It was good to be back in the city because continously staring at the fog in Sapa made as kind of depressed. The bus tour was really comfortable, we used a sleeper bus that has three rows of bunk beds – certainly recommendable for longer trips.

There are a couple of things worth looking at but I’d say three days is more than enough to explore them. The atmosphere is very much different from Saigon. Especially the government district clearly shows you that you are in the capital of the country: broad streets, large colonial style government buildings and a huge park area with Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum. The many small and big lakes spread across the city also make the city feel less dense than many other cities that size. It is fun strolling through the narrow streets of the old city center. There are hundreds of shops and restaurants in which you can easily spend a whole afternoon.

And for those interested in the recent history of Vietnam, the “Maison Centrale” is recommendable. The buildings you find there, nowadays embedded into many modern buildings around, are the remainders of a formerly much bigger complex that was used as a prison from both the French during the colonial time as well as by the Vietnamese for American prisoners of war during the Vietnam war. Senator John McCain was the most prominent prisoner from 1967 to 1973 in the so-called “Hanoi Hilton”. Besides prison cells there’s a museum to visit with exhibits from both periods.

The pagodes we’ve seen weren’t that great and often over-crowded with tourists. The ones I saw in Saigon were much more impressing, calm and they make you feel like being in a spiritual place rather than in just another “follow-the-striped-umbrella” tourist group site. But that’s part of another post. Now see some of our impressions of Hanoi:

 

Although we wished we’d squeezed in a little more time for Dong Hoi / Phong Nha National Park, we were eager to get on the plane to Hanoi and straight to Sapa, having seen so many stunning travel photos of it in the past. We met up with P’s mom and aunt, who flew in from Saigon, at Hanoi’s airport and went directly to the main railway station. There are only two means of public transportation one could take from Hanoi to Sapa, either by bus or by train. Since P never took the train in Vietnam before (her words, “no one take the train, or bus in Vietnam” ;-)) ), we decided we should give it a try.

It was a small challenge though, trying to buy/reserve/organize a pick-up for the train tickets. The (English) information you could find on the internet about the Vietnamese railway system is rather outdated and sometimes quite confusing, thus the only way to buy the tickets is really to come to the ticket booth at the train station as there is no online purchase, or through an agency which we did. Besides, there are zillion of agencies offering many different train categories from many trains of different names, from very basic to very luxurious (or so it said in their advertisement), which would make you think there are many “private” trains going between Hanoi and Sapa. But there wasn’t, but more on that later. Our next challenge was finding our way to the travel agency office to pick up our tickets after the taxi driver left us out outside the railway station (finding a place with an address in Vietnam isn’t always a straightforward task). Luckily, we had our native speaker with us ;-). Afterwards, there was still enough time for us to grab a quick bite and bought some water and snacks for our long overnight journey.

As we later found out, there is only two kind of trains, both from the official Vietnamese/government railway company, leaving from Hanoi to Sapa a couple times a days, one took a litter longer than the other. Needless to say, we took the “fastest” one, and it still took almost 7 hours to travel a distance of roughly 300km. The different categories are cabins ranging from hard seat (plain wooden seat, no cover) to softbed with aircon. The travel agencies somehow manage to make them look way more luxurious than they really are. Upon arriving at the platform and taking a look at what other categories really looked like, we were very glad we chose not to save money here. Our sleeper cabin of 4 beds was quite small but ok (there were also cheaper cabins with 6 beds), but the bed, despite being categorized “soft”, was really really hard (!). So hard that we had backache the next day. But even that didn’t stop P and I from sharing the tiny bed, 60 cm wide at most, for the most part of our journey, until our bodies gave up and started screaming. It was fun nevertheless, we’re the cuddling kinds.

We arrived at Lao Cai main station in the early morning. The morning fresh air was great and we were so happy to be able to get off the train. In fron of the station, the crowds of taxi drivers fighting for first-time tourists were almost overwhelming. Being ones ourselves, but having done our homework (aka. reading the internet), we knew we could just go a little further to all the tourist buses waiting outside and pay much less for the drive to Sapa. After another hour on the bus driving up narrow and steep mountain roads, we finally arrived in Sapa, at 1600m high, to this outlook…

Yes, there was no outlook at all because fog had taken over Sapa that day, and the days afterward as the weather forecast had shown. We had many things planned out for Sapa like trekking down to the villages nearby with a local guide, visiting Ta Phin village for a Red Dao herbal bath, strolling along local markets but we could do none of that due to the heavily foggy weather. Sapa is not that big you can reach everything on foot. After checking in, we took the short walk from our hotel to the main townsquare looking for the famous Sapa Stone Church but didn’t seem to find it. As it turned out, we were standing right in front of it the whole time but couldn’t see through the fog. It was so dense you could barely see 30m ahead. Luckily, as we walked back to our hotel, the weather cleared up for what seemed like 5 minutes max, and allowed us to take a glimpse over the beautiful valley. The following photos were taken right then and there, also the only photos we had from Sapa.

