Blog : Hanoi and Sapa

Having left B and our perfect holiday it was back to backpacking for me and I kicked it off in style by sitting on the floor in the airport whilst I waited over an hour and a half for my backpack to come round on the luggage carousel. For ages the only thing that keep coming out of the doorway was electrical goods boxes all tied up and packed, they were the most random things on the whole world! Before leaving Bangkok the girls had said they had a problem with their visa, it didn't start until a day after they were due to arrive, luckily mine was already valid, having applied for it separately and just shoved down any old date, but we'd messaged about it and Al had put it up on twitter as well. I was expecting no problems with my visa and assume it was just coincidental at the airport check in that the lady couldn't find the visa in my passport, which I found for her. And then immediately after getting off the plane in Hanoi, there was an official looking Qatar airways lady standing with headed paper and my name on it, so I went over and asked her what was up... She said supposedly there was a problem with my visa(?) and took me to the visa desk and about five visa officials inspected my whole passport, cover to cover and pretty much looked at my "applied for in advance because we're so organised" Vietnam visa with a magnifying glass, but they couldn't find anything wrong with it. After lots of Vietnamese radio communicating and faffing about, they couldn't work out where the info had come from or what was supposedly wrong with it so they let me go. Standing in the line to passport control though the initial lady came over again to wish me luck passing through and if I had a problem she pointed out a nearby seat where shed be waiting, just in case I needed any additional help - she was absolutely lovely but at the time this panicked me quite a lot because I wondered what on earth the problem was and how coincidental it all was, what with the girls problem with theirs!

Finally after getting out of the airport with my backpack I got harassed by loads of taxi drivers vying to take me into town, but as I could only take USD out in Thailand, no Vietnamese dong I was up the s***ter because the exchange rate was really rubbish. So I changed some money at the tourist information office and probably got ripped off but because the dong is such a big currency - 32000 to the pound - my maths isn't quick enough to work out the conversion! And then managed to get a taxi into town as Al had messaged me saying the shuttle bus had been really complicated so get a taxi) although I later found out she meant get a taxi from where the bus drops you in Hanoi, not straight from the airport, but never mind! The driver didn't know where he was going, despite me showing him a picture of the hostel, the address and a map and tried to drop me at every hotel named Hanoi backpackers before finding the right one. I was feeling pretty exhausted and ready to crash, after a day of pretty roller coaster emotions and I was just thinking about whether I'd be able to find the girls or not and then out came Al from the juice shop opposite the hostel and she spotted me... Phewwww! We had a pretty chilled afternoon, a quick walk round the city and chatted to a few travel agents about Sapa trekking and Ha Long bay trips an prices and then a lot of monging in the dorm room, reading up on Vietnam to do's. We all fell asleep pretty early, me in all my clothes and everything! It was bliss to have a full nights sleep though and I woke up without the familiar groggy feeling. I felt a bit panicked all day the next day though as we were following a walking tour round the city on a map we'd picked up at the hostel. I was quite shakey and feeling really homesick and obviously missing B like crazy and just a bit overwhelmed about everything and after a walk around Hanoi I had to come back to the hostel to chill out. Hanoi as a city was very French looking, with lots of Victorian style buildings with Parisian shutters and coloured fronts and there were motorbikes coming from every direction, left, right and centre, honking and beeping with children on the front and ladies riding side saddle on the back and everyone had those funny masks on their faces so not to breathe in all the fumes and pollution. Hanoi had a big lake with a temple in the middle of it and all of the streets were organised by category, silk street, clothes street, kids toys street, motorbike repair street etc which I quite liked and we walked up and down a load of them just looking in amazement at everything for sale! A lot of the branded clothes are made out in Vietnam so lots of stuff is authentic too, just really cheap! Kate managed to pick up a super cheap little north face backpack for the Sapa trek that we were booked onto and we all brought really really thick socks to keep our toes warm, protect from blisters and for me add a bit more padding into the bottom of my very thin soled and flat trainers! We had booked our Sapa trip in the end through the hostel, as we wanted to make sure that there would be a few people our age and fun on the trip rather than just going on a saga holidays day trip! It worked out a bit more expensive but it was good because we got free backpack storage and picked up from right outside the hostel front door!

