Todd and Lisa's RTW trip

Seriously the coffee here is sooo strong it would even shock a Simring. Todd had to quit, but Lisa is certifiably addicted!!

Anyways… Our trip up to Sapa had its ups and downs. In between coming back from Halong Bay and going to Sapa, we went to the travel agency we booked with to re-pack our day bags and get ready for Sapa. In this short time at the office we had some real excitement. We asked them if we could use the phone and they told us we could not, we had to go to the post office to make a phone call. “The post office, thats crazy” we declared. We believe it was interpreted as “you’re crazy” which resulted in the guy in the office standing up and SCREAMING at us ” no you crazy, you crazy. i hate you, i hate you, i hate you” (please read like an angry vietnamese guy straight out of the movies). We were a little confused as to why we were being screeched at, and then insisted on seeing the boss. Long story short, the boss was very nice and assured us if we did not cancel… blah blah blah… so we went. It turns out that after “the incident” he put us on a nicer train and gave us a private trek. Even though we were in the nice compartment of the train, we are so paranoid of being robbed again, we shoved everything of value so far in our pants it was practically arousing. After the brits at Halong Bay, it came as a very welcomed change. We arrived in Sapa early in the morning and started our trek with our guide, Tuong (2 days with him and we still could not pronounce his name right!). It was wonderful being just the 2 of us….. not so wonderful being freezing cold, foggy and raining!! We went up and down muddy hills not even being able to see our hands in front of our faces. Just when we thought we couldn’t make it anymore, we stopped for lunch… Hot soup!!! We got our warmth and energy back and continued on to the village we would spend the night in. The village was down in a valley, so as we headed down, we moved beneath the fog and it got warmer. Going down the muddy hills, we must of said a thousand times ” thank god there are no other people with us” because it would have been worthy of many complaints!!

When we finally got down to Ban Ho our guide told us there was a hot spring. We thought he was messing with us because we were like popsicles. It was for real!!!! Down in this little village at the bottom of the mountain there truly was a hot spring.. we stripped down, jumped in and defrosted!!!! In the morning the temperature had risen and we trekked through some other villages (where they were watching TV attached to car batteries) and then back to Sapa. Sapa was still foggy and freezing, so we spent the rest of our time sitting in the british pub (the only heated place in town). We caught the night train back to Hanoi.

We got to Hanoi at 5 am and we had a night train to catch that evening. We were exhausted and didn’t know how we would make it through the day. We divised the plan of getting a room for just a couple hours. We felt somewhat seedy renting a room for only 4 hours… but it was just what we needed. A rest and a hot shower later, we headed out to do some sight seeing—Here comes our next volatile vietnamese story–. We negotiated a price with a motorbike driver to take us to the army museum. As soon as we hopped on the back, almost ran over an old lady and smelled alcohol we decided we should hop off and walk. We did this at the first stop light that we stopped at ( he ran a few first). He hopped off also and followed us down the street SCREAMING “you give me $$……” (again please read like any asian man from movies). Everyone on the street was crowding around, Lisa was hiding behind the old lady selling oranges, as the angry drunk motor bike driver and todd argued. The guy was grabbing Todd’s arm yelling. Luckily, Todd was about twice his size, so we knew he would have to be much drunker to actually hit him. By this time, the entire block is involved in the situation and a stranger gave the dude some money to leave us alone. We tried to repay him but he refused… I guess there are some nice people also!!!

The Army museum was interesting but like all the museums we have been to here, not enough is translated so we don’t get so much out of them. After the army museum we went to the temple of literature to meet up with Mai, a friend of Todd B. We had told her that we would be back from Sapa on Sat. and call her, which we believed that we did. But we didn’t it was Sunday… it really wouldn’t have mattered except that we had bought train tickets (25$ each) for sat night and it was already sunday. BUMMER, but at least we had Mai to go back to the train station with us. It made buying new ones much easier.

We got the night train to Hue. Turned out that we were alone in the cabin… we thought of it as VIP $50 tickets!! Of course we didn’t realize until after we securely chained our bags so that they could not be stolen. Hue was rainy and Todd got sick so we spent most of our time watching bad HBO movies. We did venture out to the citadel and took a cyclo (see photo) to some Pagoda. We had the worlds slowest cyclo driver, but what he lacked in speed he made up for in humor. We agreed on a 1 hour trip to the pagoda and back (about 3kms each way). It took us nearly 1 hour just to get there. He wanted to charge us more for a 2 hour trip, he kept saying “far far” and we kept replying “not far, slow!!” he laughed and we didn’t pay more.

We arrived this morning in Hoi An…. we’ll keep you posted!!

This is at Uncle Ho’s —

These are from Halong Bay–

This was the boat we stayed on

These are from Sapa—

This was not one of the villagers watching TV!!

Photos from around Hanoi–

Worlds slowest cyclo driver and Hue market–

Tags: Travel

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 11th, 2006 at 8:53 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.