Month: April 2025

I’m taking a little pause from the 50 year backpacker journey that my wife and I took around the world, to reflect on my wife’s home country of Mexico.

One thing we’ve found whilst travelling is the impacts of over tourism. While Mexico certainly does suffer from over-tourism in parts, especially around Cancún, Sayulita and Puerto Vallarta, and sites like Chichén Itzá and Teotihuacán, to name a few, it also offers the independent traveler a wealth of less touristy experiences.

I’ve been travelling independently in Mexico since 2013, where I first did a Lonely Planet itinerary of some of the top twenty sites, like Mexico City, Teotihuacán, Cancún, Mérida, Palenque and San Cristobal de las Casas.

I ended up in Mexico because I had travelled over with my niece to the USA as she was going over there to study in Nashville for 6 months. My sister used to work for Virgin airlines so the immediate family could get some pretty good discounts on tickets. Originally my sister  had planned to travel with my niece and I over there, flying to LA and then driving across to Nashville. But in the end my sister ‘piked out’ leaving just me and my niece to take the trip together (by the way I basically repeat this story somewhere else on the Juanito’s Travels  site, but I can’t exactly remember where, as I have added heaps of pages and posts over the years). My niece couldn’t get the discount on the airfares that my sister or I could get unless she travelled with one of us – short explanation they had ‘tiers’ of discounts, immediate family got super good discounts and anyone who was travelling with us could get a pretty decent discount, like premium economy for the price of economy.

So, in the end I was pretty much committed to going as we had promised my niece she’d get these mad discounts and all. I didn’t have to go, but I like to keep my promises.

So my niece and I go over the USA. But by now the plans to drive from LA to Nashville have been ditched. And my niece and I were pretty much just going to part ways when we got to LA, apart from going together to an LA Dodgers’ baseball game that I invited her along to. When I thought about what I’d like to do in the USA, apart from just looking around Hollywood and going to an LA Dodgers’ baseball game, I thought, go to Mexico!

I know Mexico is not in the USA – but much of the USA used to be part of Mexico, pretty much all those places with Spanish sounding names like Los Angeles, Las Vegas, San Francisco, San Diego et cetera have Spanish sounding names for a reason!

My original plans for Mexico were quite simple and based a little around my extensive knowledge of the country through watching the Herbie Goes Bananas movie. Herbie is a VW beetle car with a personality – he has kind of a ‘spirit’ and gets up to all sorts of antics like fighting bulls and stuff. Part of Herbie Goes Bananas is set in Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, Mexico.

So based on Herbie Goes Bananas I thought I’d go down to Puerto Vallarta and have a drink of tequila, which I also knew was Mexican, have a taco and then come back to Australia again via the USA.

As an independent traveller, then just 40 years old, I bought the Lonely Planet guide to Mexico and started to flick through it. And then I started to discover that there was much more to Mexico than what I had learnt from Herbie Goes Bananas and other classics like Speedy Gonzales, fastest mouse in all of México!! I pretty much learnt from Speedy Gonzales that Mexicans wore big sombreros.

The Lonely Planet said Mexico had lots of archaeological sites, like Teotihuacán, the Mayan archaeological site of Palenque and the ruins of the Aztec main temple, the Templo Mayor (‘great temple’). I must admit on my first visit to Mexico, as you may have gathered by now, I didn’t have a great deal of knowledge about Mexico! In this case, thanks Lonely Planet for giving me a better idea! For instance, I thought Teotihuacán was an Aztec site (whilst it was an important site for the Aztecs it pre-dated their civilisation by a few hundred years and was built by the Teotihuacanos – as the name suggests).

So, now with Lonely Planet in hand I started stretching my itinerary beyond Puerto Vallarta, with planned visits to Mexico City, Teotihuacán (close to Mexico City), Cancún, Mérida, Palenque and San Cristobal de las Casas. Puerto Vallarta seemed like a bit of a detour so I ditched the idea of visiting there.

Sorry Herbie.

My friend Kurt had also been to Mexico so he was able to recommend a few places for me to go – including Palenque, which he had missed out on as he was sick and had just stayed in San Cristobal de las Casas, which is actually not that close to Palenque which I was later to find out! 

So my wife-to-be and I met up a few times and immediately hit it off. It was a short affair, just a few days in the end as I had to get back to Australia to look after my kids in Canberra as my ex-wife-to-be had to go to Sydney for some training for a new job she had started.

On that first trip I first arrived in Mexico City where I was soon to discover nobody wears big sombreros about. But they did have tequila and tacos, and many, many Herbies – that is many VW beetles, which they call Vochos. Makes sense as they manufactured VW Vochos there in Mexico for many years. And that, of course, is why Herbie was there.

On that first trip I fell in absolute love with Mexico! I loved the sites. I loved the people. I loved the food – though I did have a few mishaps like getting sick from some very cheap canasta style tacos in Mexico City. I loved the nature, the city, the art, the history. It was, and still is, all amazing!

Well that first trip started it all! My now lifelong love of Mexico had begun. Often the first time you do something can lead to a second, third, forth et cetera time.

Like smoking weed, meditation, eating and having sex. Often we do these things more than once in our lives.

So, that first trip under my belt, some years later, again using my sister’s Virgin airline discounts, I travelled again to Mexico via Los Angeles, this time with my friend Kurt, and this time going business class rather than premium economy.

That was 2015, that was the year I went to Mexico to experience the Day of the Dead – Dia de Muertos – which is at the start of November. We had been planning to go to Mexico City or Puebla to experience Dia de Muertos but Kurt’s back was playing up and he knew a doctor in Guadalajara who was good at fixing backs and so we modified our plans to go to Guadalajara instead. You can read more about that here, it also involved being delayed a few days in LA because a big Hurricane had hit around Puerto Vallarta – from Herbie Goes Bananas fame.

