were from the group sitting closest to the stage, an extended family from Korea celebrating their son and future daughter-in-law’s engagement. They were imbibing heavily on soju and multiple bottles of scotch scattered across their table, and took the stage one after another to sing songs across a wide range of genres from youthful pop to emotional ballads in both English and Korean. During a lull in the performances the band members extended invitations to the rest of the passengers to get on stage. Rach and I were two bottles of wine in, and jumped at it.

We got up from our seats to the dismay of the Canadian travel vloggers sitting next to us, who were video taping and narrating every fucking bite of their meal, and proceeded to the stage. We felt nervous and dumb at first, but got some pretty amazing encouragement from the crowd so we told the band to fire up the classic duet of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” and went to work on milking the crowd. Needless to say, Rach and I had done this a few times and didn’t need the video prompter to tell us what to sing and when to sing it, so we worked the stage with both mics, firing up the people with our combination of stage presence, (my) below mediocre vocals and a fair amount of tasteful hip thrusting. When the song ended, my heart was pounding, feeling some combination of elation and embarrassment, until the crowd literally chanted “ENCORE!” This seems like an exaggeration, even now as I’m writing it, but all the staff even came out, pulled out their phones and started video taping song #2 – Africa by Toto. Rach and I had never duetted this one before, but it came quite naturally as we again frothed the room and had the entire boat screaming “I bless the rains!” during the final chorus.

After this, our celebrity status on this boat was cemented. If I had to guess, 90% of the boat gave me, and / or Rachael a hug at some point between the end of the song and whatever crazy hour we decided to stop drinking and go to bed. I had full conversations with people without a single word of shared language, and Rach even went squid fishing off the back of the boat with the kooky Canadians while I smoked cigarettes with a Korean man named Peter. It was amazing. For those interested, I have a video from one of the crew members of the middle portion of our Africa rendition, shoot me a text and I’ll pass it your way.

The next morning the sun rose over the boat at 6:30 am, as 8 of us multi-lingual used-to-be-strangers attempted some incredibly hungover tai chi on the top deck, and I realized this is what traveling the world is all about. This is why we decided to go on this trip. Connecting people across cultures, despite language barriers, with nothing but a few dozen bottles of liquor and some rip roaring sing-a-longs. We finished the trip with breakfast below deck, and a speed boat ride back to shore where we parted ways with our new friends, and began our trip to the south of Vietnam. Voyage by air, land and sea accomplished!