Vietnam North to South – Day 5: From Hạ Long Bay to Hanoi

Our ship left Halong Bay in the morning, though not until we had made a small boat excursion to a nearby cove. Our local guide clearly hoped we would see monkeys there, to attract which he bought a handful of bananas. No one was more disappointed than him when the monkeys failed to turn up, and he munched on his bananas with an air of resigned gloom. The sun briefly came out as our ship headed back to the port, but the clouds set in once again by the time we got there, breaking into light rain as our bus returned to Hanoi.

We made only two stops on our way to the capital: one to use the restroom and one to visit a pearl farm. We were shown the whole process of growing cultured pearls, which involves opening the shell and putting an object inside, the presence of which triggers the mollusc’s self-defence mechanism. The creature begins to secrete nacre in which to envelop the foreign body, the successive layering of which produces the classical round pearl. This, of course, is a simplified version of the whole process, which also involves the rather gruesome removal and reintroduction of the shell’s membrane.

We returned to Hanoi before three in the afternoon, and my dad was itching to see the city I had already toured by myself on day one. With the area around Ho Chi Minh’s Mausoleum closing at five, we made a mad dash through the city, evading oncoming traffic like locals and spending the bare minimum at every attraction. Our loop took us from the Hanoi Opera House to Saint Joseph’s Cathedral and the nearby 11^th century Bà Đá Pagoda. The latter was hidden behind an inconspicuous arch off the main road, through which people would drive on their motorcycles into the very courtyard of the temple.

From thence we continued to the Hanoi Flag Tower opposite Lenin’s Park, and the Imperial Citadel of Thăng Long. I did not realise during my first visit to the site that one usually has to buy tickets to enter; I had lucked out thanks to the holidays. After spending some time at the citadel, we turned westwards, where we saw the One Pillar Pagoda again, as well as the outside of Ho Chi Minh’s Mausoleum. We also stopped by the northern gate of the old city and ate dinner on our way back to our hotel.

Our last stop was unplanned, as we did not expect to find the Ngọc Sơn Temple open in the evening. Open it was, however, and so we got to see both the shrine to the Jade Emperor as well as the two massive taxidermised freshwater turtles in their own specially dedicated building. I was truly shocked by the turtle’s size and was heartbroken to find that not only have these creatures died out in Hanoi, but that the whole species is now functionally extinct with two or three specimens left.