Perfume Pagoda
Hardly you can find such a great day trip like the one I did today at the Perfume Pagoda. Everything is spectacular and by being in the full festival of the pagoda it made it ten times better. After I finished all the dealings with the travel agents to see what can be done and how, I went in the evening to the hotel and I booked a day-trip to a place outside Hanoi, called “Perfume Pagoda”.
The next day, promptly as usual, the minibus came and picked me up at 7:45 am from the hotel and we drove for about 90 minutes plus a short stop to a place from where you have to board a boat The canal, where the boats are located was packed with small boats, hundreds of them easily, that were carrying people to the base of the mountain where the pagoda is located. The place is an important pilgrimage place, and it happened that one month after the Lunar New Year, called Tet here, is the festival of this pagoda and everybody flocks there in hordes. Even if this is a major tourist destination, barely you are able to see the foreigners in the mass of Vietnamese that pack the shrine. When arriving at the harbor, everybody boards boats that are rowed by two women , one in front and one in the back and the river gets crammed with row boats in the most spectacular show. Some boats have 2-3 people but some can have over 30 people. The boat ride went for about 1 hour and we arrived at the entrance of the park, where we got a ticket, paid in advance by the agency and started climbing the mountain. The climb is also packed with pilgrims and aligned on the sides by stalls selling everything imaginable. It is a typical pilgrimage place, with religious artifacts but also all sort of food used also for religious offer. It exist also a cable car that does the up and down rides, but I preferred to do the walking pilgrimage for the uphill part. The bad part was that the rain of the past days made a slimy walk and I got mud caked on the sneakers and pants. After the one hour walk, that you cannot shorten because the road is packed, I arrived at a point where I had a stalled humongous line in front of me that was waiting to reach a gate in front. Eventually, this happened after about 30 minutes when I saw that after the gate there were steps going down to a cave, where in about 15 more minutes I found a huge crowd. All the pilgrims congregated there with offers that were brought to the three altars inside the cave. They were making the offers, praying, giving money to the shrines, they were rubbing money on the rocks and wash with the beneficial water drops from the stalactites in the ceiling. The spectacle was astounding and I watched it for more than half an hour and shot lots of video. At around 2:00 pm, when I was supposed already to be down in a restaurant with the group, I left and I rushed to the cable car, that brought me fast down the hill. We ate in the restaurant and we chat about the events and the whole experience with the guys in the group: a couple from Amsterdam traveling 3 months, another from Switzerland biking Laos and Vietnam for about 4 months, a couple from Malaysia who showed to us all the animals that were ready for dinner, like deers and mountain mouse, etc. After lunch we left for the boats, where the water rides increased because most of the pilgrims were leaving and the river was even fuller of rowing boats, and further to the bus that brought us to Hanoi and dropped us in the center. Priority number one was to go and buy a jacket because everybody in the group told me that in Sapa is very cold and I did not have anything with me except a sweatshirt. China and Vietnam are the major countries for manufacturing western goods, so I got in a store, like in China, that were selling excess production for North Face, Armani, Tommy Bahamas, Polo, Lacoste, etc. After I pondered with a North Face jacket, I found a very slick Armani jacket made out of silk and I don’t know what else, and I decided to get it and got dressed with it, a perfect match to my mud caked sneakers and my dirty pant. Armani himself would have had a heart attack if he saw me! I went to the agency to be sure that they will not forget about me, especially that half of the city, but not on contiguous blocks (!) was on blackout and I checked again with them for a flight to Laos, that I found out that is code shared between Lao and Vietnamese aviation and they fly with small propeller planes (70 max), but they have flights directly to Luang Pabrang that is something, saving about 32 hours on the bus. I don’t know yet when to do and I still have to do a little more research about this issue. I went to my hotel, that was in blackout also, (so no internet!) and I booked my Halong Bay trip on Wednesday morning, two days on the famous bay so beautifully depicted in the movie “Indochine”, with one night sleep on the boat. So, the plan is to arrive from Sapa on Wednesday 5:00 am and to leave at 7:30am to Halong Bay.
The minivan from ODC Travel came to pick me up and dropped me and two Aussies at the train station, the guide giving us the tickets and asked us to be very careful about them because you hardly will be able to find others. The trains are packed and the agencies have their share of the seats. As a a matter of fact, I did some research about this trip and it turned out that the deal I got from ODC Travel was great. Sure, $222 for Vietnam sounds very high (only if you are here you understand this statement, it’s very hard to spend money in Vietnam everything being extremely inexpensive so $100 has a very long run here), but counting that is very hard to get soft sleeper seats and you have a guide for trekking and a jeep that carries you everywhere all the time is very helpful and makes your life easier. Other agencies or individuals that try to arrange the trip made higher offers with lower services, and investigating locally in Bac Cha for the price of a jeep it came with astronomical numbers. The train ride was good, the sheets clean, no matter that the sleeper carriages, even being privately owned and invested, were kind of dingy, old and rugged. The Aussies, at their first outing abroad, were terrified of theft and they were locking themselves completely inside. We traveled also (4 in a compartment) with a Vietnamese who was living in Lao Cai and who studied in Sorbonne social studies. Extremely educated, it was a pleasure to talk with him, unfortunately the Aussies were not so enthusiastic about him and it was late and we went to sleep, the rough sleep of the sleeper carriages.
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