I was like, whatever, as long as we were in Mexico around Day of the Dead, it was all good. Kurt’s bad back changed my life in a rather major way. Now on this occasion it was definitely what I would consider a kind of ‘fate’ situation.

Mainly because when Kurt was off in Guadalajara getting his back looked at, I was meeting a Mexican woman online for the first time, someone who was later to become my wife.

So in the end I didn’t quite make it to the Day of the Dead, leaving, I think on the morning of 1 November. As it happens there’s quite a bit of activity leading up to Day of the Dead anyway so you don’t necessarily have to be there on the actual day. You can read more about that here.

And that was 2015. My-wife-to-be kept in touch for a bit and then stopped communicating for a bit at all, and I sorted out my separation arrangements with my first wife, which pretty much started the day I got back Canberra.

So, now officially single, I spent some time kind of alone, though still living with my ex due to financial restraints, and hey, my wife-to-be and I weren’t together at that stage anyway. 

So the following year, my kids and my mum go to Japan, and I kept thinking about my wife-to-be and even bought her a little Snoopy notepad from Tokyo thinking optimistically that perhaps one day I would see her again. And then later in 2016 I started sending messages to my wife-to-be as I had started to plan another trip to Mexico to visit the Mayan archaeological site of Calakmul and was wondering whether perhaps she’d want to see me again for a coffee.

Well, that ‘coffee’ ended up starting with plans for us to meet up in Guadalajara, once I’d been to Mérida, and then to Calakmul. From those humble beginnings the ‘coffee’ turned into plans to visit Guanajuato, then Morelia, Querétaro, and Mexico City. After, of course, meeting up in Guadalajara.

By the end of that trip I had met my wife-to-be’s (let’s just call her ‘Jan’ from now on) family, one of her cousins, and some of her friends. After that we were more officially together and I soon started planning another trip to Mexico.

I’ll continue this Mexico focus in my next blog post as we maybe finally get to visit the city Herbie made famous (for me) – Puerto Vallarta.

But it’s worth mentioning that Guanajuato, Morelia, Querétaro, and Mexico City were all amazing experiences. Guanajuato was like a real life Disney experience with beautiful, medieval inspired buildings, and a full on romantic vibe.

Guanajuato, Morelia and Querétaro have what I’ve discovered to be a central Mexican charm, especially in their city centres. They are all bustling with good restaurants, cafes, street food, lively entertainment, often free in the town squares. You’ll see a lot of similarities in design for these smaller Mexican cities, with a central square, with a church at one end and restaurants and shops on the edges.

You also see this repeated in the big cities, like Guadalajara and the granddaddy of Mexican cities, Mexico City! Except on a much grander scale. Guadalajara’s centro area hosts a grand and beautiful Catedral (cathedral as you may have guessed if you don’t know Spanish) and large public spaces. While in Mexico city there’s an even bigger Catedral and an even bigger public space, The Zócalo, which I encountered on my very first visit to, which is also the site on which the Aztecs (also known as the Mexica) founded their capital Tenochtitlan, not to be confused with the grand site of Teotihuacán with it’s massive pyramids of the sun and the moon, which  was built by the Teotihuacanos – not the Aztecs!

All of the places I have mentioned so far are pretty easy to navigate (if you stay in a central area) and to get to for the independent traveller. You don’t need an organised tour guide to take you around and, in my opinion, you won’t get to spend enough time and some of these amazing places if you go on an organised tour.

What I would recommend instead is to organise your own airfares and bus fares between places and then maybe organise day tours in some of these areas.

I’ve put in links in this post to posts and pages I’ve already done about some of these places, but in future posts I will add some more detail on some of the areas and some recommendations for the independent traveller.

I have been travelling to Mexico for over 12 years, and I have never had any particualarly bad experiences at all! I have travelled to many, many places in Mexico and all have been amazing. I will keep giving recommendations on places to stay, where to visit and what to eat in Mexico when you travel there.

My only fear is that by hopefully making your Mexican experience slightly more accessible is that I don’t aid in promoting the negative aspects of tourism and turn nice, local vibe places into not so nice places overrun by tourists. Like Cancún, Sayulita, and Los Cabos (the last I haven’t visited but I have on my wife’s good authority that it has been spoiled through overtourism. 

Also some very good sites like chichén itzá and Teotihuacán (especially Chichén) have become tourist circuses. A few ways to avoid supporting the over tourism and promote healthy sustainable are to:

•  NOT ONLY GO TO THE MOST FAMOUS SITES. Chichén itzá for example is just one of hundreds of well preserved Mayan archaeological sites. Sure, go visit there with the massive crowds, but perhaps plan to stay a bit longer and go visit some of the lesser known Mayan sites, like Uxmal, Calakmul and many, many others. 
• do a bit of research and get on some locally run days tours where local Indigenous people proudly explain their cultural connection to sites.
• don’t go on package tours lasting for days – they will not give you enough time to explore areas and will only take you to the overly tourist hot spots. For example my kids and I visited a lovely cenote (underground waterhole/ lake/ river) not far from Mérida, Yucatán which was very beautiful but totally overrun by thousands and thousands of tourists. Whereas the day before we had visited a nice rustic cenote run by an Indigenous cooperative where we had a swim with just a dozen people.
• when doing a day trip try and get in a smaller group who can perhaps get into some of these sites a little before the big tour buses roll in. Even better hire your own guide like we did at Teotihuacán where my wife and two kids got up early and visited the site before the big crowds had made their way there.
• avoid Airbnb, especially where people are using local homes that drive up prices for locals, like has been happening in the more popular parts of Spain and Italy. Local homes are for locals. You, as a tourist, should be staying at hotels! Even if that means fewer of us tourists can visit! You have money and options, a lot of places you visit in Mexico do not have the same financial resources, so it is unfair to drive prices up and drive locals out as has happened in Sayulita.
• boycott places like Sayulita altogether! Sorry to pick on you Sayulita but you have become a magnet for gringo (USA) invasion over the last few years. There is hardly any local character to Sayulita anymore and locals are now struggling to be able to accommodate themselves at a reasonable cost in the area as new apartments and the like are practically all targeted at wealthy tourists rather than the hard working locals who support us tourists! Also, when tourism completely takes over prices get driven up and places like Sayulita find themselves with a situation where everything is twice the price of the rest of Mexico. Don’t go there! Don’t support that injustice, demand sustainable and balanced tourist options with a mixed economy that is not only based on tourist dollars!

