We travelled Vietnam from South to North in 14 days. During those days we learned some things about the country and its people. 

Traffic. When we first came to Vietnam, the chaos called traffic shocked us. Most of Vietnamese can’t afford a car, so they use scooters. But they don’t walk, ever. If you say you’re willing to walk a couple of kilometres, they will stare and ask if you’re sure about it. So there are no sidewalks. Whether you’re a scooter, a car, a bus, a truck, a bike, a pedestrian or a cow, you use the the same lane. And the rules are not really respected, since they slow people down. 

One American we met in Phong Nha told us that Vietnamese traffic changed his philosophy of life, because all the chaos just works and we understood what he meant. It flows pretty naturally when people don’t stop. 

Food and drink. Soup with noodles (Pho). That was almost all we ate during our trip: breakfest, lunch and dinner. We found the best Phos usually at our homestays. We also tried some street food like mango balls filled with nuts ( sounds good right? and they were), rice crepes with some herbs and banana pancakes. In Hue we also tried one of that region’s specialities: sticky rice with dried shrimp. 

Drinks usually cost almost the same as food except beer and water. Sometimes beer was even cheaper than water. 

People, language and customs. Vietnamese people are nice and friendly. They’re not pushy and the sellers back off after the first ‘no’. But their English is terrible. Luckily they have a habit of repeating what they say a couple of times, so that you might get the meaning behind the strong accent. Vietnamese language is pretty tough, it is tonic so you never know how the words are really pronounced. We learned some basics though, such as Com on (thank you, pronounced something like Gaam ern) and Mot, hai, ba, yo! (Cheers!).The religion was not really visible. Vietnamese often put incenses in front of the entrances, and sometimes there was also a little altar to go with them. But those seemed more of a custom than related to religion, since the altars contained often weird things such as christmas lights, fruits and plastic toys. What was more present was communistic rhetoric, and it grew more visible the more North we went.

Animals. When we left the city the sounds of scooter engines stopped but the noise didn’t, it only changed. There were cicadas’ drilling sound everywhere, and it was loud. In this country you can’t expect completely silence anywhere.

We didn’t see so much wildlife but a lot of domestic animals. It seemed that people and animals mostly lived side by side freely. There were dogs, chickens, ducks, pigs, goats and water buffalos walking all over in the countryside. As for the incects there were lot of mosquitoes but luckily also a lot of good guys like geckos eating them.

Destinations. For our favourite destinations, we would name Phong Nha Ke Bang and Ninh Binh. If we one day came back to Vietnam, we would probably take time to visit Sapa in the North, and maybe gave Cat Ba another shot. We also felt that we could go to Phong Nha again to explore its vast jungles and huge caves.