Christmas and New Year in Hanoi

We made it to Vietnam just in time to end 2023 and kick off 2024. We hope you enjoy our stories of exploring the Capital City and eating/drinking our way around as many places as we could.

‘Twas the night before Christmas, and we decided it was the perfect time to finally leave Laos and head over to Vietnam - mainly because our visa was due to expire by midnight that night, but also if we didn't go that day, then I fear we never would have left. 

We arrived late evening on the 24th December and had rented an apartment with a “full kitchen” for a few nights, so Tora could whip us up a Christmas Dinner on the big day. The only problem was, we arrived and had zero ingredients! Tired or not, we had to make the trip to the supermarket and see what vegan goodies they had on offer… Tofurkey, THIS! Isn't bacon, Richmond Vegan Sausages, maybe? No… We had to remember we weren't in the UK, or even Europe for that matter, and we would have to be more creative than having it handed to us on a plate… So, Tora put their chef's hat on and got to thinking on their feet. They came out of the shop with a couple of bottles of red wine, a red cabbage, some potatoes, carrots, tofu, some stock for the gravy and a bag of a thousand enoki mushrooms. How bad could it be? 

Christmas morning came, we had the overplayed classics blasting out of the TV and the chef was ready to get stuck in! All I had to do was drink the “wine” we'd bought at the supermarket. You'd think this would be an easy task, but the wine was bloody port!!! It was so syrup-like and I did worry my teeth would fall out. But like the trooper I am, I persevered. 

While I was getting merry on port and Christmas songs, Tor was sweating out over the single frying pan that was provided in the “full kitchen” and having to get even more creative than they had to in the first place with the little ingredients we could gather the night before. 

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It was time to plate up and it looked bloody incredible! I couldn’t believe what I was seeing after months of noodles and rice. We had a taster and I have to admit, there was a very weird taste about it. Whether that was due to the layer of port syrup on the inside of my mouth, or the seasoning that was used, it wasn't great. I tried to grin and eat it, but when Tora had a taste, it was confirmed - this meal was a 10/10 for effort, but probably only a 5 at best for taste. 

After lining our stomachs (sort of), it was time to hit the town and see what Christmas day had in store for us in the centre of Hanoi. Not much, actually. Being a primarily Buddhist country, Christmas day looked more or less the same as every other day there. Still though, bars were open, so we went to a little craft beer place and sat outside people watching for a while before meeting and getting to know a Scottish couple who seemed like the most unlikely travellers you'd ever come across, but were thriving nonetheless. While we were there, Tora suspiciously popped away for a few minutes and came back with two tickets to a traditional Vietnamese water puppet show for that very night! What a surprise! 

We turned up to the theatre, and honestly, to this day I can't tell you what it was all about, but the theatrics were fantastic. There was a live backing band playing and singing on both sides of the stage, but up a height on a built up platform, and there was a pool-type thing where the stage would typically be. Puppets on sticks danced as the puppeteers behind the curtain worked their magic to bring life to them. The port and craft ales had clearly gone to our heads, because we spent the whole time in hysterics at what we were experiencing - having no idea what was going on, but enjoying the madness all the same. 

We didn't really have a plan for the next week - I mean, does anyone ever have a plan for the lull between Christmas and New Year?? But we thought we'd just take our time exploring the fascinating city of Hanoi, and adjust back to city life after Don Det. Hanoi is wild. The constant horns tooting, the 3000 lane roads with mopeds exodusing from every side-street, the sellers on the streets with their inventive ways of transporting goods - like massive platters of fruit atop their bicycles, or food baskets dangling from wooden poles being carried over their shoulders. But also, it's a city where peace and tranquillity can also be found. There are plenty of lakes and park areas to get your fill of urban nature. 

One thing on everyone's to-do list in Hanoi is to visit the famous Train Street. For anyone who doesn't know, Train Street is literally just a street with a train track running through it, and trains go through it multiple times a day. The fun thing here is that the street is lined with cafes, and when the train comes, everyone has to move their chairs off to the sides to let the train through - it really is that narrow. The atmosphere on the street is electric from probably 15 minutes before the train is due, to just after it passes through -and  everyone is standing with their phones and cameras out waiting in anticipation for the thrilling event. 

We sat at a cafe called The Coffee Train, and had a beer while we waited. The amount of “social media influencers” on that street blew us away - from photoshoots to a man simply filming himself on the track talking to his phone on a live stream! The elderly lady who ran the cafe was a proper character and didn’t stand for any of this nonsense - she had no qualms about going up and physically shoving people away from outside of her coffee shop entrance, and even got in on the live video and gave him a shove! Tora and I were absolutely creased at this, and she gave us a cheeky smile when she saw us chortling away at her. 