That’s enough for today I think! I’ll have more tips and tricks on planning your independent travel to Mexico in coming posts before I get back to continuing the 50 Year Backpacker blog – though this is kind of part of that anyway!

We’re still in Hanoi. There I want to finally finish the story about ‘that knife’ I tried to get from Laos to Vietnam, as it did end there in Hanoi.

For those who have read previous Juanito’s Travels posts you may recall that I bought a knife at the Mekong Elephant Centre with the hope of taking it back to Australia.

It was a beautifully rustic, hand-made knife that a nice Laotian man had made from recycled scrap metal there in his little open air workshop at the Mekong Elephant Centre on the Mekong River just next to the little town of Pakbeng (or Pak Beng) which is a kind of stopover town on the Mekong River between Huay Xai, on the Thai/ Laos border, and Luang Prabang.

I thought I could use that knife in the garden to cut branches and the like (it was a pretty decent-sized knife) when I got back to Australia and it’d be all good. And easy. And it was. Initially. I carried that knife down the Mekong on that slow, and very uncomfortable, boat down the Mekong, in the scorching April heat, to Luang Prabang where we chilled out on dry land for a few days. 

The trouble with the knife only came on the next leg of the journey from Luang Prabang to Vientiane where we were taking the very fast new, Chinese-built, train. It was a beautiful, very efficient, train that was only going to take us like 2 hours rather than like 18 hours on the road. I don’t recall if it actually took 2 hours but it was pretty darn quick, less than 3 hours I think, maybe it slowed down a bit in spots. Very nice trip, read past blogs for more on that.

The fast train is super nice. And super fast. But, you can’t bring any sharp items, like knives, on it. There is also no way you can pack the knives and put them in storage as you have to take your bags with you into the carriage and you have to go through a metal detector and everything. There is no separate luggage area like on a plane. So, in short, no knives allowed. At all. Zero knives. Zero.

You’ll have to read my previous posts for more details on how I tried to get around that but the short summary is, after many creative attempts to try and get those knives back to Australia via post and what have you, my very helpful hotel reception guy in Luang Prabang convinced me that we could give the knives to his bus driver friend who could drive them to Hanoi on his regular service there where we could then pick them up from Hanoi bus station. 

I say knives,  plural, for I also had a little Swiss army knife given to me by a married Swiss woman named Corinne who I had been travelling up the east coast of Australia back in the early 1990s (read a fictitious version of that trip here). It was a knife, by the way, that I had been previously allowed to have on my person when I travelled on a Thai airways flight from Australia to Thailand and then onto London in 1995. Boy have times have changed. They won’t let you on with a knitting needle nowadays.

So the knives went one way on the bus towards Hanoi, and my wife and I went another way, on the very cool fast train to Vientiane and then by plane to Hanoi.

As I wrote, we were to collect the knives at a bus station in Hanoi. Sounded like a reasonably easy plan to execute. I’d been keeping in regular contact with my hotel reception guy from Luang Prabang via Whatsapp and he informed me that the knives would be arriving at the bus station in Hanoi one evening when we were there. I was like, good, I will try and go and collect them, and we arranged a time and he gave me the address and all that. It was all going to be rather simple, walk in, meet the bus driver, collect the knives and then head back to the hotel.

So my wife and I head out to the bus station to collect the knives.

Well, as you may now be imagining, it wasn’t that simple. Firstly our Grab couldn’t take us all the way to the bus station as it was a national holiday for Reunification Day and so half of Hanoi was heading to the bus station to get on a bus to go on holidays for a few days. So, we couldn’t get all the way to the bus station and we had to stop a few blocks from there and make our way through all the millions of scooters and cars and the like – it really seems virtually no one in Hanoi walks anywhere and they only ever go anywhere more than 10 metres on their scooter. They seem to have been practically born with two wheels beneath them. 

We managed to eventually get to the bus station at the time our bus driver was meant to be arriving from Luang Prabang. I messaged the hotel guy in Luang Prabang saying we were there and he messaged back saying the bus had been delayed but that it should be there in the next hour. So we decided to wait around a bit.

The station was absolutely chaotic. There were millions of people going everywhere trying to get  onto buses in some system most of us foreigners could not possibly hope to understand, though I did see at least one foreigner who had managed to work it out as she sat on one of these sleeper buses which had rows of mattresses lining the windows with a satisfied smile on her face as she overlooked the chaos below. I can only applaud her for working out whatever system was going on there, she probably had a PhD in Chaos Theory to help her manage.

I think we were there for maybe an hour, walking from place to place, squeezed in amongst this sea of humanity, getting accosted by people trying to sell us stuff, getting told we need to go one place then another, but not understanding any of the directions, or signs or anything about the place really. It was just generally a very, very stressful place to be. 

