Look Both Ways, Scream and Cross the Street

Hi everyone, Laura here. Dan's right hand ring finder may or may not be broken after a tragic finger-slamming-into-rock-incident while trekking in Sapa, so I'm taking over on blog writing for the time being. Don't worry about him, we've taken care not to seek medical advice for fear of amputation and have fashioned an impressive splint made out of a toothbrush and tape that seems to be doing the trick. That finger was already crooked from a previous injury so it's a little hard to tell if it's broken or not. It certainly looks jacked up. If you are one of our doctor friends you might be receiving a photo with a "Hey does this look broken" subject line soon. Lucky you!

In other news, we arrived in Hanoi last Wednesday and have spent the last week exploring three different areas of Northern Vietnam: Hanoi, Sapa and Halong Bay. The first thing about Hanoi that a tourist will notice, and possibly the thing that leaves the most lasting impression, is the honking. Honking seems to be an art form here - truly its own language with subtleties and innuendo, unlike in the US where my general feeling is that a honk means "get the bleep out of my way you bleeping moron" on every occasion. There are many different types of horns here - some of them play little songs, others start loud and then fade out with a little "nah nah nah nah nah" pattern, and others just sound like they are from a Schwinn bike with pretty pink streamers coming off the handle bars (man I loved that bike). But the honking is a symphony with no intermission, even in the wee hours of the morning. It seems to me that most honks here mean "hey buddy I'm over here and am coming through this intersection whether you stop moving or not." There are so many motorcycles and mopeds here it is quite a sight to behold. It also means that crossing the street is, and I'm not kidding, a life or death experience every time. I'm so stressed out from crossing the street I think I need a Valium. Only really major intersections have pedestrian crossing lights, and even then the little green man who flashes that its okay to cross seems to be playing some sick kind of joke on tourists. We are getting better at crossing now - you really just have to inch out into the oncoming traffic and pretend you are the frog in Frogger, keep your eyes on the prize and have a little faith that people are going to drive around you. I think I like our way a little better at home.



We stayed in the Old Quarter of Hanoi and its a fun place to walk around when you aren't fearing for your life while crossing the street. Sidewalks have three purposes, and none of those purposes involve a safe passage for pedestrians. Sidewalks are either jam packed with parked motor bikes, or become a part of a shop that spills out to the curb or transform into a curbside restaurant with the tiniest little stools you ever will see. Tiny stools rule this land. We walked for several hours on the first day and Dan seemed rather pensive and thoughtful, and then finally spoke in practically a whisper, "Whoever makes these little chairs must be so rich." Spaz.

Hanoi is also the only place I've ever visited where you can be simultaneously woken up in the morning by blaring horns AND roosters. Where do the roosters actually live? That question might always haunt me. I just don't know where the roosters live.

Anyway, a lot of our time in Hanoi was actually taken up with making travel arrangements and running some long overdue errands, including a trip to the post office which was like an anthropological study. Somehow the whole operation functions without organized lines and no one really seems to get to pissed off about not knowing how or when you'll make enough eye contact to get a worker to help you (it's sort of like trying to get a bartender's attention in a very crowded bar only here it won't help you if you have huge boobs.) It took three government forms to mail one package, and you can't seal a package until they've inspected all of its contents. People, the USPS is something to celebrate, not to curse. We have it pretty good in the States.





We did walk around a nice lake with a very neat-o embalmed turtle which resides in a temple on an island in the middle of the lake. Some people think these turtles, who have heads that almost look like seals, are extinct but we met an Aussie couple who were lucky enough to SEE one pop its head out of the moss that morning. We were molto jealous. We also caught a Water Puppet performance (after much confusion at the ticket counter...they were "sold out" until the girl in line ahead of us actually pointed to the unsold tickets on the theater map in front of the ticket seller...oh, you means these tickets??) which was very fun. These puppets appear to have smoked the whacky tabaccy and gyrate all throughout their watery stage, of course with the help of their puppeteer friends who have to stand in waist deep water for five performances a day! It really is a special art form and you must check it out if you ever make it to Vietnam.



