Our last organized trip was to Binh Ninh, an area about 2 hours away. Our guide, Max, young with great English was a real joy. Super friendly, very chatty, honest and funny. His income went down 90% from $1K to $50 a month during covid – so he was very happy we were there. The 9 of us got in the van and off we went through some working class Hanoi neighborhoods, villages to Binh Ninh. This trip had 4 components:

• Trip to the old emperor palace
• Hike to a mountain top pagoda
• Lunch
• Boat trip through the rice fields

The palace we quickly browsed through, learned some tidbits about the love/hate, actually all hate relationship with the Chinese right up north a few kilometers and moved on. Next was the hike. The number of volunteers to actually go up started to quickly dwindle once we saw the trek. This wasn’t your everyday get to the first, second or third floor trek. All but dad started, and only 3 actually made it up (Petr and the teenagers). Rest of us huffed and puffed, and stopped and smiled at the runners up and down, thinking “why are you laughing, running and taking crazy selfies everywhere, am I that out of shape that I can hardly breathe, smile or hold a camera?” Safe to say, view was great from the middle too.

The boat trip was more our cup of tea as we just had to sit while somebody else used their legs – yes LEGS – to maneuver and row the boat. Old, young, women, men, kids, all these locals were rowing tourists around, all day, for good hour each (and they would get like $2 per trip and lined up at the end to go again – potentially 2-3 a day). My abductors and overall foot coordination as well as back were aching just watching them do this. It was mesmerizing to watch and painful to imagine doing this myself. There are absolutely no ties or glue or anything between the paddle and their feet – I just don’t know how anyone could do this for 2 minutes, not to mention all day.

It was a full day, with awesome community/family lunch in the middle of nowhere – and yes, if you are wondering why we are all dressed up like we are going skiing – that’s because it was like 16C all day and windy – so not tropical (we are on the north side of Vietnam so January is January like for us).