My wife was certainly not coping with the crowd. But, apparently the bus was coming into the station in a minute, and it was some number bus, which I can’t recall, and we spent a bit more time trying to work out the bus number system on the hundreds of buses parked in this big car park thing, trying to not get run over by incoming and outgoing buses, and what the hell any of it meant before.

After a while I could really see my wife wasn’t coping with this, I suggested after trying to make some sense of things, ‘hey let’s just get out of the station and work out our next move, you’re obviously not coping’. I was barely keeping it together myself but I was a bit more used to it, I’d seen such systems in India when I was there in 1995.

So we decided to make our way out after perhaps an hour, or even an hour and half maybe, in the utter madness of the Hanoi bus station on a national holiday. And I said, ‘hey let’s just ditch these bloody knives, I can see you’re not coping’. My wife, somewhat shell shocked, just kind of nodded her head.

‘Let’s go across the road to that cafe (pointing to a cafe across the street), sit down, have a drink and then order a Grab back to the hotel’. And after that my mind went a bit blank, I’m not sure whether we got our Grab or just grabbed a taxi, but somehow, not too much later, we were in a car heading back to the hotel.

I know our phone batteries were practically kaput by that stage so maybe we had to get a taxi, who knows. All I can say is we never want to go back to that bloody bus station there in Hanoi ever again. Though, perhaps it was just extra crazy due to the Reunification Day holiday. Don’t know, and I’m not going to find out. Anway, despite calling this blog the 50 Year Backpacker, It’s fancy trains and planes for us!

But, keep in mind the fact that there is Reunification Day holiday at the end of April as this, as we would soon see, had an impact on our next destination, the usually tranquil touristy town of Hoi An.

I messaged Luang Prabang on the way back from the bus station and said we’d given up on the knives. He tried to convince us it was still a possibility, but I was like, hey, we’re staying at this hotel for one more night. If the guy can get the knives sent there then fine, otherwise the knives are gone and I never want to hear about them again, tell the bus driver he can have them!

And we never heard from those knives again (to date). The Laos knife wasn’t a big deal, as I’d only got it a few days early (though it was pretty expensive for a Laotian knife!) but I still had an attachment to the Swiss army knife that Swiss Corinne gave me. 

Perhaps it was a sign though that, after all those years, I needed to lose my attachment to that knife and that part of my life. Since that time back in the early 90s I had travelled to Ireland, the UK, France and India. Had two kids, raised them in Canberra, Australia. Got married. Traveled to Ireland, India, France a few times, Japan, Iceland, Italy a couple of times, Thailand a couple of times, Germany, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Cuba, Singapore, Austria, around Australia (where we live at present), Greece, Türkiye, the USA a few times, and Mexico many times. Got divorced. Lost a testicle. Had the kids grow up. Moved to the Gold Coast. Gotten married again, to a Mexican, the lovely, beautiful one who was there now, poor thing, getting overwhelmed by the effort to retrieve some knives from the absolute madness of the Hanoi bus station. 

And now my wife and I were travelling around the world.

We didn’t need those knives hanging around. Those memories, those ghosts.

They were gone.

Move on from those attachments, the Budhha would say, they will only bring misery.

They were just things. The most important thing was we were there together, my wife and I. Nothing else mattered.

I think we had one more night, or maybe two, in Hanoi, and then, very early in the morning we packed our things again and headed to Hanoi airport for our flight to Da Nang and then onto Hoi An.

Part one – the first bit, a bit of background, a bit of colonialism, a bit of communism, a bit of Bánh mi

I started writing this post with the same old boring (well it was certainly not boring when we were there, but retelling the tale can be tedious) detail of what we did in Hanoi and when we did it and in which order we did it, and what we ate in between doing those things – the last being one of my most favourite topics, I LITERALLY live to eat as opposed to eat to live. 

On that topic, we had a fantastic Bánh mì by that cathedral in Hanoi that looks like a mini Notre-Dame cathedral, and some great bún chả that our friends Scottie & Howie recommended from their trip to Hanoi (or maybe it was just Howie who went there and Scottie went to Helsinki – it was around when they were first dating I think), as well fantastic bánh bao, including a cheese hamburger bánh bao, at a place one street over from the second hotel we stayed at in Hanoi having moved there after the first hotel was so terribly disappointing and crappy (more on that further along). Most people probably know what Bánh mì is by now, the Vietnamese baguette with savory meats like pork or chicken, mayonnaise, pâté and fresh herbs. I think bánh bao and bún chả is getting more common to see, in Australia at least.

The former being fluffy, Vietnamese steamed buns, often filled with savory ingredients like ground pork and cheeseburger inspired stuff, the latter a Northern Vietnamese dish consisting of grilled pork (patties and/or belly) served with rice vermicelli noodles, fresh herbs, and a sweet and sour dipping broth. The bún chả I had was accompanied by some crispy crab filled vermicelli spring rolls.

I should mention a great smoothie I had at the juice place next to the bao which had avocado making it quite creamy without the need for cream, me being somewhat lactose intolerant.

But before I get into too many more Lonely Planet type details on food and places to visit, I first I wanted to say why we visited Vietnam and what our general impressions of the place were. 

Well firstly – maybe that’s the second or third time I’ve said (or written) ‘first’ – I was mostly responsible for the itinerary for this round the world backpacker trip, and I was the one who added Vietnam. I did, of course send the Google sheets itinerary to my wife before we set off, but she was mostly just interested in seeing some elephants and the Cambodian temples around Siem Reap.

