I was very fortunate to have my friend Anisa travel all the way from Montana to Hanoi for Christmas. She stayed past when I had to return to Dhaka for work, but we managed to see and do a lot during our travels together. We started with a rough itinerary: 

Day 1: Arrive in Hanoi on Christmas. Eat a giant Christmas dinner. 
Day 2: Recover from jetlag (Anisa had to get used to a 14 hour difference) and eat phở. 
Day 3: Eat phở and take night train north to Sapa. 
Day 4: Explore the town of Sapa and see if the locals eat phở. 
Day 5: Hike the mountains above Sapa and check hill villages for phở. 
Day 6: Explore local foods in the market and sample varieties of phở in Lao Cai, take night train back to Hanoi. (I am happy to report they had delicious vegetarian phở.) 
Day 7: Settle back into life in Hanoi, rest up and eat phở in preparation for a late night. 
Day 8: Celebrate 2013 and recover from partying all night by eating phở.

Day 9: Early morning bus ride to Ha Long Bay. (Fortunately, the bus stopped half-way there and we had excellent phở at a café/souvenir shop.) Cruise around the bay and spend the night on a boat, which had excellent food, although no phở.

Day 10: Early morning spelunking and brunch on the boat, which unfortunately did not include phở. Bus ride back to Hanoi, stopping for phở on the way. 
Day 11: Visit the Women’s Museum and sample all street food we come across, the more unrecognizable the better, or just eat phở. 
Day 12: I fly back to Bangladesh and Anisa spends time with a couple of her friends who live in Hanoi.

Hanoi

In case you haven’t had the opportunity to sample our favorite Vietnamese culinary masterpiece, please believe me that “noodle soup” is not an adequate translation of the word phở. I opted for phở rau (vegetable soup) when possible, although took phở gà (chicken) when necessary. Anisa usually ordered phở bò (beef). One fun thing about eating phở on the street is that you don’t always get a menu; you just sit down and they serve you whatever they have. This got us in the situation of being faced with two large bowls of steaming soup with slices of vịt (duck). That’s great if you like duck, but it’s one of the reasons I went back to being vegetarian in 1999. Fortunately, Anisa was hungry enough to almost eat both bowls.

The basic idea of phở is you have a giant cauldron of delicious broth bubbling away and when a customer comes along you place a pile of fresh, cooked rice noodles and a mix of greens, like parsley and cilantro, in a wide bowl and pour on the boiling broth, flash cooking the greens. Lay on top thin slices of whatever kind of cooked meat or vegetable is available and let the customer add in fresh chopped chili peppers or hot sauce. My favorite was our phở the first day, when the broth had sliced green onions and lemongrass in it. I liked the mix of greens in Hanoi, although it is winter and perhaps I would have been more impressed in summer. I remember phở in southern Vietnam having fresh basil and being given limes and crushed peanuts to sprinkle on top with the chili peppers.

This was a wonderful vacation, although I wish I had spent more time taking photos of the phở. I am still shy about taking strangers’ pictures, and most street food is very personal, so I really don’t have many shots of our culinary forays into Hanoi’s back streets. (That's code for: I was usually so focused on the food that it didn’t occur to me to take a picture until we had already eaten.)

If you’re looking to spend time in Hanoi’s old quarter, I highly recommend hanging out on the corner of Ta Hiên Dinh Liêt and Luong Ngoc Quyên. It’s in the backpacker area between Hoân Tiêm Lake and the Red River. There are lots of little hotels and hostels in the area, although we stayed at a hotel closer to the lake, on Hàng Quat, which Anisa found out means Funeral Street. We weren’t informed until the end of our stay, when suddenly all the shops of flashy altars and gaudy gold decorations made sense. They really didn’t look like souvenirs, or even the sort of thing a Hanoian (yes, that’s a word) would usually have in their home. The Old Quarter is full of streets named after their specialty, or function in the city. Some have become so full of restaurants and hotels that there is little room left for their traditional wares, although streets like Hàng Quat prove that some are still left intact.

