Settling Down In Hanoi

34 days into our volunteering in Hanoi and we are finally getting to the blog! After a sad goodbye with Candice, we headed to our volunteer orientation with all the other Lattitude Vietnam volunteers. There we met two girls, Gabby and Sarah, who are in Halong City, and two British volunteers, Phil and Fabian, who are in Hanoi as well. For our orientation we took a tour of the city (which we already knew pretty well), had some yummy Vietnamese food, and learned some useful Vietnamese phrases. Our placement contacts picked us up from the orientation hotel with two bouquets of flowers in hand, and they weren't for the girls! From there we were shown the school (which we had already checked out) and our guesthouse. Our guesthouse was a pleasant surprise as we have a fridge to use, a full kitchen (not that we have been cooking that much), A/C, a TV, wireless internet, washing machine, and friendly downstairs staff! While our location is a 40 minute walk or 15 minute bike ride to our school, we are greatly enjoying the area around our guesthouse. We are situated around the largest lake in Hanoi, West Lake. The entire lake is ringed with a beautiful almost Mediterranean promenade, and a mix of renaissance French and modern architecture.

The first friend Chris made in our guesthouse was this little gecko in his muesli!

Our room (a little cleaner than usual)

Our volunteer placement has been lots of fun. The children are extremely high energy, and we quickly learned a number of games that can be used to both entertain as well as teach the required curriculum. We are forced to think on our feet quite a bit because we don't know what we will be teaching until we arrive at class each day. The teachers generally show us some material in the text and ask us to do a page or two and we are left to decide what the best means of delivery will be. The children have quite a bit of trouble pronouncing English names; Andrew even decided to change his name to Andy for teaching purposes, while Chris is content with being called 'Krit'.

While the children are loads of fun, teaching is both a physically and emotionally exhausting endeavour. We have gained a lot of respect for teachers through our experiences thus far. We must complete five 3.5 hour shifts per week, each with roughly four 45 minute periods. There are shifts from 7:30 am to 11:00 am and from 5:30 pm to 9:00 pm every day, and we often use the time in between for afternoon naps!

We have also discovered that private English teaching can be a highly lucrative part time job in Hanoi. With hourly wages between $15 and $25 US per hour, we have been able to make $90 to 175$ per week to add to our spending money! Through our extra work we have met several very nice families that have offered to teach us Vietnamese cooking and take us on vacations with them.

Since beginning our volunteering we have made two weekend trips. The first was a great day trip to Hoa Lu and Tam Coc with the British volunteers. Hoa Lu is an ancient Vietnamese capital city that has been fairly well preserved, while Tam Coc can be best described as Halong Bay on land.

Our second trip was to the city of Hai Duong, about 60 km away from Hanoi, to teach at a new school that Lattitude will be placing volunteers at. The school was very impressive, well organized and with over 1000 students. The school's president took us out for all meals and put us up in their on-campus house. The son of the school's president even took us out for karaoke!

We now have just under 50 days left until our flight home, with a week in Hoi An planned for the beginning of August.

Motorbikes, Kayaking and Caving on Cat Ba

After our very dusty and successful trip to the silk village, we booked a tour to Halong Bay from our favourite travel agent, friend (and Chris's future wife) Lily.

We rode a bus for about 4 hours before hopping on a boat to Cat Ba island.  On the way we stopped at a very touristy cave as well as a small fishing village.

Fishing Village

Our first couple of days at Halong were full of rest because Andrew and Candice had caught colds.  Once we were feeling better however, we rented motorbikes for the day and got our first real glimpse of the entire island. We were amazed with the lush green scenery and large exposed rock faces. The roads were practically empty and were in very good condition for the most part. We had so much fun on our first day that we ended up renting them again for our second day. Our mutual highlight was definitely passing and racing each other down the straight, empty roads through the lush jungle valleys.

Unexpected hotel visitor (don't worry he was just sleeping!)

Inside Hospital Cave, an old Vietnamese hideout which was actually a hospital!

One of the many weird bugs we met on the island.

South Cat Ba at sunset

The next day we booked a full day boat tour through Halong Bay and its less visited sister, Lan Ha Bay. On our tour we stopped to go kayaking and swimming, but the most memorable part was visiting Sung Sot Cave. Sung Sot is a massive cave and we were all astounded by its beauty and size!

Sung Sot Cave (our favourite)

We returned back to Hanoi on the following day, which turned out to be quite the adventure as well! Sitting between Andrew and Chris was a drunk, dirty and dancing backpacker who started hitting the vodka well before noon. In order to avoid having to talk to her, Chris spent the entire four plus hour bus ride pretending to not understand any English.

Pad Thai, Pad Thai and some more Pad Thai

The last time we updated the blog we were relaxing on the beaches of Koh Tao, Thailand. Our days there consisted of lying in the warm shallow water, relaxing on the beach, playing soccer on the beach, getting Thai massages and eating our fill.