In the end the Vietnamese leg of our trip consisted of a few nights in Hanoi, then down to Hoi An and then down to Ho Chi Minh (the city not the person). On Ho Chi Minh (the person not the city), or more precisely, Ho’s preserved body which lays in state in a specially built mausoleum, our hotel receptionist, who was a real cack (funny if you don’t know what ‘cack’ is), said he, well his preserved body, wasn’t really worth visiting.

“You go there, spend like 30 minutes or one hour in line, and there is Ho there preserved, and that is it! There are more interesting places to visit. Go to the prison museum. Hoa Lo Prison. Much more fascinating than seeing Ho there.”

The receptionist also said she would call the police if we returned to Hanoi and didn’t stay at her hotel, which was a real cack indeed. But we do plan to go back to the hotel if we ever visit Hanoi again. Just in case.

I better get to that ‘first’ thing I was going to write about before I got distracted by bahn mi, bánh bao and bún chả . I added Vietnam because I was really interested in their history. The American War, their struggle with French colonialists, mostly that stuff. Their modern history. And Ho Chi Minh – whose body is preserved there in Hanoi, and according to the hotel receptionist, not worth the visit – was a huge part of that. 

After visiting Vietnam I ordered a big thick Ho Chi Minh biography by William J. Duiker and read all about him. I view him as a nationalist leader, more than a revolutionary, someone who was out there fighting the French and the USA imperialists. Prior to reading the big thick book I thought Ho was out there fighting with the Viet Minh, the Vietnamese nationalist army that Ho helped form. He did do a bit of that, hiding out in mountains and helping direct some military operations, but throughout his career he mostly went along to boring political meetings and organised all that sort of really boring political and administrative stuff which is necessary to win over the hearts and minds of people to fight for an independent Vietnam.

Mostly what he did was help organise the practical administrative, political and general organisational base for which to achieve Vietnam’s independence. He certainly did end up becoming a national symbol to inspire Vietnamese soldiers and the general population to endure many decades of armed struggle firstly against the French and then by the South Vietnamese government with considerable US support – around 2.7 million US personnel served during the American (AKA Vietnam) War.

If you’ve read my previous post you’ll see I tried to take that knowledge onto the Australian ABC TV show Hard Quiz hosted by Tom Gleeson, but they turned out to be imperialist so and so’s who weren’t interested in hearing how influential a guy Ho was. Well, their loss.

With the desire to learn more about Vietnam’s modern history in mind, beyond the classically one-side pop culture exposure I had growing up which included Good Morning Vietnam, Platoon, Hamburger Hill, Full Metal Jacket, and the TV series Tour of Duty – the last one I had the soundtrack for on an LP record which I used to play on my record player as I went to sleep. The LP had the only Rolling Stones song I really like on it, Paint it Black (Beatles – much better).  With all that in mind, Hanoi, and Vietnam,certainly did deliver on educating us on the Vietnamese struggle for independence. 

The independence movement really took off, in earnest, during the French occupation which began in the mid 1800s and progressed somewhat when the Vietnamese drove the French out in the 1950s, creating North and South Vietnam. The French government, being the imperialist so and so’s they were, could only bring themselves to ‘allow’ half an independent Vietnam, with the more economically prosperous South still being in their sphere of influence, though not under their direct administration.  

This was meant to be a temporary solution which was to be followed by a national vote to determine if all of Vietnam was to be fully independent. When the French, and the USA, realised the vote might lead to the Ho-led – well there were many other leaders, he was just one of the most well known and influential – they decided democracy was about keeping capitalists happy and communists out.

Look, makes some sense, and as I said I would generally not be interested in saying kind words about communism as it’s a pretty shitty system, however, in Vietnam’s case I’m ok with it as I don’t see the extremely ideological and illogical harmful policies of Vietnam’s northern neighbours, China and the the USSR. Plus the South Vietnamese government were not there to support the interests of the people. So, not the type of ‘democracy’ –  if you could even call it that, which I’ve already insinuated by using the quotation marks – that anyone should be supporting. Added onto that there is the total hypocrisy of the land of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, using Vietnam for so many years as their personal fiefdom and then the land of the “free and the home of the brave” ignoring the will of the Vietnamese, and killing many millions of them, in the name of ‘democracy’. Not a good look.

While we’re on about communism, my wife and I found our visit to one of the most communist countries in the world, Cuba, very disappointing, with their shops depressingly empty except for a couple of bottles of shampoo and some cigars and rum here and there. Vietnam, and the previous country we visited on that 50 Year Backpacker trip, Laos, are both technically communist, but it appears more politically communist than economically, and you have nice stores and the like, and great street food, particularly in Vietnam, whereas Cuba struggles to even feed their population due to the incompetence of the government with a ‘vegetarian’ pizza just having tomato paste and onions on it, and lasagna being tins of tomatoes with some minute pieces of meet, and cheese toasties being some of the only things you can buy outside of fancy resorts (my Juanito’s Travel post about Cuba is a bit of a parody presented by the rather under appreciated character of Hammerhead from the original Star Wars movie). 

Back to Vietnam. Vietnam’s struggle for independence only ended when the North Vietnamese finally took control of the south in 1975, after the American forces left the country in 1973 – though not before they dropped over 20,000 tons of bombs on Hanoi around Christmas 1972, starting when I was just one day old, as a parting gift. I daresay the Vietnamese would have preferred frankincense or myrrh. We bought some fridge magnets that commemorated the bombing, including one celebrating how the US war planes were shot down during the period.

We were actually there in Hanoi for Vietnam’s Unification Day on April 30, so there were perhaps more flags and celbratory displays on show that usual.

I see today (which is certainly not today for you reading this as I’m unlikely to press ‘publish’ on this post for a bit because I have to a.) finish writing a draft, and b.) go find all my Bánh mì, bao and bun cha photos – I should add and then c.) spell check and proofread this post, which you may have noticed from previous posts, and likely this one as well, can be a bit hit and miss – by the way, if you are looking for an unpaid internship to proofread all my posts you’re welcome to apply using the email address I have somewhere on my Juanito’s Travels website.

