Wheeling in Ninh Binh

Ninh Binh is friendly little place near the coast a couple of hours south of Hanoi. There's not much to see in the town itself apart from friendly locals trying to usher you into their house for food/drink. The main reason to visit here is the beautiful surrounding countryside rich with karst hills, waterways, rice paddies, temples and small villages.


I arrived by train and stayed right next door to the station to save walking far. Along this street almost everyone has converted their housefront into a part time cafe or shop, a 'cafe' here being a plastic table and chairs outside the house, but it would mean that you got some real "home cooking" yes? Well, no, in most cases it was instant noodles from a packet. But they were all really friendly and always gave a handful of longan or lychee fruit to go away with. Strangely, everyone in the street had the exact same printed English language menu too!

The places worth visiting lie outside of NinhBinh and require transport. I tried to get a decent route map to get myself around, but noone was able to provide a good one and kept insisting it was difficult to get around, which is surely a ploy to get you onto their trips. So, I decided to hire a motorbike and driver for the day. First we headed off to Tam Coc, where I jumped onto a row boat with two ladies. They were mother and daughter and it was the mother doing all the hard work rowing. The boat takes you along the Ngo Dong river, through paddy fields with karst hills protruding all around, through some karst caves and to a couple of temples. It's a peaceful trip with beautiful scenery all around, similar to that surrounding the Lijiang (Li river) around Yangshuo/XingPing in China.


Not such a peaceful trip was the bike ride to the next location, a series of Buddhist temples and again the scenery along the way was fantastic even if the temples were not so. Located on a hillside with shrines carved into caves, the site was ok, but having seen many temples around Asia, it doesn't rank so highly. Oddly, here I found some young girls asking me for money, in French! Clearly some things from the French colonial period still linger on.

We then sped on the final stop, the ruins of a citadel at Hoa Lu, which reigned as the capital of Vietnam from 968-1009 during the Dinh and Le dynasties. Sadly, the citadel is almost entirely destroyed. The views and the crazy motorbike ride journey there and back to Ninh Binh though was well worth it, even if the citdel wasn't. Through small villages, past more paddy fields and surrounding hills, waiting for flocks of sheep to clear the road, gave a pleasant, if speedy look at the local life in the countryside.

That evening was the first night of the Asian Football Championships and so I went for a walk to find somewhere to watch. Only a few doors away from my guesthouse I found someone at home watching, with their doors wide open and sneaked a look. The viewer insided spotted me and dragged me into watch, his wife immediately gave me their now familiar English menu and I sat down to watch Thailand v Iraq. As we sat and chatted - as best as we could without knowing each others' language - I inspected his motorbike that was sitting in the front room and suddenly realised this was the guy who had been driving me around on his motorbike that day! I suppose I'd been looking at the back of his head most of the day and hadn't got to know his face so well.
Bit of a surprise! Anyway, his wife's cooking was sadly as unconvincing as his motorbike driving had been, but they were ever so friendly and delighted to have a visitor. I left with the usual handful of longan and good feelings about the residents of NinhBinh.