After traveling back up and arriving in Bangkok at 3am, we were fortunate enough to find a hotel that allowed us to check in at 4am.  We rested up for a bit and decided to explore the MBK mall.  After a very tiring morning at the mall we walked away we nothing to show for our efforts because Thailand is much more expensive than anywhere else in our traveks. We took a boat up the river and then explored Chinatown. Chinatown was a bustling market selling many interesting and random things.

We returned to our hotel near the infamous Khao San Road to cool down before venturing out again for some delicious street Pad Thai. We found ourselves a streetside bar to sit at and people watch for the night.

The next day Andrew and Candice went on a tour to Kanchanaburi.  After taking a hour and a half train ride over the bridge over the River Kwai, we stopped for a buffet lunch on the river.  The action packed day then went off to do a short river raft ride down the river. Along our float we saw two "crocodiles" that turned out to be large monitor lizards. After our rafting experience we hopped on a bus and headed to the Sai Yok Nai waterfall before the main prospect for the day, elephant riding. The ride was about 15-20 mins long but was definitely a highlight for Candice and Andrew.

While Candice and Andrew did their adventure for the day, Chris explored Bangkok and its many street food vendors. Tasting fried and barbequed banana, green curries, coconut candies, pancake wrapped sweet creams, pad thai wrapped in egg, fresh fruit and fruit smoothies, chicken kebabs, freshly squeezed orange juice and sweet rice with mango, Chris definitely had an enjoyable day! 

Once back in Bangkok the three of us met up and waited around until our shuttle to the airport. The flight went by relatively smoothly after a long night sleeping in Bangkok airport, and we were eager to get to the hostel in Hanoi for a delicious burger and long nap.

Today we visited Van Phuc, a silk village just outside Hanoi, for the morning and hung around the hostel in the afternoon. Tomorrow we are traveling to Halong Bay by bus and are looking forward to our last week on the move.

Candice, Andrew, and Chris

Update from Paradise...

When we left you last, we were waiting to get to our most desired destination.  However the journey there was far less than desirable...

It began with a drunken tuk tuk driver who could barely walk, let alone drive us to the bus station. Luckily it was no more than a kilometer away from our hotel so we made it safely.  After thinking the worst of our journey was over, we got our first glimpse of our bus.  The old, beaten up and very small bus that stood before us had the most uncomfortable seats you could imagine, especially since we had to sit in them for 4 hours in the middle of the night while we were all rather exhausted.  We then had to wait at the Thai border for another 2 hours until it opened and we could be transferred onto another bus.

We found out at the border that we could only stay in Thailand for 15 days (because we had arrived by land and they did not give visas at the border) rather than the 21 days we had originally planned to stay there, and we were not very pleased with the way things were going thus far.  Still grumbling, we hopped onto our second bus to get to Bangkok.  We thought our first bus was bad… This next bus had the worst driver we have encountered so far. This man thought he was a formula 1 racecar driver. He would pound on the gas and hammer on the brakes whenever he got the chance.  Candice even got a bit of air off of her seat at one point, while Andrew was feeling a little car sick. Due to his insane driving, we also had to stop for gas twice along the way, and each time was a half an hour wait.

When we finally arrived in Bangkok we were exhausted, starving and upset about our shortened stay in Thailand.  We walked around for a bit before finding a place to eat and stay. We found a wonderful little two-story room that was owned by an older Thai couple and stayed there for one night before hopping on a train to Koh Tao. During our short stay in Bangkok we rested up from the long and tedious ride there, as well as explored some of the local cuisine and tourist attractions. Our hotel was on Rambuttri Street, which is one street over from the infamous backpacker Mecca, Khao San Road. We decided that since we didn’t have very much time in Bangkok we would just hit the two most popular sites, the temple of the emerald Buddha and the grand palace. Conveniently, these two sites happen to be in the same complex. We took a free tour through the complex, and after a few hours of site seeing we picked up some amazing chicken kebabs and headed back to the hotel.

In front of the Royal Palace.

After a short resting period, we were on the road yet again. Luckily this bus ride was much more comfortable.  After waiting for the ferry for another 5 hours we were FINALLY on our last leg of the way to Koh Tao. The ferry ride was pleasant and seemed to go bye very quickly after our long wait.

While on the ferry, promoters from various resorts on the island handed out brochures and told us their prices, making choosing a hotel very easy! We settled on Ban’s Diving Resort, which certifies more divers than any other dive company in the world. The room for the three of us, with private bathroom and a fan, costs us about $23 a night. The first two days on Koh Tao were spent relaxing on the beach and wandering around searching out good dive companies and Pad Thai!

Chris on the beach waiting for a meal that never came...

Candice relaxing in the 32 degree water.