Where was I? Yes, ‘today’ President Trump imposed tariffs on Vietnamese goods entering the USA of 46%. All I can say is ‘sore losers’. As our visit to Vietnam showed, Vietnam was really poorly treated by Western nations – particularly France and the USA – for over a century. First the French came in and then just took over the place, just parce que (French for ‘because’ according to Google), although perhaps pourquoi pas (why not) is a better description. 

The French practically, and often very literally, enslaved local people, treated them terribly, imprisoned ‘trouble makes’ like Ho Chi Minh and many colleagues in places like Hoa Lo Prison  – though in Ho’s case they only managed to get the British to put him in jail in Hong Kong rather than Vietnam as Ho was a slippery character who used to sneak out of back doors of places to avoid the French secret police.

Ho escaped from Hong Kong to Russia (well the USSR), where, as a communist, he was quite warmly welcomed. I think he even met Stalin at some point. Anyone with even a passing interest in history will know that one of the worst communists ever to exist was Stalin. 

So, the communism of Vietnam, and particularly Ho Chi Minh, wasn’t, in my opinion, as dogmatic and destructive as Russia – particularly under Stalin where many millions died from his megalomaniac persecution of his own people, including causing a devastating famine in Ukraine which left millions dead.

The communism of Vietnam, in those many years during their struggle for independence, had a strong nationalist focus. Ho and others were fighting for Vietnamese independence more than they were fighting for communism. This was not the case in USSR, China or Cuba where they fought for an ideology. 

The French were arrogant imperialist, colonialist bastards. The communists were simply the main opposition force who managed to get rid of them. 

The French even had the gall – the Charles de ‘Gaulle’ (the French leader after World War Two for those with no history background) – to come and reclaim ‘their’ French indochina, just a short time after – no wait for it – just a short after their own country was occupied by Nazi Germany. Now that, for me, is kind of like the ultimate irony right? Not kinda, is-a!

The British did the same thing with ‘their’ colonial ‘possession’ of India. Lucky India had a ‘Ho’ named Gandhi. Except Gandhi didn’t get into all the guns and armed struggle type things that Ho resorted to!  

So, the Americans help liberate France from the German occupiers, in the name of freedom and all that hoo-ha, what with the Nazis taking innocent people from their homes and killing them in concentration camps, underpinned by a radically racist bigotry, and the like, and Nazis being genuine A-grade evil, evil, unspeakably evil people. And then, literally straight after that, they go and re-occupy, and reinforce their own, racially based, claim to the territory they took from the Vietnamese, and Laotians and Cambodians. Racially based in the sense that, like many European nations, despite the horror of the holocaust, they still held views that Asians, Africans and pretty much anyone with darker skin than the snow white European snowflakes, were inferior, culturally, intellectually, the whole kit and kaboodle.

Ho, in the brief period after world war, rightfully declared Vietnam an independent state that should not have any colonial masters. He also tried to convince the Americans that, being the home of liberty and all that hoo-ha, they should be supporting the Vietnamese over the French colonialists. However, the Americans were too caught up now in the start of the Cold War, so couldn’t bring themselves to condemn the French presence in ‘French Indochina’ because, despite the French being bastards, they were, at least, not communist bastards and they were on the right side of what Winston Churchill dubbed the ‘Iron Curtain’. The other side of that curtain being where the communists did all those evil things like the type of political repression, and suppressing opposition movements, the French, British, and other European powers, were doing in their colonies.

History is never cut and dry. The baddies can sometimes be less bad than you think, and the goodies, only kinda good, and only when it suits them. The Vietnamese communist also did plenty of bad things, mind you. 

Once the Ho-led commies kicked out the French, or at least got them to cede control of Northern Vietnam, the Americans then stepped in to prop up a terribly despotic regime in the South which never had much popular support and which used its military and secret police to do things like political repression, suppressing opposition movements, and persecuting Buddhists. One of the most famous symbols of opposition to that persecution was when a Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức self-immolated on a busy intersection in the city that was then known as Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh (the city not the person). We later visited the site in Ho Chi Minh (city).

See Tom Gleeson of Hard Quiz ‘fame’. I know quite a bit about Ho Chi Minh and Vietnam and stuff which would have been quite interesting to have on your show, but your producers didn’t think so!

See previous blog post for more complaints about Hard Quiz.    

Ok, now that I’ve got that increasingly inaccurately named ‘first’ bit of the post I can go back to the bits about what my wife and I did in Hanoi on the 50 Year Backpacker trip.

Part Two – the bits about what my wife and I did in Hanoi on the 50 Year Backpacker trip 

 Our first night in Hanoi was terrible.

We arrived in the evening after our flight from Vientiane (Laos).

We got through immigration easily. The officer just asked why we had two visas (well four in total for my wife and I).

‘Well, we’d originally thought we were going to arrive in a few days time, but then we changed our plans to today, but as you can’t change your visa date we had to get new visas and keep our old ones’.

The officer just shrugged, stamped our passports and let us through. Pretty easy with the correct visas.

We have talked to other friends though who had troubles getting into Vietnam when they got duped into getting visas through third parties after being told, by those third parties, there was no direct way to get visas for vietnam. This is, of course, total BS. You can DEFINITELY apply directly to get a Vietnamese-visa, don’t let anyone tell you any different. Just go here: https://evisa.gov.vn/ 

It’s very confusing when you google e-visas for Vietnam as there’s millions of kinda legit looking sites out there that are mostly not legit but which Google seems to do nothing to monitor. I suspect they even have a few ‘sponsored’ posts that lead to non legit websites that may or may not allow you to get a proper visa.

