Halong Bay, Sapa and Crossed Over To China

Posted On Sunday, April 1, 2007 at at 12:37 AM by Alvin  

Having spent 2 days in rainy and dirty Hanoi (highly skippable in our opinion), we managed to pick a reliable agent (heads or tails, anyone ?) for a boat trip to visit Halong Bay which was calm and picturesque - a definite must-see. Hanoi was major scam country when it came to the arrangement of this particular trip, horror stories abound which we later found out to be well-documented in other travellers' blogs ! Anyway, commercial though everything was, it was well worth the trip which we happened to share with a group of Singaporeans. They were very nice to these jaded travellers (us) and shared with us their freshly caught seafood for dinner on the boat. It was a really pleasant 2 days we spent here !
When we arrived back to Hanoi, we took an overnight train to Sapa the same night. Worth mentioning, the ticket office of the Vietnam Train Authority was a direct leaf-out from the 60 Commi's era where they could hardly care less other than chatting amongst themselves and drinking tea, but somehow we still managed to buy a seated ticket off them, amazing ! The Milanese fellow and the Europeans in front of the queue had no such luck and they were waved away like annoying flies ! Poor guys.

Now, we haven't told you yet about the thieves on the overnight train, have we ? Well, to say the least, luck was on our side as we by chance, held on to our bags (tightly) when we dozed off periodically during this overnight train ride; just as well, there were thieves aplenty; the grab-your-bag-and-jump-off-train variety. Also, it was a local train and there were many farmers on board and the cocks they had brought along kept calling sunrise throughout the night of this truly truly memorable train journey ! Hey we didn't want to take the "Tourist Class" comfy trains just to sample the "real" Vietnam, right ?

We based ourselves in the peaceful hill town of Sapa and visited some lovely and colorful local minority villagers such as The Cat Cat Village and the Bac Ha Sunday Market for the next few days. It was such a memorable day to cross the border from Vietnam boarder town of Lao Cai (老街) to China at He Kou (河口) that we elected to stay an extra night at He Kou to slowly appreciate the experience before travelling on to Kunming - one of the best days during this Indo-China trip. Ace, Man !

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