the mists of sapa and beyond.......

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i am so fucking glad to be back in china, it's unbelievable. i nearly kissed the ground after i walked through immigration at the border of vietnam (but refrained, for obvious hygiene reasons). the last few days in vietnam were somewhat of an ordeal, but now i am safely delivered to the fatherland! china, home of youtiao (fried bread sticks) and hot doujiang (soymilk) for breakfast. familiar, and yet strange. it's so comforting to be back.

unfortunately, it is not the land of card readers, so i still have no photos for you. this is rather disgraceful, and i intend to remedy it swiftly by buying some kind of USB cable so that i can get the pics off the camera and safely onto the net before i lose or break or do something irreparable to the camera. i just don't trust myself, especially after managing to break someone else's!

anyway, back in hanoi.......

christmas morning saw russ, chris and i taking a trip to see ho chi minh's mausoleum. i felt i owed it to myself to complete my "pickled communist leaders tour of asia" with a viewing of the great uncle ho. i have to say, it was remarkably like the pickled mao experience, really. people filed past a dead guy in a coffin with an orangey light on his face, silence was to be kept at all times, stern guards warned us with looks against smiling. i experienced the same desire to snicker to myself as with mao.
however, the uncle ho experience did not end at the mausoleum. we were herded into another part of the grounds where we could go and visit his house, etc (we passed on this), and then finally found the museum. the first floor was fairly standard - photos and snippets of propaganda, telling of uncle ho's policies and showing he was just a regular guy like the rest of us. the upstairs was something else entirely.

even the architecture up there was fascinating - huge fancy pillars and weird designs on the floor. basically, it was more like an art gallery, with various exhibits composed of a weird pastiche of 20th century western art and film icons, put together in a fancy way, and with a placard explaining why this is relevant to vietnamese communism. weird. i'll try to explain more: one of the exhibits was made of glass cubes, arranged in columns, so you could walk around them. on some of the faces of the cubes were transparencies of charlie chaplin, einstein, pictures by picasso, and etc. other sides were mirrors. it was thoroughly interesting but disorienting. i can't remember what the communist interpretation of this was. there was also a big red tent with something in the middle, and some weird dark room with purple lights and something that could have been a planet, representing scientific progress (that one was fairly obvious, i guess), and a sort of interpretation of picasso's guernica, with names of surrealist, expressionist and cubist artists scrawled on a wall, a big surrealist head on the floor, and scenes from the famous painting printed on various white walls. this represented the communist struggle, mirroring that of the civil war in spain (?). the most baffling exhibit was a huge white table, set on its side, with several oversized pieces of fruit sitting on it. the whole thing was suspended maybe a foot from the ground. the explanation of this was that the youth would have to forfeit youthful pleasures and become strong, upstanding members of the communist nation, the leaders of tomorrow. what the?

so, after enjoying ourselves thoroughly in this bizzarre museum (it was great, art-wise, but not so great information-wise), we went and bought tickets (chris and i bought hard sleeper tickets to sapa for the next evening, and russ bought a ticket to nimh binh), and then went our separate ways for the day, ready to meet for some christmas cheer in the evening.

christmas cheer indeed. i met jamie (a british guy), and amanda (a norwegian girl, who, it turned out, had just finished her last two years of highschool in hong kong, and was now living in beijing and learning chinese), and along with chris, we started a "bia hoi crawl". bia hoi, for the unintiated, is the cheap tap beer that you drink whilst sitting on the side of the road in little plastic chairs, and hoping that motorbike isn't really about to run straight into you. at 2500 dong per glass, it's a steal (i don't know how many cents, but 14000 is $1 AU), and generally those places are open late, and also in close proximity to each other. along the way, we picked up russ, and also luke, an australian bloke who was staying at our hostel (on returning from halong bay, i was staying at the real darling hostel, with a bed in a nice dorm for $4 a night). later on we picked up two incredibly drunken germans who could hardly speak english anymore and didn't know where their hotel was, or what it was called. when they started ordering a meal of crab for everyone, we deemed it a good time to leave, and retired to our hostel, full of christmas cheer.