 Sapa

Outside of Hanoi we stayed in a hotel in Sapa named the Cat Cat View, for it’s view of the village of Cat Cat in the valley below. It was beautiful and I loved sitting out on the deck in the afternoon, enjoying the last rays of the sun as the clouds boiled up from down valley, swirling around Sapa until we were socked in with heavy mist long before evening. Mornings were just as spectacular, as the sun warmed the mountain tops and slowly pushed the mist back down the valley. Below the hotel is a great little fair trade shop named Indigo Cat that had most of the H’Mong textiles that I had been searching for in the markets. Hopefully their website construction will be finished soon. http://indigocatsapa.jimdo.com/

The day we had planned to go hiking turned out to be the best weather of the trip, and we both got plenty of sun as we sweated our way up the trails. I was hesitant to hire a guide through the hotel but it turned out to be wonderful. Her name was Mei and she was fabulous; she was friendly and informative but knew just when to walk ahead of us, letting Anisa and I catch up on what we’ve been up to since summer and reminisce about our last travels together in Cambodia. The day was relaxing and educational, exhausting and exhilarating. We hiked a lot farther than I had anticipated, up much steeper terrain than I thought possible. I learned a lot from Mei and she explained how the H’Mong grow hemp to make their own textiles and indigo to dye it blue to the point of being black. Old clothes that start fading to blue can be redyed with more indigo to look black again. Everybody I saw had blue smudges on their hands and indigo-tinged nails. I started to notice that when I washed my hands the water ran off blue. It was cold enough at nights that at first I didn’t think having blue fingernails could be due to my shopping and admiration of the embroidery in the markets. It was cold in Sapa, but not that cold. 

Ha Long Bay

On our other trip out of Hanoi, to Ha Long Bay, Anisa and I went on my first cruise. It was a small boat, compared to most cruises, and not all the cabins were occupied. We went through a company called Handspan, which friends of mine who used to live in Hanoi had recommended. They were very helpful and the night out on the bay was lovely. The first afternoon we climbed up one of the 1969 islands to look out over the whole chain, then motored to a more secluded isle where we kayaked through a cave into a bay inside an island. The guides had brought chunks of raw carrot to entice some of the monkeys down to the waters edge. The two of us paddled around the circular bay, admiring the jungle spilling down over the cliffs. Flocks of birds circled the forest canopy, high above us. It was idyllic, though still winter. As soon as we emerged through the cave, back to the open water, the wind hit us and we raced back to the boat and the luxury of hot showers.

Hanoi has lots of great sights for tourists, and I hope to see the Temple of Literature next time. Anisa visited it after I left and said it was beautiful. While I was there we spent most of our time searching for unidentifiable street food (the big yellow things turned out to be battered and deep-fried slices of sweet potato) or shopping. We went to a mall on New Year’s Day to see The Hobbit. We ate spring rolls before the show, and lychee frozen yogurt with mulberries during the movie. Gollum is just as funny, creepy and pitiful when he's subtitled in Vietnamese. It was quite an experience.

The one museum we did get to was the Women’s Museum, which surprised and impressed me with it’s depth and scope. It covered anthropology, history, art, fashion and religion. One floor was dedicated to the differences between the ethnic groups of Vietnam that are patralineal, with those that are matrilineal. The majority are matrilineal. One exhibit explained the worship of the Mother Goddess, delving into the historical origins, as well as displaying photos and stories of the Vietnamese that practice the same rituals today. One exhibit explained traditional beliefs and taboos surrounding marriage, pregnancy and birth, spanning many different minority peoples in Vietnam. The history floor had a lot of personal photos, artifacts and stories of the heroines of the war. The top floor was entirely clothes and fashion, mostly showing style differences among Vietnamese regions and ethnicities, but also illustrating weaving techniques for the clothes. There was even a display of a H’Mong headdress, with video and drawings to show how to wrap it and a mirror so you can see if you’re doing it right. The whole museum was very well done.

Somehow I seem to have written a lot for a blog that I meant to be a photo-journal. That happens to me more often than not. Maybe I should go back to keeping a real, paper journal, so you don’t have to read all the details. Or maybe you should go to Vietnam and take photos of the phở to send to me.