After all the fun on Train Street, we thought it would be a good time to check out the craft beer scene in Hanoi, and do a bit of a pub crawl. There were actually a fair amount of places to choose from, dotted around the city, and we enjoyed some beers from the local Vietnamese breweries. 

During our time at the breweries, we looked up what else we could do in Hanoi as we were going to be there for a while, and we found a “free” walking tour of the French Quarter. At this point, we didn’t even know there was a French Quarter, so we booked ourselves onto it for the following day and took to the streets by foot. 

We met our guide and the other couple on the tour, and set about learning more of the history of the City during the French rule. It was amazing to enter the French Quarter and actually feel like you were in France! The architecture was just so… French. Of course, this was the richer part of town, with all the grand buildings and 5* hotels - so there was also an abundance of designer shops (but actually real ones… not like the knock-off North Face shops you see dotted around the Old Quarter!) - we aren’t interested in designer shops and things, but it was interesting to see them situated in this City. We walked for a few hours and stopped at different points of interest, like an old jail that the French built simply to threaten anyone who disobeyed their orders. But after all the chatting during these stops, our guide had lost track of time and took off SPRINTING down the road shouting for us to follow him. Like the sheep we are, we all ran after him and realised that the train was due any minute which is what we were running for. We’d only seen the damn thing the day before!! We didn’t get a very good spot, but we saw it chugging down Train Street (again) and we all took a minute to catch our breaths. 

After doing a bit of research on where to spend New Year in Vietnam, it seemed Hanoi was the place to be. We were due to leave our apartment on the 28th, so we had a look around for a new neighbourhood to move to. We had a walk over to Thong Nhat Park which was really nice, and there were so many more locals there than we’d seen knocking around the other parts, but the area was a bit dead and we didn’t think there’d be much going on for NYE. We sat in a bar doing some traffic-watching at a busy crossroads and took to Google Maps for a bit more research. 

We came across a tiny island on Trúc Bạch Lake, in the North of the City and thought it looked quite cute, and the surrounding area seemed like there was a fair bit going on. With that, we booked a hotel and got ourselves settled in ready for the New Year celebrations. 

We found a bar doing a vinyl DJ set on NYE, so we headed there. It was pretty dead when we got there, but thought it'd pick up as the night went on. We got chatting to two locals who were there to celebrate, and we shared our plans for the next few days. We mentioned we'd been contemplating doing the Hai Giang Loop, but we didn't want to go with a tour group (we were already sick of tours at this point, and wanted to take a more flexible approach to any sight-seeing we would do going forward). One of the pair was a keen biker and knew the Hai Giang area well as he regularly volunteers, and takes food up there for the local community. I half-jokingly said that the four of us should go together and Tora and I could just be on the back of their bikes… Well, as it happened, they thought that was a great idea! We said we'd meet up in the following days to discuss the finer details (and for us to assess whether or not they were psychopaths). 

On 2nd January, we headed back into the City Center to hang around for a few days and wait for our pals to meet us and come up with a plan. More on that later. But in the meantime, Tor came up with a surprise day out for us. They’d done some research and found that there are murals all over the city, and there’s actually a guide you can download onto your phone to follow the route. The majority of them are on this one wall, which reminded me a lot of the Berlin Wall (just due to the art and the layout of it, rather than the harrowing history), but there are other murals dotted around in different parts. We had a great afternoon just sauntering around the city and coming across these wonderful masterpieces. We finished off the day with a bottle of wine in a swanky wine bar and watched the world go by outside the window. I love days where I don’t have to think, and Tora has done all the research and planning - very grateful to them for this day. 

Back to our new friends from NYE and, well, we went for a coffee with them and things went a bit south. It turned into them basically trying to make a tour out of it (which we categorically didn't want), and therefore charging us wild amounts of money for hotels, etc. When we questioned it, they changed what they were saying and it became less clear what the plan was than when we started. They said they'd come up with a solid plan and send us a message, including how much it'd be for bike rental, etc. So we extended our stay in Hanoi once more. When they messaged us with the new plan, it was even worse than before and still not quite clear what we were expected to be paying for, so we decided to just sack the whole thing off and jump on a plane to Da Nang instead. By this point, we'd exhausted Hanoi, and just wanted to get out of the north so that's what we did.