Ninh Binh

We were dancing, and moving, Ninh Binhing around. We were shaking, and grooving Ninh Binhing around. Our little jingle for the backcountry exploration around Ninh Binh province.

We never actually went to Ninh Binh city. We stayed in Tam Coc instead, which is the tourist home base for the area. There are a few things to do around here with the landscape being the main attractor. It’s similar to Ha Long, or Lan Ha bay. Massive limestone mountains that tower over the flooded flats. The accessible areas are used for farming, and you can take a bicycle to bike between the mountains and lakes. The inaccessible areas are filled with jungle and water. You can take boats to them!

We had one major adventure day in Ninh Binh to tackle as much as we could.

We rented bicycles, and got to fully enjoy the chaos of Vietnam traffic with ourselves in control for the first time. Cars and motorbikes pass by ever so close, but you never really feel in danger. There’s an unspoken rule about predictability on the streets. Just go slow and steady to where you want to go, make it obvious, and you will get there safely.

We passed through a neighboring town, Ninh Thang, though you wouldn’t have noticed that you changed towns. Vietnam has a lot of people, and they live generally everywhere that’s accessible. So all of the highway and secondary highway roadsides are filled with shops and restaurants. Powering through this town, we ended up on a dirt road, and into the wilderness that was Ninh Binh province.

Limestone again formed mountains that powered out of the water. The area was one big lake, with infilled roads through the middle that we biked on. We passed through farms, farmstays, homestays and restaurants in the area known as Trang An, another tourist hotspot. All the while the views over the lakes were spectacular. A perfectly still green water reflecting the green and yellow-grey mounds.

Our first stop was the Hoa Lu Ancient Capital site. This area was the first capital of modern day Vietnam, over 1000 years ago in 968. There’s not much there now. The site of the capital building is a farmers field now. There are a couple modern monuments depicting and explaining the history of the area. There were also ~1000 young Vietnamese students, presumably on a field trip from Hanoi, visiting the capital. Whether we got unlucky on this day, or it is always like that, we don’t know.

We stopped for lunch at a homestay that gave us direction to Hoa Lu, enjoying a nice view of a lake and purposefully set up bamboo Instagram spots (These are everywhere in Vietnam. Instagram and photography culture has massive influence within what we presume are local Vietnamese, as well as Chinese tourists in every photogenic spot. Many popular spots will have a line of Vietnamese and Chinese dressed up in traditional wear to take pictures.) The pho lunch was delicious as always, then we were off to our next excursion, the Trang An river tour.

So geologically we have no idea what’s going on here. The ‘rivers’ that weave their way under and around the mountains have no detectable current, giving more of an impression of a lake that has been invaded by limestone. The water comes from somewhere and goes somewhere though. But this maze of rivers makes it the perfect place to explore via boat tour. It is also the perfect place for ancient retired emperors to build temples in a few in hard to reach locations.

We got on our boat, which was powered solely by an elderly man who was wither half-assing it, or not fit enough to be powering a boat anymore. Either way, Cam and I picked up paddles and helped him out for pretty much the entire journey, giving the other couple in our boat a nice free ride around the landscape.

The landscape was wild. These rivers meandered and snaked between sharp cliffs of limestone. Anywhere there was flat jungle land a temple was located. Some ancient, many modern, and a couple under construction now. The modern tourism aspect of Buddhist temples is growing massively in Vietnam. We started the tour moving through the water, next to the main road, before taking a sharp left away from all the other boats into a kilometer long cave.

There’s three routes to choose from for a Trang An boat tour. Most people choose route 1 cause there are lots of caves and temples. We chose route 3, cause an employee told us it was best for nature, specifically for this cave. In we went, and we stopped paddling so the boat didn’t crash. We learned from our time on Lan Ha Bay.

The cave was the prefect size. A ceiling generally of 5ft tall, and 10 to 20ft wide. There were some larger rooms that would have been 100 feet in every direction, and some narrow corners that our driver expertly navigated. He’s much more skilled at this than we are.

The passage was well lit with yellow light lanterns every so often, so you could marvel at the various cave features. Not for too long though! We had to duck a lot. This cave was a really cool highlight for us to get moved through. There were two more on the tour we took as well, each as impressive inside, but much shorter.

The temples on the journey were cool too. Every hour or so we would get off of the boat, stretch our legs, and walk 10 minutes or so around a complex. Buddhist tourists would take the time to pray at each temple, with some leaving offerings.

The inside of the Trang An area was super isolated. It is only accessible by swimming (or boating) through a cave, or by climbing over a sharp clifflike mountain. As a result, there’s no agriculture in the area, and has been generally left untouched for most of human history (apart from the temples).

The tour ended with a long noisy stretch along some SunWorld construction. SunWorld is the main tourist attraction company in Vietnam, and is personally detested by most tour guides and operators, as they destroy the nature. They’re not wrong though. Apparently, Asian tourists like easy access to the cool places, and if there somewhat ruined, oh well. Chinese tourists are the main tourism demographic in Vietnam, so they get catered to the most. SunWorld is responsible for the cable car up to the top of Fansipan mountain, the tallest mountain in Indochina, and is trying to turn Money Island in Lan Ha bay to a tourist resort, again with another cable car. SunWorld is building some theme park in the Trang An area, so its good we got to explore it while it was only mostly touristy, not fully.

We decided against a 600 step hike to a viewpoint for sunset, instead opting for a dinner with a small lake sunset view. We had some nice fried noodles and watched the sky go pink behind the mountains, before departing on our bikes back to Tam Coc. We would return to climb the viewpoint the next day, wanting to avoid biking in the dark.

Well the next day was really smoky. It’s the start of crop burning season in the area. All the local farmers burn their harvested crops for the ash, which leaves good nutrients for the soil and next years harvest. Not wanting to perform a hike in the smoke, we instead opted to hang around town and plan out the rest of Vietnam. There was a UFC fight on in a bar (Strickland vs Duplessis), where some South Africans were cheering hard for their fellow countryman, who ended up getting the victory. We chatted with them about South Africa, digital nomading, and trying to use the world to retire early, which is what one of them were trying to do. He also didn’t eat vegetables.

The planning question for us now is, do we go back north into the mountains, where its 5 degrees for some beautiful motorbike scenery, or do we head south for good weather? What did we choose? Well, we will see you there.