On the third day, Andrew did his diving review course in the morning while Chris and Candice did their Discover Scuba Diving courses. In the afternoon, we all went out together and did two dives. We saw many colourful fish, corals and anemones on the dives! The next day we did an all day snorkeling tour around the island, visiting four different snorkeling sites and a picturesque small island off of Koh Tao called Koh Nang-Yuan. We all really enjoyed the snorkeling, especially throwing our watermelon rinds off of the deck and watching as the fish swarmed the rinds! We were fortunate enough to have an excellent guide for the trip, and he showed us all the best spots, as well as how the corals are both being harmed by tourism but growing back at the same time. We saw many of the same animals that we saw on our dives, but we also lucky enough to see a banded sea snake, the most venomous snake in the world!

SCOOBA diving !!

The colourful dive boats.

Fishy

Sunset and drinks on the beach

Long-tail boat

Since then we have been relaxing on the beach and making regular trips to watch the fire-twirlers perform nightly on the beach. 

Cambodia and the temples of Angkor Wat

After our short visit to Saigon (in which Andrew and Chris picked up some snazzy tailor made suits!), we continued our journey to Cambodia via an overnight bus.  When we arrived early morning in Phnom Penh, we were pleasantly surprised with the cleanliness and almost French riveriaesque atmosphere.  We walked along the promenade searching for a suitable hotel, before stumbling upon Indochine hotel.  We were glad to avoid more stairs as the last three hotels we had stayed at required as much uphill trekking as in Sapa. After recuperating for most of the day, we had an amazing khmer dinner before setting out to explore the weekend night markets.

Men in Black...

The next morning we accidentally slept in four hours later than intended, partially because of exhaustion and partially because our room was a cave. After breakfast we rented a "tuk tuk," or a motorcycle with a carriage on the back, for the the whole day for $12 through our hotel. We took the tuk tuk 17 km south of the city to visit the Chheung Ek Genocide Memorial, otherwise known as the killing fields. It is a memorial to the tens of thousands of farmers, intellectuals, priests, etc. who died there under the Khmer Rouge rule in Cambodia. The site of the killing fields was used as an extermination camp for prisoners who had been interrogated and were not longer of any use to the Khmer Rouge. While not to the same scale as WWII, the genocide was particularly brutal and we found the museum and memorial to be a very emotional experience. The main monument is a beautiful structure built in a traditional Cambodian style, but it is vividly juxtaposed by its contents: layer upon layer of human skulls.

Tuk Tuk!

The memorial building outside...

...and inside.

After the killing fields we headed back into town to visit the Tuol Sleng prison, otherwise known as S-21. S-21 was a high school and elementary school which the Khmer Rouge converted into a detention facility for the thousands of prisoners they arrested in the Phnom Penh region. The prisoners were held there for interrogation and torture. The Khmer Rouge would torture the prisoners until they obtained a confession, or until the prisoner died.

A prison cell for high officials at S-21.

After a very depressing morning, we decided to do some shopping! After Candice bartered some jewelery merchants to 20% of their original price, we headed back to the hotel. There our tuk tuk driver tried to scam us by saying that the trips to the markets would cost an extra six dollars, and when we decided to just walk away after paying the $12, he used every offensive word he knew in the English language.. and it was by no means a limited list.

The promenade in Phnom Penh. (Yes, Chris and Andrew have the same shorts.)

We caught a morning bus to Siem Reap that took about 6 hours. The bus was rather uncomfortable and the air conditioning was barely functioning, making us very pleased to get off and have a swim and shower at our previously booked hotel. After refreshing ourselves, we set out by tuk tuk to the temples of Angkor Wat. After arriving on the site, we climbed up a small hill and an unsafely steep set of 'stairs' that led up one of the temples. Sitting at the top of the temple we watched the sun set as tourists took elephant rides up and down the hill below us, a truly magical experience!

Sunset atop Angkor.

The next day at 7:30 AM we set out once again for the temples. We began our journey at Angkor Thom and then visited many more temples on our route to see Ankgor Wat, the largest religious building in the world. The temples were magnificent, each intricately carved of sandstone that had been carried from a mountain 50 km away by elephants. The stairs to enter each of the temples were extremely steep, with an average rise of about one an a half feet with no more than 4 inches of flat space to rest our feet.

After several hours of visiting temples we came back to our hotel for a 50 cent bowl of rice for lunch, and another dip in the pool.  Once we were feeling refreshed, we ventured out into the old town market.  We walked around for a bit and stopped on "pub street" for dinner.

Pool at our hotel, much nicer than expected, and super warm!

Chris also managed to stub his toe on a rock and cut it up pretty badly.  After Andrew and Candice cleaned it up as much as possible, he headed off to the clinic just to be sure it was alright.

Today we took it easy and spent most of the day by the pool, and again we find ourselves waiting for another night bus off to Bangkok.  Until next time...

Andrew, Candice and Chris.