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!!

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Hanoi is a crazy city. We cannot even begin to explain the number of motorcycles here. It is the wildest experience crossing the street. There are waves of motorcycles, cars and bicycles coming at you and you just have to walk across, making eye-contact with everyone coming at you so that they go around. We are Pro’s at it!!!!
Our first real day in Hanoi was great. We woke up early to go to Ho Chi Minh’s mausuleum. It was … wierd… for lack of better words. There are all these rules you have to follow. You walk into the dark cold building in a single file line. You have to be appropriatly dressed, check your bag and camera, and keep your hands out of your pockets. When you get inside there are all these guards watching every move you make. It is very militant. So we go in and there he is just lying there as if he were just napping. It was unreal.. he looked so real he even had his goatee and wrinkles. He is not under glass or anything, just lying there embalmed for our viewing pleasure!! So strange!!!!
For the rest of the day we negotiated the city and the post office. Like we said in thailand the post is never an easy experience. Here in Vietnam, you have to show the postal workers everything going into the package and pack it in front of them. What a pain in the butt. We were paranoid of the bootleg DVD’s that we bought… but we snuck them by her.. what rebels!
The past 2 days we took a trip to Halong bay. It is an area about 3 hours northeast of Hanoi. It is a gorgeous bay that has 2000 islands in it. We sailed for 2 days and slept on a big, old wooden boat. We stopped at floating villages and kayaked through some of the islands and limestone caves. It was definately one more major highlight of our trip. The only problem that we had was that the boat trip was one of those packages. We hate them because you never know who you are going to be grouped with… and unfortuanately we had some AWFUL people in our group. There were 11 of us all together and within that a group of 6 british men (from liverpool, we couldn’t understand a word they said, and they call it proper english) that were disgusting. We are under the impression that they were taking vacation in thailand as “sex tourist”… we believe that says enough about them!! We tried our hardest to ignore the situation and still had a wonderful time, but what an annoyance.
Tonight we leave on a night train to Sapa, a town way up north at the chinese border. We are staying there for a few days to do some trekking in the minority villages.

We tried to post some pictures but his computer wont let us… next time!

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