This past week was our last in Vietnam. It’s hard to believe that out of the one month (!) we’ve been traveling thus far, we’ve spent three weeks in Vietnam. We could easily have travelled there even longer, but we have an ambitious itinerary set for the year and needed to make time to see other countries. Plus, our visa was only valid for one month.
After we left Da Nang we spent a few days in Hue in central Vietnam. We toured the imperial city, which is undergoing restoration after being severely damaged by bombing during the war.
After Hue we went to Phong Nha, a small town famous for its caves. We stayed at a really cool ‘eco-resort’ just outside the town beside a beautiful lake. We had our own tiny A-frame shack, and felt truly immersed in nature for the first time since we’d set off on our adventure. (To be fair, we weren’t really ‘camping’, we had a fully functioning bathroom in the cabin, but it felt very nature-y).
The first day in our little cabin was wonderful. It was so quiet and peaceful. We could hear birds and the steady hum of night-insects. Our conversation went something like this:
Oh wow this is so peaceful, you can hear the insect chorus and we’re surrounded by trees and it’s so quiet. Wow I just love this we should do this more often, maybe just stay here longer and – OH MY GOD THAT IS A SPIDER ON THE WALL. Why is it so big?? googles whether spiders in Vietnam are poisonous okay yes it is big, like, as big as my palm big but there is only one spider, we can just kill it and then move on with our lives. Byron attempts to whack the spider with one of my hiking boots oh sh*t that thing is fast. Okay maybe it will just leave us alone and… oh no…. *looks around cabin* there are six of them. We are outmatched.
The spiders were everywhere that first night. There was one on the wall right next to where we had been sitting, one on the ceiling, a couple on the ground, one behind a pipe in the bathroom, eventually we just stopped looking. We gave up on the idea of killing them – they were too big and fast and we were like 90% sure they were huntsman spiders which are apparently totally harmless to humans. So I decided I would think of them as guardians of the cabin, protecting us from the insects that could actually hurt us, like mosquitos. This helped somewhat.
Other than the terrifying spiders, our stay in Phong Nha was lovely. We took a motorbike through the mountains to Paradise Cave (I drove us there and Byron drove back, it turns out driving the motorbike is a lot of fun when there are hardly any other vehicles on the road).
I also had a couple days to myself when Byron went off on an overnight caving tour. I had intentionally opted out of caving, choosing instead to savor a couple quiet days by the lake, which I filled with reading, writing, long walks, and, of course, knitting.
Thankfully Byron returned from his caving expedition in one piece and leech-free, and we happily hopped on another overnight train, this time to Hanoi, Vietnam’s capital city. Before exploring Hanoi though we had one more stop to make – a trip to Ha Long Bay.
Ha Long Bay is about four hours east of Hanoi by bus, and is absolutely beautiful. We took an overnight cruise there with three other guests – a man from Brazil, a woman from Peru who now lives in France, and her French daughter – plus our Vietnamese tour guide. Our conversations were a mix of English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese – thankfully everyone could understand multiple languages, even if no one was confident speaking them all, so we got along quite well despite the language differences.
Finally, we returned to Hanoi to spend our last two nights in Vietnam. And at last, at long last, I found a marvelous place. A place much hoped for. I found… a yarn shop!!!
A small one, to be sure, and the vast majority of the stock was not that exciting (lots of Michaels-quality acrylic yarns that I wasn’t interested in working with). But lo and behold I found treasure – fingering weight cashmere yarn in beautiful colors, for about $4 a skein. For those non-knitters, this price is absolutely unheard of in the US. You could easily pay $30 or above for similar quality yarn back home. Naturally, I bought quite a lot. I think it will become a sweater, we shall see.
Today we took a short flight to Luang Prabang in Laos. We’ve only been here a few hours but are already appreciating the relative quiet of the city and the beautiful sunset.
Knitting update: the hat is finished! Well, the knitting bit is finished. I haven’t yet weaved in the ends, but that’s really just a technicality.
