Perfume Pagoda

In March, 2007, my family and I took a trip to northern Vietnam. We spent a day in Hanoi, three days in Sapa, a day at the Perfume Pagoda, and then two days at Halong Bay. This is a selection of pictures from our day trip to the Perfume Pagoda.

The Perfume Pagoda is a very popular day trip from Hanoi. It doesn't cost so much, it isn't so far away, and the Mulan-esque scenery is very exotic.

We were there on a Thursday. Even so, it was quite crowded with people. Our guide from ODC Travel told us that it was because it was the end of the lunar New Year season, and that it would be really crowded on the weekend. Even though it's a popular tourist destination, most of the tourists we saw that day were Vietnamese tourists, not foreign ones.

This is just a selection of the pictures we took that day. You can also see all the pictures we took that day without the commentary.

We were staying at the Camellia Hotel in Hanoi, and they had a desk for ODC Travel in their lobby. As it was the path of lease resistance, we just booked the tour through them.

We started out in a sensible little minivan, as only our family and two German ladies were going on the tour that day. To my surprise, halfway out of Hanoi we pulled over and got into a pretty large bus. I never really knew why we made the switch, and our guide, Mr. Duong, said he didn't know either - he was just following orders.

What this picture is is a group of graves in the middle of a rice field. It appears that Vietnamese do not believe much in cemeteries, as there were graves in the rice fields here and there all the way to our destination.

It's only an hour or so down to the river, but it doesn't matter; your breakfast could already be digested, I suppose. We were soon to find out that an extended stop of a souvenir shop was de rigeur each way on any tourist excursion. That said, it was nice stuff, reasonably priced, and we did buy some.

When we got to the town, the bus stopped and Mr. Duong jumped out for a conference. Then the bus turned down a street and into a parking lot. I didn't see water anywhere nearby. What was going on? He told me that the bus was too big to be parked down by the water - we were going to have to walk. I wondered again why we hadn't just stayed in the minivan.

Anyway, it was a pleasant little country town, and the walk added to the experience. The peaks shrouded in haze made a nice backdrop, too.

After our little 15-minute stroll, we were down to the water, and there certainly were enough boats! They all had numbers on them; otherwise each one would be pretty indistinguishable from the next, except that some were painted aqua. Our guide told us that the boatmen, who were all actually boatwomen, put their names on a list and got work when their names came around in the rotation. He went on to explain that, since farming didn't really pay the bills in modern Vietnam, many of the husbands were away in factories and the wives put their names on the list to row tourist boats.

Interesting thing - although our guide carried a stack of cushions out to the bus, they never came with us to the boat. Maybe he didn't want to carry them through town. As a result, we ended up sitting on those thin, unforgiving braces between the walls of the boat. I took out the long-sleeve shirt I had in my backpack just in case and sat on it, but my butt never really got used to the idea.

After we got out in the water and saw boats like this with ten times the passengers ours had, we felt better. I guess half of them were on the floor, and I hope it wasn't wet. Our boatlady might have felt lucky, too, with only seven of us on board. Or not?

Going down the river camera in hand, we were looking to take pictures of anything that looked like it would make a good shot, and this pagoda-roofed building on the top of this rock was as good as any.

After a nice, relaxing (at least for us passengers) trip down the river, we put in at the side and saw this scene. Since we had gotten up pretty darn early to make it down from Hanoi when we did, it made me wonder what time all the people who were already there got up. We got out and started to walk down past all those shops you can see on the left. I wasn't really sure where we were going, but I knew that the tour included lunch, and it was lunchtime.

Well, since this is what we saw hanging in front of the eateries, I jokingly asked our guide if any of those pets were on our menu that day. He told me "No way, dog and cat too expensive!" Somebody must have brought their credit cards, though, because when we went walking back the other way, these tasty little morsels were gone.

As they proudly say in Vietnam, "We can eat anything with four legs except the table." This phrase got 61 hits for me on Google. Try it.

After running the gauntlet of restaurants there along the water's edge, we turned inland and started walking up the grade. We went through some ancient looking archways with Chinese characters on them and gaudy red and gold souvenirs for sale along the side. Wait a minute, I thought the Vietnamese disliked the Chinese.