the next day was spent cruising around hanoi, trying to enjoy my last glimpse of it. actually, i think the best thing about it was that i was leaving. sure, it has its good points, but it will never be my favourite place in the world.

after a few more bia hois with our new friends, chris and i said goodbye, and hurried off to get our train to sapa. this was the beginning of our trials. i was waiting outside real darling, bags loaded into the taxi, worrying that we were going to miss the train, when suddenly chris comes pelting down the street. "they've lost my bag.... go without me....maybe i'll make it there!"
after some confused communication with the driver, i made it to the station, feeling a bit apprehensive about going to sapa on my own. i think this was mainly cos i was expecting to be travelling with a friend. i settled down into my top bunk and put on the waifs. at least hard-sleeper trains and music sung in clear 'strine were familiar and comforting, in a way. i remembered i'd forgotten to get any water, and i was feeling pretty thirsty, but thought, oh well, i can just sleep for the next 10 hours and forget about it til i reach sapa.

next thing i know, the train is moving, and a breathless chris is entering the cabin. "chris!" i yelled, disturbing the demure vietnamese passengers. "you made it!"
it turned out that chris was sick, and neither of us had any water, and he was feeling stressed beyond belief at the way his hotel had been so dodgy about "losing" his bag. when he got back from telling me to leave without him, they miraculously "found" the bag again....... not what he needed. so he got in a taxi, and only just made the train in time. what a relief!
the no water thing..... hmm, i thought. what are we going to do? i could maybe have coped, but clearly chris was sick and needed to drink something. i remembered i had some water purification tablets in my bag, and there's always a sink next to the toilets on trains, even if there isn't boiling water available, and women selling bottles of drink, like on the chinese ones. chris went on a water mission, armed with my water bottle and some instructions. he came back with two bottles of water (bought from some lady), and my own water bottle filled with boiling water from the tap. haha! saved!

i went to sleep pretty quickly, but apparently chris spent the night spewing. no fun for him. we woke up around 6am with propaganda music blaring in our ears, and various announcements being made through speakers right next to our heads. argh!
at lao cai, we were hustled off the train. after some dry-heaving on chris' part, and disorientation on mine ("let's just follow everyone else, they seem to know what's going on"), we made it to the station proper, and saw a lady selling tickets to sapa. we handed over some money and went out to find our bus.

we were pointed in various directions for at least 15 minutes before one guy told us to just tear up the tickets, they weren't worth anything. we'd been scammed. dammit! it was only two dollars or something, but it really sucked (note to anyone doing this journey: if there's a woman with a card table selling tickets at the entrance to the station, ignore her. it's just a clever scam! apparently some other travellers saw her and nearly bought tickets, but thought they'd check out something else first, and when they went back to buy from her, she was gone. dodgy. chris and i were easy prey at 6 in the morning, unfortunately). eventually we got on a minibus and paid a bit extra, and were on our way up the mountain. finally.

getting off the bus, we were mobbed by the usual touts, out in force. we looked at quite a few different places (ignoring the touts as much as possible), and finally we followed one of them. i was explaining to her that i understood she was just doing her job, trying to make money for her family, but really, it wasn't very nice for me to be yelled at by 5 different people so early in the morning. or at any time of day. she backed off after that, and apologised. i said it was ok, but maybe she could be less aggressive in future? she said she understood.

we actually ended up at this young woman's hotel, which was probably one of the nicest in town. a little way away from the main tourist area, but still very close, with a single room with hot water and a private balcony for only $5. it was called the family hotel (luong trung in vietnamese, i think), and anyone staying in sapa should definitely stay there if they can. really helpful and friendly staff, small place, with great rooms.