If you get your ‘visas’ anywhere other than the official Vietnam e-visa site, you may or may not get an actual Vietnamese e-visa and you may or may not have to pay an extra fee of a few hundred US dollars at the airport on top of being scammed. Rather than the 25 USD single entry e-visa (in March 2025). That is if they let you in, as technically I don’t believe there is an official visa on arrival system for Vietnam. Don’t quote me on that though.

It’s a really Laissez-Faire buyer beware world when you rely on Google. I know, it’s hard, it is in no way readily apparent which site you should go to to get a legit e-visa.

But since you’re a ‘fans only’ Juanito Traveller supporter, and I don’t accept money from anyone, you came to the right place for real information! 

Just go here: https://evisa.gov.vn/!!!!!

Just don’t expect any other ‘fans only’ privileges, as my wife would NOT like me posting pictures of my pompis on the internet. Look I don’t mind, I think my pompis are worth a look, but they are just reserved for my wife and masseur now! Plus doctors I suppose.

After crossing immigration successfully with our 4 e-visas (2 each do the math), we headed straight to the SIM card people. Some of them seemed a bit dodgy but we got a SIM that worked.

Another tip – check the SIM works before you leave the airport!!

We then headed out to the car parking area and booked a Grab rideshare. The Grab app. was such a godsend in places where taxi drivers can be dodgy as hell – especially in Bangkok! 

Hanoi airport carpark is the most chaotic I have ever encountered anywhere in the world. At Reykjavik airport – sorry again with the jumping countries randomly, you can read about my trip to Iceland here if you like – you have one little place to wait for taxis. In Vienna it’s really quite easy (Vienna is further along in our 50 Year Backpacker Trip, I’ll get to that) you walk out the door and then, low and behold you have taxis there. Even when I travelled to New Delhi in 1995 I found the taxi area fairly easy to navigate, despite the millions of people, camels and elephants vying for your attention. 

But Hanoi, boy Hanoi is on another whole level. There are lanes and lanes of cars just trying to squeeze into this tiny area. When you book your Grab they say you have to meet them at some post in the car parking area, and you have to go through 20-30 lanes of traffic that is almost at a standstill until you find your post and then squeeze yourself and your luggage by the side of the road so you don’t slowly get runover. My mind gave up and I just put all my faith in the very capable hands of my wife who managed to navigate this sea of cars and mopeds and people and noise. We managed to find our Grab and we grabbed it and soon we were heading out of the airport and towards the centre of Hanoi along a pretty nice freeway and past 5-6 story buildings lining the sides of the road until we reached our hotel.

Someone should write a song about getting taxis and rideshares from airports around the world. Maybe something like Peter Allen’s I go to Rio.

I’d booked the hotel – we’re back in Hanoi by the way if you’re lost – on Booking.com. It had lots of stars and good reviews. Seemed like a real steal for the low price – just $33 AUD a night or something like that.

The pictures looked nice, it didn’t seem to be in a bad location. All was good.

Until we got there.

It was terrible. Really, really shitty, terrible.

The rather small room they had us in – you would literally not be able to swing a cat in the space – had been very roughly divided in half and a flimsy semi-transparent plastic wall had been installed to turn half the bedroom into a bathroom area, with shower and toilet.

From the photos both the ‘bedroom’ and the bathroom looked nice and totally in order and ‘separate’ from each other like rooms normally are. 

The room was so small I’m not even sure how they fitted in the camera to get the creative angles that made the ‘bedroom’ and ‘bathroom’ look like actual separate rooms. The description certainly didn’t mention how creative they’d been in dividing up the space.

That, in itself, wouldn’t have been too bad. I can handle small rooms on occasion. We had a tiny one on the island of Koh Chang when we were in Thailand.  

But, the room walls were also paper thin, you could hear every bump and car horn, and truck and conversation on the street down below. I could also hear the guy next door coming back at sometime between 2.30 and 3.30 am and then vomiting loudly in his bathroom. I imagine his room was probably originally our room’s bathroom that had been converted into a bedroom/ bathroom. He sounded like he was dying, but I didn’t see any bodies being dragged out the next day so I assume he made it through. As with my previous warning with alcohol in Laos – don’t think you are going to get quality alcohol from places that give you bucket cocktails for 80,000 dong! It is going to be bad/ potentially fatal.

Of course, having a bucket cocktail of even the finest alcohol will probably leave you feeling crook the next day anyway.

For now I don’t have to worry about those things as I’m trying to be a Buddhist and I’m not drinking alcohol or taking drugs. I can’t quite bring myself to committing to that for the rest of my life, but I will certainly keep it up the next few months as I’ve put my name down for another Vipassana meditation course. I think after that I may just allow myself a day a year where I have a drink and a joint. I think that day may be in March next year when my wife and I are planning another trip to Thailand for our 7th wedding anniversary. That is, if weed is still legal in Thailand by then.

I could not sleep at all – back at that Hanoi hotel again. Luckily my wife, tired from our flight from Laos, went out like a log.

As she slumbered away, I embarked on an epic search for a more suitable abode.

I realised I’d been very lucky so far with the accommodation we’d had in Thailand and Laos, it was all pretty decent and mostly lived up to the descriptions on the booking website (still through Booking.com – they aren’t paying me, I just found it convenient to do most of my bookings through them for that trip).

Perhaps it was more a Vietnam thing, but I found hundreds of really highly rated places – with 5 stars and all – which when you delved into them turned out to be either average or, like our current hotel, completely shit. I resorted to only looking at the WORST ratings/ review for each hotel as a way of narrowing down potential options. Often the 5-star places had pages and pages of 1-star reviews which expressed shock at how such a shonky/ crappy hotel could possibly have gotten 5-stars. 

