January 12th 2019, I came to Hanoi, Vietnam to spend my 5 days holiday there. I booked my flight ticket with Air Asia during the year end sale that they held in 2018. My cousin and I didn’t take a lot of time to finally decide to go to Hanoi. We actually took about half an hour before we decided to say, Yes! To Hanoi we go!
We were excited since it’s our first trip together. Like finallyyyy, as she was so busy with her work. However, when I was planning for our trip, I saw least blog that wrote about Hanoi, Sa Pa and Ha Long Bay. I get tiny amount of information by reading online. Worst of all, I get the eerie feeling of going to Hanoi since I read and heard a lot about scams, black magic, taxi drivers threatening tourist, double or even triple charges by vendors to tourist and the list goes on. Reading those horrible comments and experiences made me considering again whether we should go or just forget about the trip. Deciding to go on a trip like this with a tour guide is a big no. I don’t really like to travel with tour guide as I know that I wouldn’t be able to learn much except for when I need to go with my family.
However, one blog caught my attention.This blogger refused to revisit Hanoi. She experienced a very bad trip in Hanoi with scams and rude local people cheating and trying to earn the most out of tourists inappropriately. However, despite all that, she still encourage her readers to go as she said different people might get different experience. “After all, one bad person to ten good people” Reading that made realised that yeah, I should just go and make my own judgement. Experience, try to adapt myself within a short period of time, learn something and try to make and earn the best out of my trip.
After all, Hanoi was not that bad. I did’t encounter any scams, rude people maybe yes(perhaps we meet that group of people even in our every day life) but nothing as in taxi drivers threatening us. But of course, I got a taxi driver who managed to win the argument with us when he tried to manipulate the grab apps. We were in Sa Pa at that time and it was stated that the price that we need to pay was only 29K VND to the place we intended to go. But after that, the taxi driver fetch us and said that the grab app wasn’t official and that we need to pay him 100K VND per trip. So return trip will be a total of 200K VND. He earned like 6 times of what he should get. I was extremely tired at that time and all that came out from my mouth was just a yes. I realised that he was taking advantage on us but my battery bar was red. I should just sit back and relax the 10 minutes journey in the car. However, in Hanoi, we used Grabcar few times and I can assure you that it was safe and trusted as compared to the metered taxi.
Sometimes, I realised that it’s the situations that those taxi drivers were put in forced them to do such things. These taxi drivers usually came from a poor family who stayed hundreds of miles away from Hanoi. They have got family there to feed and usually they are the breadwinner of the family. As they stayed here in Hanoi, they needed to pay for their daily expenses and also accomodations too. They earned a small amount of money by driving taxi even around Hanoi. For example, when my hostel booked a taxi for us, we paid 250K VND with the hostel for a drive to the airport. But the taxi driver was only given 130K VND in which almost half percentage of that money will be given to the company that owned that taxi car. Thus, they don’t really earned much by driving a taxi around Hanoi. This taxi driver who sent us to the airport, Mr.X, has got 2 children. Both of them, he didn’t sent to school as he couldn’t afford it. Even Mr.X, himself, didn’t go to school. Due to many curroption that occur in Vietnam according to Mr.X, the fees for kids to go to school are very expensive and only affordable by the elite group people. Imagine if this situations were to continue, how many more generations will not have the opportunity to get the education that they should get ? Things that made me reflect back and realised of how we, or maybe I, took our education which is more accesible, for granted. Mr X though was not provided with enough education, he has got the initiative to learn on his own. He has been learning english through online applications that he purchased for the past 3 years. He found that it was very difficult for him to communicate with his passengers as most of them were foreigners. Thus, to make their communication easier and his service better, he is willing to spend the tiny bit of his time to learn english. Now, he can speak english. Even though it was not a fluent english but I’m impressed. It was understandable. If only you knew how difficult it was to travel in a place where most of the people spoke language that was alien to you, you’ll start to appreciate these people who are willing to learn to make your life easier and better while travelling. He’s such a strong man. Getting back to the point, we can’t put all the blame to them because it’s the situation that they’re in, that forced them to behave that way. Unless you asked, never label anyone as bad/immoral/evil.
Nothing comes in life for fun. They’re there for a purpose. After all, these experiences were there to help you grow. As compared to bad experiences, I have tons of best memories throughout all the days I spent in Vietnam. I met some good tourists and welcoming locals. Just have no expectations or impressions when you go there to travel. You’ll create your own wonderful memories. Vietnam will serve you with a lot of culture that you would like to learn more about, historical places, maybe some food to try for muslims, plus of course an extraordinary perfect view in Sa Pa especially. Well, in Hanoi and Ha Long Bay too.
As a muslim, I guess we all do know that we are encourage to travel but put good intentions and find purpose for every places that we wanted to go. InsyaAllah, we’ll get what we want. Dua and pray for protection from Him. If we are in doubt whether to proceed or not with our journey, ask from Him to show us the way. Istikharah.
“If anyone travel on a road in search of knowledge, Allah will cause him to travel on one of the roads of Paradise. The angels will lower their wings in their great pleasure with one who seeks knowledge, the inhabitants of the heavens and the Earth and the fish in the deep waters will ask forgiveness for the learned man. The superiority of the learned man over the devout is like that of the moon, on the night when it is full, over the rest of the stars. The learned are the heirs of the Prophets, and the Prophets leave neither dinar nor dirham, leaving only knowledge, and he who takes it an abundant portion.” (Abi Dawud 3641)
P/S The itinerary to Hanoi will come soon after this.
Comments
Post a Comment