so, sapa. when the mists cleared on my second day there, i ran out to the balcony in excitement and snapped a few photos of the stunning view of the valley below. it's a really beautiful place. i went for a walk down the mountain to cat cat village on my second day, which was great; really quiet, lovely scenery to take in, and the way down was dotted with local h'mong women wearing traditional dress.
apart from walking around, or going on one of several tours, there's not a lot to do in sapa, and by the third day, both chris and i were ready to leave. actually, chris had to leave, cos his visa expired on the 30th. we went to a place called "know-one, reccommend one travel", but for reasons i will describe shortly, i would not reccommend this place. in fact, i would go so far as to caution people against it. what we thought would be a fairly simple trip down the mountain, across the border and into hekou, china, and then a long but ok day spent on a sleeper bus, turned out to be a bit of an ordeal.

it started out ok. at 7:15, we got picked up by a minibus, and taken down the mountain to a restaurant whose name was written on the back of our receipt. this was where we'd get our ticket for the bus to kunming, and everything would get sorted out from here.
except it didn't quite happen that way.
the people there said they didn't know the guy who'd sold us the ticket, and didn't know the travel agency, and weren't going to provide us with the bus ticket. the girl who was helping us tried to call the number on the ticket receipt and got nothing. the phone didn't even ring. dodgy. she got more and more pissed off at us as we insisted on being allowed to try dialling ourselves, and so forth (we didn't really trust her, and she didn't seem to be dialling the whole number). then she called out guesthouse and started yelling at them, which was really awful, because they had nothing to do with it, and had been nothing but nice to us through the whole thing. eventually, she let us speak to the people at the guesthouse, who told chris that they'd been to the travel agent's, and the power was out there, and they asked the guy, who was very unfriendly and then just walked away.
fucking hell.
it was now 10am, so we'd officially missed the bus we were meant to be getting on. it crossed our minds to go back to sapa and yell at the guy who'd sold us the ticket until something happened. meanwhile, the girl we were dealing with here was getting increasingly shitty with us and kept telling us to wait, wait.
we were on the verge of walking to hekou (it's actually only a couple of ks from lao cai), and hoping that once there, we could find a bus to kunming, when the girl announced that we had tickets now, and could get on these motorbikes and they'd take us to the border crossing.
what the fuck?

so, we did. we got to immigration, went through all the procedures on the vietnamese side, and then walked across the bridge and into china. china! ahhh! i felt like i was coming home. we went through immigration on the chinese side, which was a bit of a pain, because my bags got scanned at customs and they demanded to see all my books. with a bad feeling about this, i showed them, and sure enough, the chinese lonely planet i had carefully covered with stickers, and carried with me like a bible (oft-wrong and full of largely useless information, but still lovingly consulted) for six months, was confiscated, as it was a "forbidden book". of course, i already knew this (the reason being that taiwan is not on the map, and is instead viewed as a separate country, which china disagrees with, for obvious reasons), and had no choice but to surrender the book sadly. the guy was really nice about it, apologising a lot. i asked him, quite pointedly, where i could get another guidebook for china (ok, i don't really need one anymore, but i wanted to ask anyway), and he apologised again, and said maybe a chinese bookstore. i said, ok, i really hoped so, cos i needed something to tell me information about the country. he just kept apologising, so in the end i just said, "oh, never mind, i understand, you're just doing your job"...... feels like i've been saying that a lot lately.
i should have just pretended that i didn't have that book. there were so many other books in my bags that they never would have known, and i don't think this guy would have pressed the point.
luckily, chris' bag didn't get scanned, he just walked through nonchalantly whilst i was having my stuff inspected, and so we still have his fake copy. which is sort of better, cos it's the most recent version.
sigh. i don't care so much about the information in the book, it's just what it represented. that book had character - all sorts of scrawlings, and my map of where we'd been marked on the big map of china at the front, and little notes about which hostels were good, new entries for places to eat and stay and drink pencilled in.......
oh well. one less heavy book to carry, i guess.


