Good Morning Vietnam!

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Xin Chao!

Arriving in Hanoi was quite an experience, it is a city with 9 million people and 5 million motorbikes. Your ears are constantly filled with the sounds of noisy engines and non-stop honking. The road rules are few and far between, as the bikes seems to go where ever and when ever they want. If you need to cross the street you learn to walk at a steady pace, and make sure the poeple on the bikes are looking at you to dodge out of your way. The cars and busses are a different story however, you have to watch out for them! Everything is very cheap here, a meal and a beer at a cheaper restaurant will run you less then 50,000 dong, and with the Canadian dollar exchanging at about 13,000 dong you can see that living expenses are low!

Hanoi is a good home base for making trips up to the northern mountains of Sapa, and to the coast for Halong Bay, so we booked trips to both these places during our first days in Vietnam. An overnight train took us to Sapa, a town nestled in the mountains of the Northwest among vast rice terraces and many minority villages. We were greeted at the bus by some of these villagers, and they walked the 10km with us to their village of Lao Cai, telling us in broken english about their customs and lifestyle in the terraces. This trip was full of the good and the bad side of Vietnam, as we would often talk and have a good time with the locals, but when it comes time to sell their wares it becomes competetive and overwhealming. Apart from the selling, the villages were a great experience, as the people are still very independant from modern society. They grow their own crops (mainly rice and corn), they make their own clothing and fabric out of hemp, and they breed and slaughter their own meet (chickens, goats, pigs, and sometimes even dog!). It makes it quite peculiar to see the small satellite dishes and tv's sitting in these small huts, but most of them do have electriciy, and some even have motorbikes parked in the back. After a day of walking it was nice to relax at the Dzay village with some beers ricewine and a big dinner, served to us by the family that was taking us in for the night.

We arrived back in Hanoi after an overnight train from Sapa at about 5am, and headed off to Halong Bay at 8am that same morning. Again this trip showed us the good and bad of Vietnam. The Bay is filled with more then 3,000 limestone islands, and we took a 2 day cruise through them on one of the thousands of 'junk' boats cruising through. Due to the thousands of boats and litter in the water surrounding the islands, it is not a favorable place to swim, and at this rate the future of this area is uncertain. It seems that Vietnam has been rushing into the tourist trade, and many of the company's and government are not planning for the long term. We had a great group for this trip though, and enjoyed a trek and some of the local beer on Cat Ba island, where we spent one of the nights on the trip.

Back in Hanoi we booked a hop-on-hop off bus that will take us all the way down to Saigon with about 5 stops in between. It is a 'sleeper bus' with many small little beds as most of the trips are over-night. Our first trip on the bus was a short one, only 3 hours south of Hanoi in a town called Ninh Binh. We hired 2 motorbikes and drivers yesterday to take us around to the various temples and sights close by, which turned out to be a cold wet day of sightseeing, but enjoyable none-the less. We were scheduled to get on the overnight bus last night and take it down to Hue, but due to a mix-up (which our travel agent won't take blame for) I am still sitting here in Ninh Binh typing this with not much else to do today as the weather is cold and wet again. At least the internet and food is cheap!

Signing off,

Joe and Hawley

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Photos

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