Perfume Pagoda

We arrived in Hanoi around 4am on Wednesday morning and decided to walk from the train station to Hang Bac street. This street is simply famous for all its travel agencies, cafes and hotels that are organizing trips all around Hanoi. This was our first real day in Hanoi and the first impression we had was it's a very quiet city, nobody was walking in the streets, the only person we met were people asking if we want to go somewhere in motorbikes :"Where do you wanna go? moto - cheap.." and after telling them we didn't need anything they found something else to sell: "marijuanna? cheap - good, good...ladyies?very nice ladyies?".

After denying all the "propositions" we finally found Hang Bac street where we discovered that it was impossible to go to Ha Long Bay on Wednesday because the typhoon was still severing on the region. After wondering what to do we decided  to do a trip to the Perfume Pagoda without knowing what it was exactly.

We paid 17USD/pers for transportion (80kms to get there), food and entrance fees. We've been waiting an hour for the minibus to arrive, watching people getting up and the city starting to huste and bustle. After all there are more than 5 millions motorbikes in this city.

The Perfume Pagoda was a really nice place and is something to do if you have time. In my opinion the best part was going to that place on a river (a local womam rowing all the way long). Once there you'll see Pagodas, monks and walk through the forest to a cave on the top of the mountain.