Back at the hostel we checked out and sat in the chill out room, packing, whilst we waited until the bus came to pick us up and take us to the train station for the start of our Sapa excursion! We packed loads of warm clothes and I was really sparse packing only my absolute essentials because we had to carry everything on our backs over two days of 20km trekking through rice paddies and a bamboo forest... I was really excited about going up to Sapa, as I hadn't been to Chang Mai like the other girls and done a trekking trip there, but it also meant I had no idea what to expect, so packing was hard!! We caught the overnight sleeper train to Lao Cai, which was apparently 2km from the Chinese boarder and then a minibus to Sapa. The sleeper train was pretty uncomfortable, the beds were really narrow and we swayed side to side quite a lot as we rattled down the tracks. I had a top bunk in a little compartment of four, us three and then Helen, who had been written down as Nelen on the tour register, joined us and immediately slotted into our group as we laughed and chatted our way through the evening over beers and lesbian (Leibniz) biscuits. Everyone in our tour group was really sound and I was looking forward to trekking and chinwagging to take my mind off missing home and B.

The overnight train arrived into Lao Cai at about 5am and we got picked up and transferred to Sapa via a crazily uncomfortable and massively crammed minibus which took about an hour. We were taken to a hotel where we were given two rooms to share between eight of us to shower, change and pack everything up before breakfast at 7am. Literally the second we arrived the hotel staff told us that categorically not could any of us walk in the shoes that we were wearing, they were unsuitable for the wet terrain and not grippy enough, which sort of put the fear of god into us. It was so so so cold when we arrived and I'd got all my layers on already! We were scared about our little plimsole trainers and the weather - torrential rain apparently - and being freezing cold, especially at night, so we got conned into buying full length rain macs from the hotel shop, to protect ourselves against the elements and some people rented welly boots but we figured we'd just make do, just for two days of hiking! Breakfast at the hotel was a massive buffet with chips, beans, eggs, noodles, baguettes, dairy lea and pancakes - yummy! We scoffed and scoffed because we weren't sure if the lunch would be good! And then we walked into town to see the market and see if we could see any more warm looking clothes and we all ended up buying traditional headscarves to keep us warm and they looked hilarious!

We set off on day one of trekking at about 9:15 the morning and it felt like lunch time already, until he took us through the local market we'd been down to earlier, although now it was in full swing and it was really interesting to see the older Vietnamese men sat round tiny low tables drinking tea from thimbles but then our appetite was completely shot when we rounded the corner and saw tables upon tables of red, blood oozing meat everywhere, chopped up and unrecognisable. There was a disgusting moment where an old lady was sweeping the floor and flicking blood and chicken feet everywhere and a man carrying half a pig brushed past us and another had a pigs head all bloody and brainy hung on the handlebar of his moped...poor old Al had to run straight through and was sick on the other side :/ Completely unoblivious, the dead pan tour guide stopped by the side of another meat table and showed us what was very clearly the head and front paw of a dog, before telling us that yes it is common to eat dog in Vietnam - bleurghh!! We trekked on through the town and were joined by more and more local women in traditional garb carrying wicker baskets on their backs, wearing flip flops and asking us in broken English whether we had brothers or sisters and how old we were. They followed us for the whole morning, helping us over tricky bits and pointing out the best routes through muddy parts of the path. We walked through rice paddies and up and over the big rolling countryside hills... The views were amazing, especially in the early morning as there was a low hanging mist that gave a kind of ereathal feeling to the place! Al had a fall quite early on but it broke the ice between the group and soon we were all snapping our cameras and feeling very professional photographery! After about 10km of up and downing and with super muddy and very skippy trainers we got to where we were going to have lunch, a local hillside restaurant. The local ladies that had been with us then pounced, flogging their souvenir jewellery, post cards, purses and bags. It was quite awkward because we all felt obliged to buy something after some of these ladies, maybe 50+ with babies strapped to their backs had trekked with us and helped us, but there stuff was so expensive, trying to rip us off! In the end Kate and I brought a little silver bracelet each for £3 and Helen got completely harassed and brought earrings and bracelets galore! Lunch was quite nice, a noodle and veggie soup with egg and kinda weird spices chips. We were all ravenous so gobbled down the whole lot and then the pineapple pudding too! The toilet we could use was literally just a whole in the ground in a small shack that was overhanging a river and all the waste just got flushed down into the river so it was a bit gross (the flush was a saucepan in a bucket of water that you had to do manually as well :s)

