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Vietnam the third: day 9, Sapa-Hanoi-Hoi An
Today was, simply, a travel day. We hit the hotel breakfast at 7am, just to get something into us before the day kicked off. Our goal was to get out of town before the various streetsellers, who we’d been telling that we were leaving Sunday so we’d be shopping Saturday, caught on and swamped us/set the car on fire/whatever they do in this town. Our car picked us up at about 7.45am, by which stage a few streetsellers were around, but not ones we’d encountered before. We were close to getting away clean, but our driver had another pickup right in the centre, and while the new passengers were being…
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Vietnam the third: day 8, Sapa
Mt Phan Xi Pang, at 3,143 metres (or, depending on the source, 3,174.3m) is the tallest mountain in Vietnam, and taller than anything in Australia, Cambodia, Laos, or Thailand. One nickname for it is the “roof of Indochina”. At times it can be covered in 60cm of snow. It is also probably the easiest 3,000+ metre mountain in the world to ascend. After picking up our laundry, we set off from our hotel base camp at approximately 0930, walking up the street, climbing the stairs to Fansipan St. The last couple of mornings we’re stopped there to pick us a couple of extra bottles of water, but today we figured…
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Vietnam the third: Day 7, Sapa
Folk art. No matter how cool or talented you think you are, you’re never going to be at the same level as an ancient lady in a house on a hillside surrounded by chickens and buffalo. Fortunately I know that I’m about as talented and artistically blessed as a Billy Joel concert, so a morning creating a batik design was never likely to produce a work that had any more than occasional moments of accidental competency. Batik is a method of creating designs through first applying wax to cloth then dying, then removing the wax leaving the design where the wax was. It is recognised to have been first practiced…
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Vietnam the third: Day 6, Sapa
It’ll likely be a short post today (I can hear the sigh of relief over the rain and the rampaging children from here) as, well, we didn’t do much today. Managed 14,500 steps of not much, somehow. We kicked off with the hotel breakfast, nothing too fancy but al least this way I get my daily ration of pink dragonfruit and lychees, along with what is best described as coffee flavoured mud — they keep their pot going strong, but sadly I didn’t find any condensed milk to give it what it really needed. It’s probably the first sign that I’m starting to go bamboo, actually looking to put sugar…
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Vietnam the third: Day 5, Hanoi to Sapa
“Smile, you’re travelling!” is what my alarm would have said at 6.15am had I not already been awake. For all the mumbling I make about early starts, and we’ve had a few on this trip, to be able to just get on a plane with a minimum of paperwork and fly to another country, spending money hard earned through many long hours of work, is a privilege. So many people in the world will never know this, instead are focussed on their next meal, or maybe even next week’s meals. So for all the mumbles and whinges and minor inconveniences — and they are all exactly that, minor, I mean…
