(Spoiler alert, I’m writing this on day 6, after already crafting a whiny day 6 post, so here will just be the fun stuff).

Tết essentials

To properly prepare for Tết, you need at least three things:

Museum

Ha Giang has a neat little museum documenting the many indigenous cultures that make up the region. Most of the exhibits are in Vietnamese and English, but the first series of photos were not so I did a lot of phone translating, sometimes with less than stellar results:

I especially liked the grass ghosts who will worship ancestors or the recently departed.

And though I initially read the heading incorrectly, I am all for the idea of my wedding involving 50kg of wine, masses of rice and cold hard cash.

Suffice to say though, that Ha Giang is not the prettiest city you’ll ever visit, especially when shrouded in cloud (a topic for that day 6 post…)

Yesterday was chill. I got up, had breakfast, had coffee, got a haircut, had two more coffees, watched a train pass within half a metre of my nose, went to a skyscraper and looked across a cloudy and polluted Hanoi, looked straight down at the ground 65 floors below, saw a cat, drank a coffee, ate Bahn Mi, drank a coffee, had a nap, had a crisis, had Pho, had a margarita, had a beer, met a guy cycling around the world, had some more beers, went to bed, couldn’t sleep, shouted at drunk Americans and now I’m on a bus waiting for it to move to Ha Giang.

I think I’d had my fill of Hanoi by yesterday. It’s relentless: noise, fumes, horns, motorcycles, horns, cars, horns. There was a point where I was checking if I should just pack it all in and go somewhere quiet, like Bangkok. Then I realised I should probably eat and things got better.

Train Street

Hanoi has a thing where some streets are kind of dedicated to one thing: books, sweets, whisk(e)y, paper.

Train Street is perhaps a little different because it’s not a real street but a train track where a whole bunch of coffee shops have set up right next to it. Since trains are infrequent, it’s a thing to do to sit with a coffee and watch a train rumble past your table.

This is perhaps where my problems started because I had two incredibly strong coffees while all this went on. Anyone who knows me knows that I don’t really drink coffee (and might therefore wonder why I’m in Vietnam).

The view from above

I am low-key obsessed with skyscrapers and their viewing platforms. When possible, in each new city I go to, I try to go up.

In Hanoi, that means the Lotte Tower. At a little under 300 metres, it’s not a super tall, but it’s got a viewing floor and two glass floors to test your mettle.

The ticket lady warned me – and showed a picture – that the view was pretty limited, but I’m committed so up I go. And, uh, yeah. Nobody is going to take spectacular pictures today.

Moar kwaffs

Back to the old quarter for lunch and more coffee. That’s six now, and – who knew? – a recipe for sleep disaster. Still: there’s a cat.

Minor crisis and Michelin Pho

Surprisingly, I managed a mid-afternoon nap and then woke up all jittery grouchy. This, I decided, was all Vietnam’s fault and I’d be better off somewhere familiar like Thailand. Cue a wasted hour or so looking to see what I should or could cancel to make that happen.

Then I decided to get pho from the place I was recommended on Monday evening. The store is extremely unassuming, given that while it doesn’t have a Michelin star, it’s been commended by them in 2023 and 2024. Personally I couldn’t tell you the difference between Michelin-level pho and regular pho but it was tasty all the same.

Serious backpacking

To round off the evening I went back to a little bia place near my hotel. I got talking to a guy called Fred, who’s 27 and has spent the last eight months cycling from the UK to (so far) Vietnam. He’d just spent three months travelling across China and I was the fourth English-speaker he’d talked to in all that time.

Cycling. Cycling. Like, on a bicycle, with a tent, for eight months. It sounded like a lot of fun but I think there are people who thrive on that and people (like me) who’d catastrophise the fuck out of it by Calais.

And after all that coffee:

I slept like ass. Lesson learned.

I slept for about ten hours last night and stilll needed a nap this afternoon. But I’m nearly synced.

I think Hanoi lives off chaos. It’s a city for turning chaos into air pollution. How people get from A to B is just a factor of staying exactly on the line between chaos and calamity. At the same time there’s a literal balancing act going on with the 80 litres of wine or 120cm maxi-bonsai tree or four cubic metres of socks being carried on the back of each moped.

I saw it go wrong. Nothing serious, maybe a busted indicator and a grazed hand. Fortunately the bus behind the guy who came off stopped. But since it generally feels faster to walk places, it’s clear nobody is going that fast in the first place.

Tết 2025

Maybe I mentioned it already. The lunar new year happens 29th January, and everybody is preparing. Most noticeably, young Vietnamese are taking a lot of photos in traditional dress. It’s fun to watch and they take it very seriously.

Elsewhere loads of places are decorated (red, obviously) and the streets of the old town are doing rapid business.

I was talking to the guy running a bar near my hotel and he said that since the pandemic, Tết has become a bit more insular or closed off. Where before people would spend the days visiting absolutely everyone they know, now they just do relatives.

One anecdote does not make the truth, and I’ll be in a much smaller city when it happens, so let’s see.

Photo dump