From Hanoi we took an overnight train to Lau Cai, which is only three kilometers from the Chinese border (Yunnan province, it was so hard to be that close and not get to visit Kunming, Dali, Lijiang, etc.!) We can safely say that we no longer fit into the "backpacker" category because we bought four tickets on the sleeper car in order to have some privacy and not have our faces pressed up against some stranger's smelly sock for eight hours straight. This move would disgrace us if we were to sink as low as to return to the hostel world. Which we won't. The Hanoi train station was a crazy crazy crazy place and I really don't think we would have ever found our train compartment if a stranger looking for a tip hadn't helped us. Of course the lock on the cabin door was broken so Dan got all McGuyver on me and jerry rigged a lock out of his cargo belt and the foot hold of the upper bunk. Very impressive and we walked away unrobbed (yay for us, we are making progress)!

Lau Cai is the closest train station to Sapa, which was our home for the next three nights. Sapa is a very lovely French hill station town and is mostly visited by tourists looking to trek through the mind blowingly lovely landscape and visit one or all of the six ethnic minority groups living in the surrounding villages. Sapa is very often encased in thick, mysterious mist which is how it was for the first entire day and night of our visit. See the before and after photos below.



We honestly thought the whole town was just one street but then discovered a huge area that we just couldn't see through the mist! Sapa is just a chill kind of place to hang out, but the highlight for us was our two day trek and an overnight stay in a village. We had a wonderful 23-year old guide named Lan, and it was so nice to have the trek be just the three of us rather than with a big group (like it was for us in Chiang Mai). The largest minority group in the local villages are the Black Hmong people, who get their name from the black clothing they wear. The clothes are embroidered with bright colors and intricate patterns and the villagers come to Sapa every day to sell their handicrafts, mostly hand embroidered bags and blankets, to the tourists. This became the most difficult part of the visit over the days.

Black Hmong women follow tourists out on a trek trying to make a sale.

The Black Hmong women are the most aggressive salespeople you will ever meet (they make the carpet dudes in Turkey look like little kittens). They surround tourists in large groups and poke and prod and stare and don't take no for an answer. They also speak pretty great English because of all the interaction, but they really only know one conversation and it goes like this:

Where you from?
What your name? (Note: If you have engaged to this point you might as well kiss your money goodbye)
Hold old are you? (To which the reply is always "Oh, very young!" - this worked on me until I realized the woman asking me was 20 years old and had three children...methinks I am not so young in their eyes)
How many brothers and sisters you have?
Older or younger?
You buy from me? (Which is really more of a statement that a question.)

By the end of the visit I felt like I was being hit on by a guy with Alzheimer's. There is only so many times you can have the same conversation before asking for a restraining order. The women will even stand outside the window where you are eating lunch and stare at you until you come out of the restaurant at which time the pick up lines begin. When we left on our trek two very sweet girls named Ma and La followed us for over two miles before I put them (or me) out of misery and bought a couple of trinkets so they could make the haul back up to Sapa to start the process all over again.



The trek itself was gorgeous and not too strenuous, ideal for lazy folks like us. We stopped around 3pm at our village and the noodled about the countryside until Dan decided it was as good a time as any to (maybe) break his finger. So mostly we just sat around and drank tea after that.




I was quite dubious of the authenticity of our homestay at first glance - after all, they had a Western toilet (outside the house) and a sign on the front door saying they have WiFi. I was expecting a hole in the ground so these were interesting developments. But when the sun went down and the the tourists went back to Sapa, this really was a family home, absolutely bustling from several generations living under one roof - from the toothlessly young to the toothlessly old. We felt so very lucky to be there. The "kitchen" if you could call it that is a low and narrow fire pit with a grate that can support two pans or pots at one time. The firewood is mostly bamboo, and it is quite a clever system they use. They simply push the bamboo sticks slowly into the fire as they burn down, which keeps a very hot flame but the fire is very low to the ground. We sat on the tiny little stools that Dan had so thoughtfully contemplated in Hanoi and watched Lan and the host cook us a six or seven course meal. It was amazing the way they can cook, deep fry even, over a wood burning fire. I was mesmerized, especially when they lit all of the contents of the wok on fire to flash fry our beef. This is really not for beginner cooks, see below.



