Ninh Binh: Boats Rowed by Foot, and the End of a Ten-Part Trip

Asia · Solo Travel

Solo traveller · 17 min read

Ninh Binh, roughly 100km and two hours from Hanoi, closes out this whole Vietnam trip, and it’s a genuinely fitting place to end, karst mountains, rice paddies, and a piece of history most visitors to Vietnam never even hear about.

Hoa Lu served as Vietnam’s capital in the 10th and 11th centuries, under the Dinh Dynasty and the early Le Dynasty, well before Hanoi ever took on that role. Temples here honour King Dinh Tien Hoang, who unified Vietnam and founded the dynasty, and King Le Dai Hanh, who succeeded him, and standing in what’s genuinely one of the country’s oldest capital sites, with almost none of the crowd you’d find at somewhere like the Hue Citadel, was a quiet, unexpectedly moving start to the day.

Tam Coc is genuinely the reason Ninh Binh gets called “Ha Long Bay on land,” a slow boat ride along the Ngo Dong River, through three natural limestone caves, flat rice paddies flanked by sheer karst peaks on every side, close enough in places to reach out and touch the cave walls as you pass through. What makes it properly unforgettable, though, is how the boats are actually rowed, not by hand, but entirely by foot, the rower seated, oars crossed and worked with their feet while their hands rest. It’s a technique local farming women originally developed specifically to give their hands a break after long days working the fields, and watching someone steer a heavy wooden boat through a narrow cave tunnel using only their feet is genuinely one of those images that stays with you well after the trip ends.

Mua Caves, a short drive from Tam Coc, is really about the climb rather than the cave itself, somewhere between 486 and 500 uneven stone steps, flanked the whole way up by carved dragon and phoenix sculptures, rising 142 metres up Ngoa Long Mountain. At the top, the path splits, one side leading to Dragon Peak and its dramatic ridge sculpture, the other to the quieter Pagoda Peak if you’d rather skip the crowd gathered for photos. The view from the top is genuinely one of the most photographed in all of Vietnam for good reason, the exact same rice paddies and river bends you’d just floated through on the boat, now spread out below you in full. Budget 20 to 30 minutes for the climb itself, and give yourself another half hour at the top, it’s not a view you want to rush.

Back in Hanoi that evening, egg coffee closed things out properly, whipped egg yolk and condensed milk forming a thick, custard-like layer over the coffee itself, genuinely one of Vietnam’s most distinctive drinks and unlike anything I’d had anywhere else on this trip. A walk through Hanoi’s French Quarter afterward, wide boulevards and colonial-era buildings standing in genuine contrast to the tight, crowded lanes of the Old Quarter just a short walk away, felt like the right note to end on, two completely different versions of the same city sitting side by side.

This is where the Vietnam series ends, ten episodes, three regions, and a country that turned out to be genuinely different in the south, the centre, and the north, in ways I hadn’t fully expected going in. From tunnels dug by hand to a temple India is actively helping rebuild, from a bridge held up by two carved stone hands to boats rowed with nothing but feet, it’s been one of the more varied single-country trips I’ve done, and Ninh Binh was exactly the right place to close it.

This closes out the ten-part Vietnam series. If you’re starting fresh or want the full journey in order: Crawling the Cu Chi Tunnels and Firing an AK-47, 604,481 Soldiers and a War That Ended at 11:30 AM, Hoi An by Basket Boat, in a Town That Floods Every November, The Shiva Temple India Is Rebuilding in Vietnam, A Golden Bridge Held Up by Two Stone Hands, Watching a Mountain Become a Buddha in Da Nang, An Imperial Citadel Still Scarred From 1968, Hanoi: A Train, a Closed Mausoleum, and a Sardonic Nickname, and Ha Long Bay: A Dragon Legend and an Island Named for a Cosmonaut.