Sapa, Vietnam

We caught a night train from Hanoi to cool off in the mountains of north Vietnam.

Sapa is a small town but it is full of tourists. Most travellers come here to go trekking through the mountain rice fields and stay in the villages of the hill tribes people.

On Saturday the town is full of the different hill tribe groups as it is the local market day. The different tribes can be identified by the different head dress and patterns on their clothing.

The streets are lined with vendors trying to sell silver bracelets, wooden toys and embroidered handwoven indigo blankets. For us it is annoying to have the locals follow us everywhere and pester us to buy things. They are lined up outside the hotel and restaurant doors. As soon as a tourist buys something he or she is swamped by all the other sellers nearby hoping the generous tourist will also buy from them. They are pretty persistent and will follow you for miles.

We met some people who did treks and they all had the same story. Sellers would follow them on the trek and then make friends with them and then they would feel guilty and buy things they didn't want to buy! In the internet shop were I am writing this blog there are lots of young girls dressed in traditional Hmong clothes. They are looking at Westlife websites, listening to music, playing games and writing to the friends they have made trekking. One girl is asking Damien for 10,000,000 dong!

Halong Bay, Vietnam

Vietnam is the country of tours. The Ministry of Tourism is very well established. They have more travel agencies than hotels as every hotel is also a travel agency!

We paid $40us each for a 3 day 2 night tour to Halong Bay and met others on the tour who paid $80us each for 1 day and 1 night! They were not happy to find they had been ripped off! The Vietnamese are very good at finding extra charges!

The boat was a battered old thing and did not have sails like the pictures they show you have. There were 14 people on each boat and we were lucky enough to have good weather. The guide was a grumpy guy as 4 people walked off the tour because they had paid for a deluxe tour and it certainly was not that. You are told that the different prices are because of the different classes of hotels or type of food you eat but we paid different prices for the same thing!

We had one night on the boat and in the night Lil was woken by a rustling noise in the room and when she got out of bed she nearly stepped on a large white rat that had been munching on the bag of muesli in her backpack! Vietnamese rats are bigger than Vietnamese cats because they are fed better!

It was very pleasant sailing through the karst rock formations in the bay. We stopped at a limestone cave and managed to get in some kayaking before the sun set.

The next morning we set out on a trek through the Cat Ba National park with a guide and 2 Canadians. We saw an animal that looked like the endangered Cat Ba Langur: a monkey.

We stayed in a hotel on Cat Ba Island and did some more kayaking around the islands. We paid extra and stayed a couple more nights to relax before joining the tour and returning back to Hanoi.

Around Halong Bay are many factories and a coal mining area so the air was very smoggy which was a shame!

Hanoi, Vietnam

Caught a dreadful night bus to Hanoi. The driver had a DVD blaring to keep him awake and it stopped the rest of the bus passengers from sleeping! The seats were very narrow and covered with hard vinyl so not at all comfortable to snuggle into. We arrived at 6.30 am and were loaded into taxis and taken to a budget hotel in the old city. It was difficult to get in the hotel doors as the street vendors were on the hotel steps selling meat and vegetables. We decided to find a hotel that was not such an obstacle course.

Hanoi is pretty noisy with all the horns tooting and the thousands of motorbikes. Crossing the road is a feat. Pedestrian crossing signs don't mean anything and the red light at traffic lights don't always mean stop! You have to move slowly forward through ten lines of motorbikes and they drive around you- it is quite hard to do when you are not used to crossing the road in this way!

We have done a lot of walking around the city and even popped in on the NZ Embassy to check if there were any changes to visa requirements for Taiwan or Japan. The Vietnamese staff were not very helpful.

Visited the Literary Museum which was where the teachings of Confucius were passed on to the scholars.

Booked a tour to Halong Bay and Cat Ba Island from here.

Hue, Vietnam

Incense sticks drying in the sun.

We have spent 3 days here and did a walking tour of the city and a boat tour to look at the emperor's tombs and temples.
These sampans are where very poor families live on the river between the old city and the modern city. There are about 1000 boats and about 7000 people. They prepare and sell food on the side of the street or catch newts and crabs. They have TVs and shrines on the boats. Many men work in the city as motorcycle taxi drivers or as cycle rickshaw drivers.

September 2nd was Independence Day and the houses and shops displayed the Vietnamese flag. The tourist sights were free for the day so they were crowded with local Vietnamese families dressed in their best clothes enjoying the sights.
Green dragon fruit

Hoi An, Vietnam

Previous flood levels (Sorry we still can't turn the photos around, but if you click on them you should be able to.)

Hoi An is a UNESCO World Heritage city. It is beside a river and every October the city floods.

They sell a set of tickets to historic buildings in the city and they are very easily visited on foot.

The meeting rooms and temples were interesting and some of the the old wooden houses are still being lived in after 100+ years and they have survived the annual floods because they are built of 'iron wood', a resilient native timber.

Many travellers come to Hoi An to have clothes made at one of the 200+ tailor shops. You can also have shoes made or buy any of the Vietnamese made brand label shoes sold in the numerous shoe shops. (It felt as though there were the same number as tailor shops!)

We took a tour to the old Cham ruins. They were badly damaged during the American war so there is not much detail on the remaining ruins.

A large fishing net on the river.

They are harvesting the rice at present and after they have threshed the grains they are laid on the sides of the narrow roads or footpaths to dry in the baking sun. It is pretty difficult for the buses to move on these narrow rural roads as they have to avoid not only the drying rice, cows grazing the verges, ducks crossing the road, chickens and hens feeding on the rice, but also cyclists on the wrong side and old slow overloaded trucks! It is best to sit at the back of the bus so that you are not deafened by the very loud air horn and you don't have to watch what is ahead of you!

Nha Trang - Vietnam

It was so nice to return to a warm place so we spent about 7 days relaxing and enjoying the beach atmosphere.

Nha Trang is full of tourists and all that goes with that: Western food, beggars, touts, tours, cyclo drivers, moto drivers, tourist offices, street vendors, beach resorts, happy hours and set menus, and local English speakers.

We spent a lot of time walking about and went on one of the 4 island tours. The tours are very cheap and often include lunch and a pick up from your hotel. The islands have an entry fee that the government charges when you land. The snorkeling was not very good and we saw more fish traps than fish!

The tour we went with had an MC (Master of ceremonies) like Frankie Stevens (a NZ entertainer) who called himself Mr Funky Monkey! He and some of the crew formed a band and played western and Vietnamese pop songs. They sang songs from all the different nationalities represented on the boat: Russian, Polish, French, Aussies, German, Kiwis, Italians, Argentinian and Vietnamese. The MC even knew a Maori song: Oma Rapiti (Run Rabbit)! The drums were made from an oil drum and old pots. They dropped the backs of the seats and made a dance floor- it was such a laugh!

There were free cocktails (rice whisky and pineapple juice) at the floating bar near a fish farm by one of the islands.

Lunch was an enormous spread of prawns, tuna, squid, octopus, tofu, fried spring rolls, with rice and noodles. There was so much food left over.

The last island was a local resort island and there were more locals than westerners which is always pleasing. They had paragliding and beach volleyball and there was very little shade unless you paid to sit on a lounger for the hour we were stopped on the island.