B52 bombers and getting to know the locals

On my last Hanoi adventure we were greeted with baffled and confused faces whilst trying to track down the downed B52 wreckage hanging out of a lake. I asked Cham about it on Tuesday and she said it was quite far away and you would have to take a motorcycle so I had knocked that idea on the head until I figured out how to get there on foot. It was at least a 40 min stroll away and seemed silly to miss the opportunity to see it yet again so we want to find it. Eventually as the streets narrowed I started to see why most normal taxis didn't have a clue where it would be. I took a wrong turn and ended up down the ally's of a local community, must have stuck out like a sore thumb as a lady pointed us back the other way. And there it was, about 7 square meters of green stagnant water with a hump of metal sticking out of it! We had found it. Hard to think how it missed all the other land when it came down and ended up in that small patch of water.

Hanoi is renowned for its Bia Hoi - fresh beer brewed the night before and delivered to outlets that morning. I knew I had to try it having missed out last time around. It's pretty good, and at 5,000 VND a glass (about £0.15) you have to wonder why I didn't try this sooner.

Later that evening we were preparing to take our first overnight sleeper train to Sapa, a Hill Station in North Vietnam. We left it late so we were lucky to get any tickets at all but Cham found us a pair of "hard sleeper" tickets, one way so we would have to figure out how to get back. I did a lot of research on the trains and soft sleepers seemed the obvious choice so I was somewhat nervous about what we had got ourselves in for!

When you go to board you freely walk across the train tracks to get to the platform. On arriving Into the correct cabin you see 6 berths of bunk beds, made for sized people of the local variety. I took the top bunk and must of only had 40cm's worth of clearance between the bed and the roof. Very hard to navigate storing and removing stuff from my bag. My bed for the night looked like a big piece of hardboard with a pillow on it!

At this point 3 other passengers joined the cabin. They were local people travelling up to Sapa for a holiday with the rest of their family occupying another room on the train. We introduced ourselves and didnt really expect that over the next 3.5 hours we would continually talk in broken English, sign language and my continual attempts to impress them with my Vietnamese - Xin Chow (hello), Chuc Mung nam moi (happy new year) and Cam on (thank you) which seemed to work quite well. All of a sudden our scary bed for the night had turned into a social outing, we met their wives and their children and they were extremely generous sharing their food (pork in a packet like crisps) and rice. We steered clear of the wine (smelt like vodka!).

To get to Sapa you have to take the 8/9 hour journey to Lao Cai, the rest of the track was damaged some years ago by landslides. We had been warned about being ripped off for the bus transfer needed to take you the rest of the way. We asked Wan and Ang (no idea if you spell their names like that!) how they were making the rest of the journey. This quickly turned into us being offered a place in their private mini bus at no charge at all.

I slept for around 4 hours being tossed about as the train meandered up the mountains. A few times I had to turn around as my bones felt like they were going to break and were a bit numb. All worth it - only regret being we didn't get any pictures of the inside of the train.

Some 12 hours after leaving our hotel in Hanoi we were in in Sapa. Hopefully you are seeing some of the pictures I am posting as the view was incredible. I'm writing this at 1,500 km above sea level staring at the peaks of Mt. Fansipan - Vietnams largest mountain.

Temple count: 12
Noodle count: 5
Hours travelled: 33