we were not home yet. we tried to find somewhere to change dong, with no luck (there was nowhere in sapa, either, and there's nowhere in kunming, so i'm stuck with a useless wad of the shit. maybe they'll change it back in aus?). then we used our first chinese toilet (my first in a month, chris' first ever), and i explained to the ladies taking my wu mao (half a yuan) that i only spoke a little chinese. the older one said she didn't like my hair (the sides recently shaved in a fit of boredom and possibly insanity in sapa - what was i thinking? i was headed back to china for goodness' sake! oh well. i have beanies etc).

we found the bus station after some useful directions from the nice immigration man who stole my lonely planet, and discovered that our bus would leave at 1pm.
we had an unpleasant surprise when boarding the bus. it was not a sleeper bus, as we had been originally promised, but an ordinary bus with ordinary seats. oh no. and leaving at 1pm meant we would be getting to kunming at roughly 1am. bugger bugger bugger.
oh well. nothing to do but grin and bear it. so we got on and settled ourselves in for a long, long ride.


after hours on the bus, passing through the weird semi-tropical scenery that constitues yunnan province, with various stops for toilet and a traffic jam further on, and dozing and waking too many times to count, we stopped for dinner. this was about 9pm, and we were both starving, not having eaten much that day. the bus driver had been an absolute trooper so far, and we'd hardly stopped at all. chris was getting worried, but i kept confidently assuring him (from about six pm onwards), that yes, any time now we'd be stopping for dinner.
getting off was such a relief! we went inside a typical chinese roadside eatery, and immediately felt out of place and confused. i collected myself as quick as i could and said to one of the waitresses, in my best chinese, that i didn't eat meat, and could she make me something? after repeating the question, she said yes, she could, and pointed to the vegetables.
der. we were standing in front of one of those glass cabinets where they keep the food. basically, you point at what you want and they'll cook it up for you. i pointed at the eggplant, and ordered some plain rice, and sat down. chris was staring into a bowl of soup with bits of skin floating in it, and next to it some rice. "i wanted noodles......" he moaned. he'd been telling me "no more rice" the whole bus journey. i think i'd snorted at this a bit. no more rice, and he was going to china? (i should explain he's been in asia nearly a year now, working in singapore for 9 months of that, so i can understand the reluctance to eat rice yet again).
he took the weird soup back ("do you think they'll be offended?", "nah dude, just say bu yao zhei ge and it'll be cool"), and the eggplant arrived, looking every bit as delicious as i remembered (well, maybe that's an exaggeration, but it looked damn good, and i knew the best was yet to come, once i got back to sichuan).
ahhh, my first bite of chinese food in a month. i don't care if it's just the msg, and it's going to give me cancer or something, it was so much more enjoyable than most of what i'd eaten in the last month that i couldn't stop smiling and shoving food into my mouth for the whole meal.
chris said, "it's pretty good, actually...... and i can see why you like china so much. this is, like, the most exciting place i've been so far".

we finally made it to kunming at midnight, after hours of weird chinese films about junkie neighbours and undercover police, and then "city hunter", some weird 80s jackie chan thing where he bumbles around staring at women and ostensibly fighting crime (there was a great scene where he got stuck inside a street fighter arcade game and was dressed up as one of the female characters. it was the best part of the whole film).
we got off the bus gladly, and sleepily got into a taxi, where i tried out my chinese again, and then ended up showing the guy the map. ("oh, you mean such-and-such street, right!" is about the english equivalent of what i think he said. "i only speak a little chinese, sorry", i told him, in my dodgy chinese, and he chuckled to himself).

miraculously, cloudland youth hostel was still open when we got there. we walked through the door and into the common area, where people were drinking and smoking and watching dvds and using computers. reception informed us there were beds in 4- or 6-bed dorms available, and we gladly took two beds in the 6-bed dorm. my leftover yuan was just enough to cover the taxi fare, dinner, paying a key deposit and for the beds for one night, and then breakfast this morning.

we were happy, happy people when we laid our heads down on those comfy pillows last night.
it's good to be back!

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