Northern Vietnam – Hanoi, Halong Bay, Sapa, 3 day travel to Laos

Hello, we spent a week or so of early December in the Northern parts of Vietnam. Having moved away from sunshine and blue skies, we shivered in our raincoats and under our layers of jumpers. It felt more like a typical winter's day in England than the tropical climates of South East Asia, and  I was glad I had packed my Marino wool socks!

We didn’t see much of Hanoi (the capital city) beyond the hustle and bustle of the streets around our hotel, but we did enjoy watching a traditional Water Puppetry performance in a theatre, an art which has been performed in Northern Vietnam for thousands of years. The performance was accompanied by traditional singing and very beautiful musical accompaniment on Vietnamese wind, and string instruments and percussion. The wooden puppets were manned from behind a screen of a temple by long wooden sticks and the various puppets enacted simple scenes of traditional life in Vietnam like a man ploughing his rice fields with a buffalo, or oriental dragons dancing around and even one scene had horses jumping through rings of fire! The stage was 3 feet deep in water allowing the puppets to go under and above the surface! It was fascinating to watch something so different from what we are used to seeing at the theatre at home.

We travelled to the east coast on the 8^th December where we spent three days on a wooden ship cruising around Halong Bay islands – one night sleeping on the boat and one night staying in a wooden hut on stilts above the water of a small island. It was a lovely relaxing trip, with delicious food and great scenery but sadly the weather was a bit bleak and cold and didn’t really encourage us to disrobe and jump into the emerald waters below us. (I was wearing as many layers of clothing as I could pile on underneath my jacket,, and thick merino wool socks….) We made friends with some really nice people on the trip– a German couple, a Canadian guy, and two Aussie girls who have already insisted we come out to visit them in Adelaide and enjoyed hanging out with them. As part of the three day tour we did some exploring by bicycle on Cat Ba island, visited caves and kayaked around the large rock formations. On the island where we slept on the second night we paddled out in low tide where we found hundreds of tiny starfish –which some locals were tossing into large baskets…for eating!! Don’t ask me what they taste like, it wasn’t on the menu for us!

We headed on by night-bus on the 11^th to Sapa in the very north-west of Vietnam for trekking and seeing local hill-tribes in the mountains. When we sleepily stepped off the bus at 7am we were immediately woken by the icy cold air that was like a slap in the face, and the fog which surrounded us. If we thought Halong Bay was cold, Sapa was even colder: it went down to 2 degrees at night. We were whisked off to a hotel on the back of mopeds (standard transport for us now) which we were promised had hot water and electric blankets – both facilities we immediately made use of! When we reluctantly stepped back out into the cold we sought out woolly gloves, scarves and some very nice North Face, (or should I say ‘North Fake’) jackets which were roughly £30 each – a bargain as the UK equivalent would probably be 5 or 10x that price. So we were finally prepared for our 15km trek the next day.

We arranged our trek with a local guide called Chai who our Aussie buddies had recommended and passed on her mobile number. Chai was so sweet and so lovely and the trek was arduous at times but made so enjoyable by Chai and her her two friends who accompanied us. May I just say at this point that Chai is an amazing woman:  She is 27 years old and already has 4 children – was married at 14 and had her first child at 16. She speaks her local H’Mong tribe dialect, Vietnamese and a good level of English – which she taught herself a year ago simply from listening to tourists talking in the town and markets and by starting conversations with them! She could understand us and answered all our questions; we were very impressed. Oh, and she also speaks a little French too! So we are glad she can do these tours for tourists and earn a good wage to send her children to the local school, we even got a few photos of us altogether printed that evening and gave them to her the next day to keep. She was so, so happy and said she will remember us forever!

We trekked uphill for the first few hours, passing teak tree plantations, bamboo forests and small scale Vietnamese tea plantations, the occasional house, buffalos, and to my surprise large pumpkins growing over roofs. We then went to Chai’s village where we met Chai’s family and were cooked a delicious meal of many dishes prepared by her in front of us over a wooden in her simple but welcoming family home. After lunch we continued down the mountain, slipping and sliding as the ground was muddy and slippery – but Chai’s friends from the villages all the time. We enjoyed views of rice terraces all the way down and Chai and her friends wove us little things out of the plants – such as a heart woven out of ferns and decorated with tiny pink flowers which they put in my hair!

We left Sapa on the 13^th and had an epic 3 day overland journey to our destination Luang Probang in Laos that was memorable but for all the wrong reasons! On our second day of travelling things got a bit hairy when we were due to get the 5.30am bus but missed it when our alarm didn’t go off. After some initial panicking (as there is only about 3 buses a week that go across the border into Laos) we grabbed our things and ran to the bus station anyway.  After being persuaded by two local drivers that they could take us the 30km to the border crossing Neil and I ended up on the back of 2 mopeds with our big bags precariously balanced on the back – and clinging on for dear life as we ventured through thick fog, down roads with more pot holes than actual road.

We ended up catching up with the bus before the boarder and in our gratitude and still half dazed state (as you would expect before 7am in the morning) we handed over far too much money in a mixture of dollars and VND (Vietnam Dong) to the moped drivers who then sped off. We gratefully took our seats on the bus ready to relax but in true money-grabbing Vietnamese style, no sooner had we sat our bums on the seats of the bus, we were asked to hand over yet more money – even though we had already paid for the journey and had the tickets to prove it! We were then hassled for the next couple of hours of the journey and threatened that our bags wil be thrown off the bus if we did not pay. Irritatingly, we had to pay up as we weren’t faced with many other options, and the Laos border crossing was fast approaching and we didn’t want any trouble kicking off as we entered another country. The next worry for us was that we had exactly enough money for our ‘bribe’ payment and visas, but no more, and with a long day ahead of travelling and no idea where another cashpoint would be, we started thinking about what items we could sell to raise some money for us to continue our journey to the next town in Laos another 6 hours away. Luckily a kind Spanish couple who had learned of our troubles that morning leant us 10 dollars so we could take the bus onwards to the next town. Phew.

Well all I can say is it’s a good thing travelers stick together and generally will always help one another out. But it was just one of those days for us and luckily we managed to continue our jouney safely on into Laos with no further troubles. :-)