We stopped in at a large cafeteria with some of the worst food we had in Vietnam. Doesn't merit a picture, although I took some video. We had things like fried cabbage, which was exactly that. Imagine how tasty you would think it if you just threw some cut cabbage into a frying pan with oil and then put it on a plate. I went for the scrambled eggs but got a big piece of egg shell in my mouth to deal with. I think I would have preferred to eat the table after trying half the four-legged things they brought out. ODC gives you and exit evaluation form after each tour, and I let them know what I thought about the food.

After "lunch," with the distinctive pointy mountain on our left now, we continued up the mountain.

We walked around this, which looks more like a gate than a temple. It had a lot of people inside though, which is why we walked around.

And up the steps there was a real temple, complete with smoldering joss sticks outside and people getting their pictures taken in front.

Our guide told us that it was difficult to become a monk in southern Vietnam, but easy in the north. There was no initiation or anything, you just had to give up meat, drink, sex, money, and a few of the other things that make life worthwhile, and pray all day. If you did, you could stay in the temple for a day, week, month, the rest of your life, whatever.

Then we went inside and saw these people with offerings on their heads. Wait a minute, aren't those cans of beer on there? You just said you had to give up alcohol.

Yes, replied our guide. The monks have to give it up, but Buddha does not!

Well, none of the pagodas so far were the Perfume Pagoda, so we needed to press on. Of course you can walk up if you like, and judging bay the absence of a line for the gondolas it looks like most do, but we decided not to follow the crowd this time. The gondolas are Swiss made and the ride was scenic, as you can see.

I remember paying with some of the new Vietnamese money, the ones made of polymer instead of paper, using Australian technology.

Unless you know me personally and went straight to my website to see what I said about my Vietnamese vacation, you probably clicked through dozens of Google pages to find me on page 108 or so. So I don't imagine I'm telling you anything new when I say that the Perfume Pagoda is actually a cave. There were a lot of Chinese characters on the archways near the bottom of the mountain, and our guide told us its name in Vietnamese had kong in it, which I took to be like the kong in Hong Kong, which means "fragrant harbor." I could be wrong about this. Anyway, if its real name had that in it and you had to render it into English, I'd say perfume sounds better than fragrant, aromatic, or odiferous, wouldn't you? Anyway, you will find neither perfume nor pagoda when you finally get to the Perfume Pagoda.

Real hard to get a decent picture inside without a tripod. I kept on trying with available light but the pictures didn't look very good. My wife took this one with a flash. Not very artistic but not blurry. You can see there's an alter that is kind of lit up, and there sure and a lot of people hanging out in there on a Thursday afternoon. Were these people all on Spring Break like I was?

We decided to walk down, forgoing the Swiss gondolas but soaking up the atmosphere, getting our daily exercise, and saving the polymer funny money.

The path down is, of course, lined with souvenir shops and eateries blaring loud music, and there are some with mat floors that looked like restaurants for people accustomed to eating cross-legged on the floor. Our guide said that those mats would be rented as impromptu "hotel rooms" for the night - not everybody would be making the trip back that night. Then I understood why we had to park our boat so far away. The cobblestones look good here, but there are plenty of sections that are totally broken down and we kind of wished we'd opted for the gondolas after all. I know our stout German traveling companions were hoping to see the bottom long before it came into view.

The boat ride back was just as tranquil and uneventful as the way in had been, except for a couple of scenes. We had seen a huge pen of ducks on the side of the river on the way in, but their master had let them out on the way back. Then he began to call them (don't ask me to describe what his duck call sounded like). He must have made the same sound every time he fed them, for every time he called they all went nuts, quack quack quacking and jumping off the bank into the water. It was a scene to remember.

When we pulled up to get out, our guide, half embarrassed, told us that the boat ladies wanted him to ask the tourists to get them tips. Now, you know as well as I that tipping is a Western thing, not an Oriental thing, so I thought it odd. But anyway, my wife offered her a couple of bucks before we got off, and I was surprised at her reaction. She glared and yelled, "No! More!" Subtle as a brick. I would have been tempted to throw it into the water after that, but my wife just gave her an "I'm sorry" kind of look. Considering what we had paid for the day, I'd say her beef was with the tour operator. Your mileage may vary.

OK, that's how our day at the Perfume Pagoda went. Our Japanese guide book said that the lazy rowboat ride was the best part of the trip, and that's the way I felt, too. I'm sure you can "do it yourself" much cheaper by negotiating a taxi ride there and hiring a boat yourself, but our schedule was too tight this time to leave it to chance. Either way, if you're in Hanoi and looking for a day trip, the Perfume Pagoda gets a thumbs up from me.