Ninh Binh

Vietnam

October 2006
1 days

Arriving at night we simply got a room and went to bed. Waking up the next morning we decided to hire a motor scooter (not automatic - crikey) and explore the surrounding area.

Ok firstly, vietnamese traffic is mental, loads of bikes and lorries and stuff and everyone is crazy, the main idea behind driving seems to be 'I have right of way, everyone else can swerve to avoid me' but everyone thinks like this so it took some getting used to - dodging bikes and stuff, plus the gears were interesting but i got the hang of it all and didnt crash.

Anyway, so we went to check out Tam Coc which is the Halong Bay of the land or summink - its basically a river with big cliffs around it, we got a boat for a couple of hours and they rowed us up through 3 caves then back the same way - it was very peaceful, so quiet and beautiful.

After that we had some lunch then scootered off to a temple, dunno what it was called. Its sort of built into the mountain which was cool, a vietnamese dude sort of dragged us around telling me where to take photos from and grunting at us (he didnt speak any english) it was a bit weird cos i didnt have any change and tried to explain this to no avail, i went with the flow. At one point he suggested we go up (by poiting) it turned out we had to climb this mountain to look at some amazing views - pretty scary stuff but got some good pics - i ended up tipping him in thai baht.

Then we went to check out this ancient 'city' whcih was a couple of ok temples, but a bit boring - we then went to this cave/mountian thing where we climbed 461 steps(lorriane counted this number both up and down, i cant count as my up figure was about 20 steps different from my down figure) - there were some amazing views of Tam Coc up here so it was well worth it.

We realised we had done everything we wanted to do in Ninh Binh, so we got the evening bus to Hue.

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