We carried on the walk, but feeling a bit stiff after the stop we were a bit slower! We trekked through two mountain villages, the first was that of a smaller and poorer tribe, one of who's house we got to look around whilst the 'hilarious' tour guide joked that we'd be staying on the mud floor in this old mans house, who was squatting over an open fire heating water in a saucepan that looked older than he! It was super akward because we weren't sure if he was being sarcastic or not and we all felt really rude slagging off the mans house right in front of him so we were trying to put on a brave fave whilst the tour guide had a pop at the grubbiness! We then walked further to a second tribe village, the richer one who mainly controlled the areas and found the home stay we'd be in for the night. I was expecting a really traditional house and a few of us in each place, really bonding with the family we stayed with and enjoying a traditional meal and sleeping in the freezing cold but instead we were in a dorm with about eight other people, with a family who didn't even bother to say hello or welcome us to begin with. They even had a pool table!

We had been joined with another group so we all sat and drank tea in tiny china mugs to keep ourselves warm as the mist started descending at about half four on the afternoon and I had a scorching shower and then layered up before dinner that we'd been told was half past six-ish! At about nine we were still waiting, absolutely starving after only being fed a 'starter' of spicey chips! Finally when the food was served there was loads of it and it was absolutely delish, tofu in tomato sauce, loads of veggies, gorgeous veg spring rolls, cabbage, rice and more! We ate and ate and ate until we were ready to burst although all the way through dinner the tour guide and man of the house both kept pouring us shots of rice wine, which tasted absolutely disgusting, like strong and yucky schnapps, toasting to good health, luck and fortune!

We all sat round the dinner table chatting, sharing our experiences of the day and also of other places we'd all travelled, laughing when we all had similar views on places and putting forward recommendations for people. We played a couple of games with toothpicks with the guide, he made shapes and asked us to move one or two sticks to make another shape... They were mainly silly games that were just trick questions, but putting our heads together we manage to crack a couple of them. If we lost one of us had to do a shot of the soda gusting rice wine and if we manage to crack the puzzle the guide had to, although he definitely didn't look like he was enjoying it either and kept giggling like a pissed fifteen year old boy!! Because it had gotten so dark and cold early on and we'd had such an early start that morning, 10pm felt like about 1 in the morning and slowly we all started calling it a night. The older lady from the second group went first, after she had been repeatedly bullied to drink the rice wine which he kept saying she 'couldn't - after she said her hubby was an entertainer and they'd live all over the world I suspected she was maybe a recovering alcoholic and wife to a rock star! The Australian couple went next, they were both so cute and shy and so young to be travelling Vietnam together - quite a random holiday to take with your boyfriend aged 19, surely you'd want beaches!? The crazy Brazilian went next after she'd told us all about her arranged marriage that her parents had pairs for and that shed gone along with the whole charade so that she could live with her boyfriend at the end of it... Weird! Then all of our group retired together, to the mattresses on the floor with mosquito nets (so I didn't have to use mums head net one) and the thickest, heaviest duvets in the world! I still slept in my leggings, jumper and head scarf though!! It was a great nights sleep after so much food and fresh air and even the early morning wasn't too bad!