Our impression of Sapa? It’s a bit overrated and highly “commercialized”. You couldn’t walk 10m down the street without being “harrassed” by street vendors and travel “agents” trying to sell something to you. Big shops, cafes, restaurants and hotels are owned by none of the locals, the whole town didn’t give any sense of authenticity, much less coziness. Although we had read about it, but it turned out even worse than we had imagined. After almost 8 hours train plus an hour on the bus, we were more disappointed than ever, from any place we’d been to in Vietnam. In the evening, there wasn’t much to do except going to bars or getting a massage in one of the many studios along the main street, so we did both. After the first night had passed and the weather didn’t seem to improve, we knew we needed to make a plan B. P spent the whole morning talking to the travel agent in Hanoi into letting us return our train tickets with as little penalty as possible (we originally planned to spend 3 nights there), while trying simultaneously to book us into any bus leaving for Hanoi on the same day and of course a hotel in Hanoi. Mission was difficult, but accomplished nevertheless. She always gets things done ;-). After lunch, we packed our stuffs, hopped on the bus (quite comfortable to our surprise, they call it a bus with “lying seats” in Vietnam cause you can really lie down and stretch your legs) and left Sapa behind. We don’t think we’ve ever looked back.

On our way heading up North, we made a quick stop (2nights) in Dong Hoi to explore Phong Nha Ke Bang National Park after reading all the raves about the Sơn Đoòng Cave, the biggest cave on the planet that had been discovered by a local a few years ago. Since it’s quite exclusive and requires booking very well in advance (one-week all inclusive guided tour, 1,5 years waiting time), we chose to visit Paradise Cave and explore the National Park in Phong Nha instead.

Phong Nha village is about an hour moped-ride from Dong Hoi airport, about 50km away. We could have had ourselves picked up by our hosts, but decided renting a bike would give us mobility and allow us to see more of the regional countryside that is still quite untouched by the outer world. It was worth it. The route was quite straight-forward as there was only 2 turns to make with proper street signes, and the road was fairly well maintained, for Vietnamese standards, with very few potholes. We drove mostly through rice fields with the exceptions of a couple houses and a few cafés along the road. It became real interesting once the first sight of mountainous scenery appreared. Before we knew it, we arrived in Son Trach village, ideally located along the Con River, where we spent our nights. As mentioned before, this part of Vietnam has remained quite untouched by mass tourism so everything is quite basic in this town. It has a few hostels, a couple restaurants, one or two bars, one ATM and that’s about it. There’s no super markets or convinient stores, if you need anything other than shampoos and softdrinks, my bet is you need to go back to Dong Hoi. The simpleness of it all was actually the reason we dicided not to stay longer, but turned out to be the thing we liked the most. The air was very clean, the people were very warm and helpful, and the mountainous scenery around was magnificent. It was also very quiet in general, so quiet that you could hear the cracking of the trees when someone step on them. Mostly, we only heard the birds singing, children playing and dogs barking ;-). It was strange, but spending a couple of days over there really brought us back to basic. And we loved it. It’s not one of our most favorite spots in Vietnam due to the modest quality of the foods and accommodations, but it’s definitely  a place we would come back to explore more.

On our search for a proper bed, we came across “Jungle Boss homestay”, run by Dzung and his (then expecting) wife and their little son. Their “home” is a rice field apart from the main road so it was a little difficult for us to find. But people didn’t invent cell phones for no reason ;-). On one of the nights we had dinner, cooked by his wife, with his family and other homestay guests in their living room (don’t remember how much we paid for it but it wasn’t much). It was fun and the foods were way better than what we had in one of the restaurants in the village. We learnt that Dzung had been helping other locals build up the homestay network for them to have an extra incomes and for tourists to have better, more authentic choices of accommodation. He’s also very active, along with other villagers, in protesting against the government plan of building the cable car network into the Son Doong Cave in order to make it accessible for the mass public, which would destroy its uniqueness and the eco tourism currently built around it. If only people in other parts of Vietnam would also think this way.

We actually booked two nights at “Jungle Boss Homestay” but our confirmation came a little late so we had to move to another homestay for the second night (they had only 3 rooms for rent in total).

In our short stay there, we chose to visit Paradise Cave, one of UNESCO’s Heritage Sites that we could easily access by our bikes (Phong Nha cave requires a boat ride and Hang En cave a two-day hike). The whole cave is 31 km long but only the first few kilometers have been explored. From the parking lot, it’s a short walk and a short hike up to the cave’s entrance. From there, you start to descend into the cave along established staircases which take you, at most, 1 kilometer into the dimly-lit spectacle. After adjusting our eyes, we could really admire the thrilling limestone formation of our mother nature.

On the way back from Paradise Cave we stopped for lunchbreak at Nuoc Moc river stream, in the middle of the jungle surrounded by Karst mountains. It was truly a lovely place where you can take a dip in the crystal clear water, order sticky rice with grilled chicken for lunch, or simply lay on your back and rest.

Other “discovery” in the area.

On our second (long) trip to Vietnam we had again planned to visit a couple of different locations. We started with Can Tho because we love the floating market there on Mekong river and we also wanted to show it to our friend Henrik who had joined us on that trip. We started in the morning leaving Saigon and drove to Gò Công, a small village south of Saigon to visit the grave of our grand parents. They are buried in between rice fields behind their house. We then proceeded towards Can Tho and spend the afternoon and evening strolling through the streets:

 

The next morning we started very early at 5am to go to the floating market, a 45min boat ride. The evening before, we were lucky to meet the same woman who guided us with her boat 3 years ago (time flies…). Even on the crowded market we recognised a few faces of the women selling food and coffee.