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Published: July 21st 2016
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After a very long set of bus journeys we arrived in Hanoi at dawn, exhausted but happy to be in northern Vietnam. We enjoyed Hanoi a lot - we didn't do a lot of the tourist bits, but just wandered around the atmospheric old town, soaking in the sights, smells and sounds. Hanoi is a lot more like the typical image of a Vietnamese city than Saigon is; motorbikes far outnumber cars, little alleyways wind in all directions, and every street bustles with noise and activity. Always exotic, every step out of your door is an adventure.
We were staying just down from what's been dubbed 'Beer Corner', a crossroads in the old town where pop-up bars set up shop. It goes crazy around there every night; the perfect place for people watching with a beer and a deep-fried snack. We were looking forward to regular servings of
bia hoi, the quintessential Vietnamese beer; freshly brewed every day, crisp, pretty tasty and incredibly cheap. Unfortunately, the police have apparently been cracking down on these bars as they're not licensed, so they're even more temporary than normal; just little plastic stools spilling out into street and only bottled, mass-produced beers -
the kegs of
bia hoi are too large to quickly roll away when a raid arrives, and the police are quick to confiscate them. Presumably quite a party at the police station when they do!
A highlight of our time in Hanoi was a motorbike tour we joined for a day. The company we went with have a load of nice dirt bikes, and we had a huge amount of fun after leaving the city riding through the rice paddies and canals of the Hanoi countryside. We stopped in tiny little villages, rode through bustling markets, and dodged buffalo, goats and geese as we explored the rice fields. We had a huge and delicious meal in a traditional home for lunch; and, this being Vietnam, had multiple shots of rice wine pressed upon us while we ate... It was all good fun until we headed back to the city. We'd left Hanoi at about 10 am, and the traffic was minimal, but we arrived back at rush hour. Hanoi rush hour traffic is utterly insane; a seething, many-headed mass of motorbikes and scooters, interspersed with the odd speeding juggernaut of a lorry or bus. It was a little terrifying
at times; a little for us, but extremely terrifying for the other person on the tour with us; a Chinese girl who didn't actually know how to ride a motorbike before we started that morning, and was too short to hold the bike up once she'd stopped. I lost count of how many times she fell over, but it was a lot - and Hanoi rush hour traffic is really not the kind of place that you want to be falling over. Somehow, we all made it back safely, drew a deep breath and had a well-earned beer. An exciting and memorable day; but if I lived in Hanoi I definitely would not be riding a motorbike to work every day!
After Hanoi, we were off to do some trekking in the stunning scenery of Sapa. A tribal area up by the Chinese border, the people of Sapa have lived the same way for centuries, growing rice in the vertiginous hills. For them to grow enough rice to survive, every inch of the hills have been sculpted into incredible terraces, giving the area a unique combination of natural and man-made beauty. The first morning was a slog through day
trip territory, where the scenery was spoiled by large numbers of tourists and people trying to sell you things, but after lunch we got into the tribal villages and suddenly seemed to go back in time. Flanked on either side by steep hillsides carved into rice paddies, we wandered through fields being ploughed by water buffalo, while farmers in traditional clothes climbed up and down the hills, planting rice in the thousands of narrow terraces. Everywhere you looked was just a stunning vista; probably the most beautiful scenery of anywhere we've visited all year.
Our host that night was a homestay in a village of the Black H'Mong tribe, one of the many tribes that populate the valley. Having stayed in a number of very basic homestays during treks this year, we were rather surprised to arrive here, a day's walk from the nearest road, to find a big double bed, hot shower and WiFi waiting for us... Staying in basic homestays has a lot of charm, but with the amount of mud covering us by that point it was quite a nice surprise to be able to clean up. I guess large numbers of tourists frequenting an area
isn't always bad!
The gender stereotypes in Vietnam are reversed from in the West; traditionally, the woman is the major breadwinner, while the man does the cooking and cleaning, and brings up the kids. This means that the women of Sapa are the ones who interact with the tourists, and also the only ones who speak any English. The woman of the house in our homestay was out when we were there, so we spend the evening just with the man, who spoke barely any English at all, meaning conversation at dinner was somewhat stilted - that is, until he brought out the moonshine. Guests in Vietnam are always plied with varying quality home-brew rice wines, and his was actually not too bad; it was bottled with all sorts of herbs and medicinal plants, plus a load of some kind of smoked tea leaves, which all helped to disguise the less tasty spirit itself... This was when we started to communicate much more easily with our host, using the four words of Vietnamese he taught us with each shot we took - "
Môt, hai, ba; yo!" - or 'one, two, three; drink!'. The pronunciation was tricky for us, but
with determined and repeated practice we got there by the eighth or ninth shot...
With slightly sore heads we got up the next morning and trekked further through the stunning scenery and through more tribal villages. The views in the Sapa valley never dropped off in their brilliance; if anything it got ever more beautiful as we got further down the valley. After another night in a more predictably basic homestay, and a final morning in the pouring rain getting thoroughly covered in bright red mud, our time in Sapa and in Vietnam was already at an end. An overnight train journey later we were at the airport in Hanoi ready to board a flight to our last stop before heading back to the West - a quick ten day stop in Japan.
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