We shared our dinner with the host, who has nine grown children and seems to be the godfather type figure of the village, and he shared his home made rice wine with us. Lan translated the phrase, "If you don't get drunk, don't come back," and we knew this was our kind of village. So the dinner was full of toasts and handshakes and I loved every minute of it, except for when we had eaten past our capacity and Lan just kept semi-shouting "Eat More Now." After dinner went to the neighbor's house (our host's daughter) and drank more tea and rice wine. At this point Lan seemed a little slurry, but Dan and I really felt fine (probably because we ate enough for the whole village). But Lan kept telling us that it was his duty to protect us and that he was very scared we would soon be drunk because rice wine is stronger than vodka or tequilla. Let me tell you, if that were true we would have been in similar shape to the 2003 IGN Christmas party (seriously bad news). But we were fine and ended up sneaking shots with our hostess when Lan left the room, and then she would high five us after. I think that may be one of my most favorite memories of the trip so far. We slept on a low futon upstairs and listened to the sounds of the house waking up the next morning.



After another day or so in Sapa and more lovely walks and hikes, we took the train back to Hanoi and arrived at 4:30am. That blew. We had no where to go because we were meeting our ride to Halong Bay at 8am. The streets were creepy and dark, though we did get to see a moped carrying multiple pig carcasses, followed by a cyclo carrying the largest pig carcass I have ever seen. Not covered up or wrapped or anything, just hanging out there in the cyclo for all the world to admire. I think I would get up that early again just to watch the surreal dead pig parade. We decided to come back to the hotel we had stayed at before, thinking it would be open. It was not, and we were happily sitting on the doorstep reading our books when an old lady from across the street came over and starting banging on the door of the hotel, thinking she was doing us a favor. We were so embarrassed when a guy in his boxer shorts came to the door and confusedly let us in and kept saying, "You have booking?" to which we could only mutter, "Uh, no, we didn't know where else to go." It was all just sad and pathetic. It turns out that the guys that run the hotel sleep on a futon in the lobby, so we ended up crammed in the lobby with their three motorbikes, a futon with two sleeping men, and us just sitting in the corner looking at each other and wanting to melt away. They still weren't awake at 6:45am so we just slipped out, waking them up AGAIN, and grabbed a taxi to the Hilton where we should have just gone to begin with but our brains weren't working at 4:30am. We felt like such jerks. Finally it was 8am and we were on a bus to Halong Bay!



Halong Bay was our big splurge for SE Asia. We took a one night cruise on a pretty high end ship which we hooked up through an operator that I used to work with while I was at HCP, so we got a pretty good deal on it. The ship was called Bhaya and is a pretty new boat but architecturally similar to the traditional junks. The ship was gorgeous and we felt very pampered for about 24 hours. Halong Bay is stunning, even in the drizzly weather that we encountered. I can only imagine its beauty in full sunshine. We sailed through countless karst islands, and took the ship tender to explore caves and floating fishing villages. In our spare time we sat on the top deck and drank beers and watched the islands pass by. It was heavenly, and much too short. The highlight for me was a visit to Sung Sot Cave, also known as the Cave of Surprise. There are three chambers, getting progressively bigger and the final cave is truly huge. I was blown away by the rock formations and they had everything lit very nicely with colored lights which added to the atmosphere. Granted I haven't been to Carlsbad Caverns or anything like that, but this was really the most amazing cave I've ever seen. I could have spent hours hanging out in there.



We made it back to Hanoi late on Wednesday afternoon and went sheepishly back at the hotel (hey guys, remember us?), and then woke them up again this morning at 4am because we had a 6am flight to Da Nang. We took a taxi to a wonderful little town called Hoi An, but not before our taxi broke down by the side of the road in the rain. We are too relaxed now that we are out of Honk-oi to really care about stuff like that, feel free to hate us.

We'll be here in Hoi An for three nights and will make a side trip to the ruins at My Son, then will head to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) for a couple of nights before flying to Siem Reap on May 25th. We have about three weeks left in SE Asia, so we are half way through this segment of the trip...it is really hard to believe how fast the time is going. This weekend will mark our 8th week on the road. Believe it or not we really miss all of you back home and talk about you often, and most of it is even positive!

Love to all,
Laura and Dan