[The following post is from the archives of my In Search Of Incredible blog, originally published on 5 July 2013. Minor edits have since been made from the original post to update some links and info.]
30 March 2012, Friday
Morning call: 7:00am
It was the end of our 3-day, 2-night Kangaroo Café Halong Bay/Cat Ba Island tour and we departed our hotel on Cat Ba Island at 8:30am this morning. We then took a boat back to Halong City harbour before transferring to a minibus, which dropped us off at Thang Long Hotel around noon time for lunch. The lunch was part of the tour package and it was at BMC Restaurant, which served decent Chinese food.
At 12:48pm, we left Halong City and headed back towards Hanoi, with a short 20-minute toilet break at Hong Ngoc along the way. It was 4:50pm by the time we returned to Kangaroo Café in Hanoi, so we had spent a good part of the day travelling.
We went back to our Hanoi Old Centre Hotel to pick up our luggage and to freshen up. We were keen to check out some of the shopping areas in Hanoi, so we asked our friendly receptionist for suggestions. She told us that the best shopping mall in Hanoi was at Vincom Tower, so we took a taxi there, about ten minutes away.
Luckily I didn’t have very high expectations, as Vincom Center turned out to be quite disappointing. It had some international brands but nothing extraordinary. It was nothing like the mega malls we have in Singapore and Bangkok, so we just browsed around for about half an hour before moving on.
We took another taxi back to the Old Quarter and wandered along the myriad of streets there, where the roads were now closed and converted to the Dong Xuan night market. The night market operates only during weekends and runs from 7pm till late.
There were hundreds of stalls, selling a smorgasbord of goods like T-shirts, keychains, handicraft, crockery, greeting cards, handphone accessories and also foodstuff. It was like a typical pasar malam, but compared to Bangkok, the quality of goods here was way lower. The night market is actually not geared towards tourists, as evidenced by the swathes of locals there picking out the best bargains, or simply just enjoying a night stroll.
We weren’t too keen on spending much money so we just walked around and soaked up the atmosphere. We were back in our hotel by 9:30pm, ready to go to bed and enjoy the air-conditioned comfort of the room. End of another day in Hanoi!