I eventually came across a few places in the central zone, where I wanted to be in, where the worst review/ rating was something like ‘the place was good but the staff didn’t smile’ or ‘the place was good, but they didn’t have any croissants for breakfast’, I’d shortlist them for later review. Eventually , around 4 am, post-vomiting neighbour, I found what I prayed was a nice, big, clean room, in a decent area, where it seemed quiet and there were no horrible reviews – the only negative one being, “hey this place is down a narrow alley so if you don’t like going down narrow alleys don’t stay here”. It cost something like $125 AUD a night.

Then, still unable to sleep, I went and had a shower, conveniently located just 5 cms from the bed, then got back into bed and, for the rest of the night, watched some shows on Netflix.

At around 7.00 am as my wife’s eyes were just opening I said, ‘good morning, I found another hotel’.

‘Ok’ she said, and she rolled over and went back to sleep for a while longer.

When she did get up a short time after we went down to reception, I said to them we’d found another hotel and, no offence, but that this place was really terrible. The woman there was absolutely sweet and she said ‘no problem, we can give you a full refund’ for the remaining days we had booked which came to around 2,436,111 Vietnamese Dong. 

And then we asked where we could get breakfast and she recommended a nice little coffee shop that was around the corner and up some stairs. So we packed our things up and then went off and had breakfast at the coffee shop which was so cute, with these tiny little chairs and very, very nice coffee, plus I’m sure some nice Vietnamese breakfast sweet pastries or something that I can’t recall and then we walked around a bit and had a look at the neighbourhood, which was noisy, but really cute and interesting. 

Then we walked around some more and had some more food, and enjoyed some more sites and walked down to some little lake as we waited for the afternoon to arrive so we could move our stuff over to the new, hopefully much more awesome, hotel. 

And my sleepless night was mostly forgotten as we took in all the wonderful sites and sounds of Hanoi! Let’s admit, hardly the struggle for Vietnamese independence that I spent half this blog post focussed on.

We went back to the hotel, having been blown away by Hanoi, and the lovely receptionist expressed her regret that the room hadn’t been up to standard and handed over a big wad of Dong amounting to around 2,436,111 (it was the first time in our lives that my wife and I were millionaires) and we went on our way with the yellow backpack and suitcase in tow as we didn’t think it’d be worth taking a taxi there as the new hotel was only on the other side of some lake, sort of, down a lane near St. Joseph Cathedral – the one that looks like Notre-Dame Cathedral.

Maybe we did take a Grab, I can’t remember. I could probably check on my past trips, but nah. It was a really short trip anyway.

We met our new receptionist at our new hotel, the one I mentioned was a real cack, and then checked in and went up to our room which felt like a penthouse suite after the night before. 

It even had a balcony overlooking St. Joseph Cathedral.

We went to bed for a while before heading back out into Hanoi and exploring more.

And that was our first morning in Hanoi. 

Apart from the first hotel, really cool and interesting.

Part Three – other stuff that happened in Hanoi

What else did we do in Hanoi?

We saw a pagoda thing down by another big lake not far from the mausoleum where Ho lay in state.

We went to the water puppet theatre, where some obnoxious fellow tourist immediately got out her phone and start filming, blocking our view until I leant over and said, ‘hey can you put your phone down we’re actually trying to watch the show’ to which they said nothing.

I didn’t ake any pictures during the performance as I was considerate enough to let other people see the bloody thing! People, with their phones, they can be so oblivious to the rest of the world.

We lined up for some great bánh mì near St. Joseph Cathedral. I’m always a bit dubious of lines, thinking perhaps some influencer had said this street stall had the best bánh mì in all of Vietnam or something and it turns out it was just ok. But it was much, much better than ok, and for only 25,000 Dong, amaaaaazing value.

We also had that Bun Cha, that I mentioned earlier and actually looked around the cathedral. We also walked down pub street, tried to find boutique beer breweries which I just could not find, everyone just serving bucket cocktails and the standard Hanoi Beer, which is not that bad, but not as good as Beerlao.

And we went to the ‘Hanoi Hilton’ and French colonial prison where many of Ho’s comrades were interned and tortured, including using the infamous ‘tiger cage’ a low cage made from barbed wire which was out in the full where the prison guards would put mostly naked prisoners to suffer. Plus a whole bunch of other tortures. Well worth a visit for those interested in the modern history of Vietnam.

We had egg coffee at another cute little cafe just across the little lane from our hotel. The coffee was for me an acquired taste, but my wife really enjoyed it. I preferred the coconut coffee.

We also went to the famous railway bar/ cafe area where bars and cafes line the railway track and, if you are there at the right times – tip, check the times of the trains as the bar/ cafe owners won’t tell you and you may have to sit there for ages before the next one arrives. That’s a fun/ scary experience and I’m sure some tourist is going to die sooner or later as they wander all over the tracks taking selfies. They used to put tables on the actual tracks but I think the authorities put an end to that a while ago.

So, Hanoi was very fun! Very fun indeed. Go there, you’ll probably love it!

But I don’t really know you and not sure what you’re into, so maybe you will, maybe you won’t.

We did do one other thing while in Hanoi. That is, try and collect the knife I’d bought in Laos which our hotel guy in Luang Prabang had arranged to have delivered by a bus driver because you aren’t allowed to take knives on the fast train from Luang Prabang to Vientiane (see previous posts for that).

But, I want to spend a little more time on that story so I might call today’s post mostly done and start the next post with that story before moving on to Hoi An.

Hasta entonces – until then!