I woke about 8am and dozed for a few minutes before I very suddenly needed the toilet and I literally had to sprint downstairs before I exploded liquid out my ass. Something had definitely not agreed with me from the previous night as within the space of about two hours I went to the toilet over ten times, always s***ting pure liquid :/ I was not looking forward to an uphill trek through the bamboo forest to say the least! We had a yummy breakfast of pancakes with sugar, limes, bananas and condensed milk as toppings (yum yum and some of us talked about what a special treat having sticky cream used to be as kids and sneaking spoonfuls of it front the fridge between meals!!) The tour guide wasn't joking about the trek being very uphill on the second day and through a lot more mud. To begin with we walked through the rest of the mountain village and looked into schools and saw Vietnamese kids learning to read and write and a class of really young ones sang to us which was so sweet :) Whilst some of the guys from the group were still inside the school KV and I sat and waited on the pavement outside and a group of women walked past us with massive chunks of meat sticking out the tops of their wicker baskets, with loads of blood running down plastic sheets that were tucked under the baskets to cover their legs. It was so grim when the last lady came past with the head of a buffalo on her back and we realised that all of the chunks of met had been part of this buffalo that had been chopped up somewhere in the hillside. There was brains and blood and guts and everything hanging out the top of the badly severed head which literally made my stomach turn, so so so rank! Her legs were absolutely drenched in blood as well and we were both really glad that Al had been inside the school and missed the whole procession else she would sego have been sick again! We carried on walking through lots of muddy rice paddies uphill an through little trails in a bamboo forest. I had my eyes trained not to look too closely at anything as I suspected that it was spider territory! And Al at one point told me to step quickly over a certain spot which I tried very hard not to look at and avoided any glimpse of spider! Going through the forest and all the uphill climbing was quite hard as my legs were a little tight from the day before and my trainers covered in mud so v slippy. They also kept slipping off the backs of my feet because I brought them a size too big in Singapore to compensate for my foot swelling on planes! Al and I were at the back of the group, which had joined together with the people from our homestay and we were behind the older lady who seemed to be struggling quite a lot and took an tumble, knocking one of the local ladies slightly, who had a baby on her back which from that second onwards would not stop wailing! Al and I literally were at our wits ends and kept hanging back loads to try and get away from the sound but they were desperate to help us as well - more guilt money for when they tried to sell us souvenirs later we supposed. It was awkward having a new group of local ladies with us on the second day as we had all cottoned on to their sales tactic an kept refusing them help and trying not to be to friendly when they chatted with us, but it felt pretty rude! We had a break at the top of a massively steep waterfall through the rocks and I took a couple of pictures of the amazing views... I was quite conscious that I did have a lot of pictures of rice paddies though! Al and Kate went and top some pics on the rocks closer to the edge of the waterfall and all took a little tumble and landed in some wet mud which went all over her denim shorts and made her look like she had s*** herself. It was me that felt lily it though, the second day of trekking was more remote and a lot more stop start-y which was difficult because the stopping made the pokey feeling come on a lot stronger than when I was moving. And obviously the lee were no bathroom facilities in the middle of the hillside and squatting with all my backpack and camera dangling and liquid poop was far to difficult to even entertain! We trekked down into the valley next and stopped at the river which was t the bottom of the waterfall where the looked like the was a wedding photo shoot going on. We all sat down on the rocks nearby whilst one of the guys had a swim in the rapidy kind of water and we caught some rays and rested our feet (and I toileted) before a mega uphill climb to another restaurant for lunch. Lunch was just noodles in a soup with egg, not as good as the previous day and we got harassed by the local women again to buy stuff. Quite bluntly I had to say I already had one bracelet and NO, I was not going to buy another one from any of them!

After lunch we caught a minibus from the main road back to Sapa town, which took about an hour and got dropped back at the hotel. We changed our shoes and put our bags in the storage area enforce heading out as a group to have a little look around Sapa town before it got dark and cold. We were also looking for something to have for dinner and wanted to stretch our legs after another 8km or so of trekking all day! We wandered about and in the end sat down in a cafe where some people ordered a coffee and what not. It was quite kitch and the town was a quintessentially French town, it felt like we were in a ski resort in the summer or something! I managed to get some biccys for the train journey home but couldn't find anywhere for a sandwich so Al and I went back to the hotel to shower as we were freezing once the mist and darkness descended! We were all huddled onto another minibus and taken back to the train station about 30 mins later and just dropped off at a random restaurant and told to wait an hour for the train :/ there was a lady selling baguettes and dairylee cheese though, so we brought some bread for our dinner!! The train journey back to Hanoi was long and uncomfortable and I had a nasty nightmare that some thug came into our little compartment and stole all my valuables from my bag so I slept hugging them and basically scared for my life, which pretty much meant I didn't sleep! The train arrived to Hanoi at about 5am again and we got picked up in a taxi and transferred to the back to the hostel were we tried to sleep in the chill out room for a couple of hours before cashing in our free breakfast. Al had already had here but for some reason her name hadn't been ticked off the list so Kate and I ate her second one as well as we went down separately! We then had to wait until midday until we could transfer to the other hostel (same brand, different location) and check in. It was pretty confusing because suddenly there was quite a big group of us and multiple bookings under the same name, the receptionists had no idea what they were doing as well which didn't help our slightly grumpy, tired moods!

After a good sleep we went for a walk, dropped off some laundry, had our trainers cleaned and started talking to the travels agents again about booking our Ha Long bay trip, which a couple of people from our Sapa group wanted to join us on...