Bia Hoi in Hanoi - Blogabond

On the 31st we decided to take it fairly easy and just get to know our surrounding area. I had one main mission in mind: sample the "Bia Hoi". It's a local speciality, so I had to. Bia Hoi is -- means, I think -- "Fresh Beer", which is drunk on the day it is brewed. Apparently there were Bia Hoi places all round where we were staying but we had failed to find them the previous night.

To try and inject a bit of organisation and high-brow into our trip we decided we first had to book some things: "Water Puppetry", a boat trip from Ha Long Bay to Cat Ba (Island), and also a bus to our next destination, Hue (pronounced like "whey" with an extra "h" at the start -- not Huey). We had planned to get an "open bus" trip all the way to Saigon, meaning we could move on to each next town whenever we wanted, but the prices had apparently "gone up for the holiday". This New Year was determined to continue plaguing us! In fact they bus tickets had doubled in price. Reasoning that the Spring Festival was in fact over now, so the prices would be coming down really soon, we just booked the first stop.

Drinking Bia Hoi (fresh beer)

Eventually we found a Bia Hoi place and sat down on little plastic seats at the street corner. (Disappointingly) it was all tourists there, but we got chatting to a few people and the Bia Hoi was rather pleasant: very light and, yes, fresh tasting. Apparently it's only a couple of percent maximum, so we had several and felt very little effect. But it was so refreshing, we could have sat and drunk it all day... just as a thirst quencher of course. While we were vendors kept walking by with trays full of books. Every now and then one of them would say to me "marijuana? very nice quality". Joanne complained that they never ask her; it must be my hair. We bought a couple of books from different vendors: a Lonely Planet Vietnam guide (haggled down from 340000 dong to 120000) as our Rough Guide to (all of) SE Asia was proving a bit too rough, and a Vietnamese phrase book (haggled down from 200000 to 80000). The books are, of course, copies; scanned and reprinted, judging by the occasional incorrect letter or missing space. The quality is ok, but the pages are a bit thin and some of them a little too faint.

Later in the day we were in a book shop to buy camera batteries and I noticed the same books on the shelves. The price tags were exactly what I had paid for them! Later we would meet some French tourist who had paid more than this and feel slightly smug. We took note of the price for the Cambodia Lonely Planet and moved on.

Encouraged by our new purchase we sought a particularly good restaurant, in fact it was the "Lonely Planet Pick" for budget Vietnamese restaurants. When we arrived the place was JAMMED full with Americans (apparently uniformly -- I didn't hear another accent or see a non-white face) and the prices must have at least doubled since it was listed under the budget section, because it wasn't at all cheap; near the upper limit of our price range in fact. That, of course, is the problem with using a Lonely Planet guide book. We went across the road and had a perfectly pleasant real budget meal.

written by

The Happy Couple on January 31, 2009 from Hanoi, Vietnam

from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon

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