Last adventures in Vietnam

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Well, China is still awesome. It's also still taking me a long time to get anywhere, as i seem to have been having fun wherever I go and sticking around.
That's not necessarily a problem, but it does mean I only just left Yunnan province a few days ago after spending an entire month there. For once lonely planet was totally right, when visiting Yunnan first, be prepared you might not end up seeing anywhere else in China.
Im taking a slightly different approach. Seeing as I've spent the majority of my planned 6 weeks in China in Yunnan province, and I want to see lots more of China, it seems to me that the only logical solution is to stay a little longer. I've been looking into teaching English somewhere, but I haven't signed any contracts yet so we'll see how that goes.

As for my next blog entry, it's back to 'Nam one last time. My last blog entry finished with me heading back to Hanoi With Jonny and Ian after a few days at Halong Bay. Seeing as we hadn't got the chance to see much of Hanoi the first time round, we planned to spend a few more days chilling out there before we went our seperate ways.

Once back in the nation's capital, we again stayed at the same hostel as before Halong Bay. The old quarter is really where it's at in Hanoi, and I spent my days trying to get some more nice photos and buying pirate DVD box sets for next to nothing. We cruised around the night market one evening, and I finally managed to buy myself a face mask to wear around town. Well, people mainly wear them on the scooters and it does actually help quite a lot against the exhaust gases, but my main reason to buy one was obviously because they make you look so cool. I almost bought a helmet too, as the Vietnamese have some of the coolest helmets I've seen, but sense got the better of me and luckily I didn't add any more tat to my collection of useless items I was carrying around with me. The helmets are shaped like baseball caps, probably because that's what everyone wore before helmets were compulsory, and they come in crazy fake designer motifs. They only cost a few dollars, which also probably means they don't offer much more protection than the baseball caps they replaced.

The next day I walked around the lake with Jonny, got a few pictures of the famous red bridge and took the video I will upload with this entry. As we walked around Hoan Kiem Lake we spotted a statue of a nameless Vietnamese hero of some sort. To get to this statue we had to cross a busy road, and when crossing back towards the lake a great idea popped into my head - why not video crossing the crazy Vietnamese streets? I had become so used to crossing the road like this I really didn't think anything of it anymore, but thinking rationally it does seem dangerous and I thought it would make a cool video. To be honest, Jonny and I actually crossed the road twice to get a good one as in the first video I took the road suddenly became clear when we were only halfway across. That simply wouldn't do. As you can see, the second attempt was more fruitful 😊.

That night we walked around Hanoi trying in vain to find somewhere selling the cheap 3000 - 4000 dong a glass draught beer, and realised that possibly Hanoi doesn't really rock that much. Either that or we didn't know where to go, but everywhere did seem to close very early and my last night in Hanoi was a bit of an anticlimax. The next day Jonny and Ian were off to Laos and I caught a train to Sapa, North Vietnam, for a few more days of rental motorbike madness before heading into China.

I arrived in Sapa early the next morning, checked into a cheap hotel and set about trying to find somewhere to rent a dirtbike of some sort. The first few places I tried told me that either their bikes were already rented out, or that they didn;t rent the bikes to foreigners. Undeterred, I eventually found a guy that had an old Russian built Minsk for rent for 10 dollars a day. When I saw it I instantly loved it, as it was bright yellow and totally old school. I heard it wasn't too much of a smooth runner when the guy started it up for me to show me it worked, but that didn't bother me one bit. An old bike just means it has a bit more character.

Well, this bike had a little too much character perhaps, and when I took it for a drive through the rice terraces around Sapa I quickly learnt that this bike was an absolute liability. Not to say it wasn't fun to drive, but I can quite honestly say without any doubt in my mind that that was the absolute worst bike I have ever rented. Way worse even than the scooter that kept shutting off on the middle of junctions...

The Minsk kept jumping out of gear at random times, not ideal when you're driving down a gravel track with a cliff edge to one side. It was also impossible to put back into neutral when the engine was running, although this wasn't too much of a problem as the bike would shut off as soon as I stopped anywhere to take a picture anyway. I quickly gave it a nick name too: "No Brakes". The brakes on this thing were incredibly poor, and braking on the engine generally provided more stopping power than the brakes themselves. Also, if an emergency stop would ever be necessary, it basically just wouldn't happen. Still, No Brakes and I had a great day cruising through the rice terraces, and I even took it down some of the crazier gravel tracks for a little off-roading action 😊.

I stopped for lunch in a random village after a few hours of driving, and the lady in one of the improvised restaurants made me some nice noodles. I had made the slight error of wearing flip flops for my drive, and seeing as this thing had to be roughly kicked into and out of gear, my feet were starting to get a little sore so I decided to head back towards Sapa. The drive back went a lot quicker because I didn't go down all the mountain paths that lead to small villages, and I was back in Sapa after just over an hour or so.

I was glad to leave No Brakes on his own while I went and got some food, but later on I decided that because I wasn't going to rent the same bike again tomorrow, I would take it for another spin on the beautifully surfaced road towards Lao Cai. I wore shoes this time, filled up on petrol and set off down the windy mountain road towards the Vietnamese - Chinese border. I also decided to drive the bike a little harder as this road was good enough for it. Somehow, as I tore the bike round corner after corner, most of its faults seemed to disappear. Of course, there still weren't any brakes to speak of, but braking on the engine together with going full on the brakes provided an acceptable compromise. I really had a great time driving, and got a little carried away chatting to some Vietnamese guys at a cafe near Lao Cai. Because of this I forgot about the time, and ended up driving back for the last 45 minutes or so in the dark. This was a bit of a problem as the bike also didn't have great lights, but at least they worked and I went back to my hotel totally satisfied after returning the bike to the rental place later on that evening.

My next day in Sapa was spent walking around the market, and in the evening I decided to walk up to the radio tower for some nice sunset views of the town. Having almost arrived at the radio tower after a tiring walk, I realised it was closed off and I couldn't go right to the top. I spotted another lookout on another hill and decided to walk there too. This was well worth the effort, and the views of Sapa at sunset from the top of that hill were pretty impressive.

I finished reading Wild Swans in preperation for China that evening and gave the book away to someone on the street the next day, after checking he wasn't going into China as well as it is obviously banned there... I made my way towards the Chinese border shortly after giving away my book.

This is where my photo album ends so I'll neatly end my blog entry here too. The photos will probably take me a while to upload again but as soon as that's done, I'll post the link on my blog.

I'm off to get some food and some more Chinese beer 😊.

*Update: For the very first time since arriving in the middle kingdom, I've found a computer which allows me to uplaod an entire Facebook album in one go, saving me the hassle of uploading five photos at a time - great success! (in the words of Borat of course)... Here's the link to my photos:

Last stint in 'Nam

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