Cat Ba Island.......

It's always interesting when a friend comes to visit (ESPECIALLY for me.....twelve time-zones away from everything that I know, that a visit from a friend just does amazing things for my well being).  You tend to actually GO to neat places nearby your home that you'd never visit on any ordinary day!  Like, how many of us in Buffalo actually GO to Niagara Falls?  How many of us in Denver actually GO to Nederland?  And, in Portland, how many of us go to Bend?

Cat Ba Island is one of those places - technically, it IS ruled under the jurisdiction of the Hai Phong City/District People's Committee (because it's only 90 minutes away by "fast boat"/180 minutes away by "slow boat"/30 minutes away by "swimming" from Hai Phong)....BUT - with air that can actually be breathed, water that appears safe to actually wade into, and an astounding lack of concrete....it couldn't be more night and day when compared to Hai Phong City proper.

So my friend Anthony flew in from Scotland (after a four-day stop in Siem Reap/Angkor Wat, Cambodia) and was fully expecting to fall in love with Viet Nam.

Landing in Hanoi in the middle of the 1000th anniversary of the city's founding gala and it being similar to Times Square on New Year's Eve with wall-to-wall-to-wall-to-wall humanity and the airport shuttle bus driver declaring - "OK....me not go further.  Too much crowd!  Everybody out here!" about a good 2 miles from our hotel and THEN finding that the brand new unused SIM card that I gave him (that I bought ten months ago and never once used) refused to function (oops!) and not having a clue WHERE exactly he is in one on thee most bizarre street layouts in the world, followed by being badgered by everybody for "Motobike!  Motobike?"  "Massa?  Massa?  Boom-Boom? Boom-boom?" "Me get you hotel with special price!" all day every day QUICKLY soured his views on Vietnam.

Now, I really despise ANY large city in Vietnam (Da Nang being the only possible exception, 'cause it doesn't feel or act like a large Vietnamese city) and I ONLY use places like Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City to escape the skull-crushing boredom that IS life in Hai Phong......but, man - coming from Siem Reap and the Cambodian Countryside straight into Hanoi hell.......that hadta be a bit of a shock!

Anyways, he found the hotel, and he took a train to meet me five days later in Hai Phong.  Helped me do a few classes ('cause the kids always love to see a new Tay, especially one as enthusiastic as Anthony is, 'cause the Tay generally avoid Hai Phong), and he really got to enjoy Hai Phong!  

So, on his last coupla days here, he really wanted to see Halong Bay.....so we headed out to Cat Ba Island!

Anthony with my friend and fellow English Teacher, Mrs. Hien

A lake on the interior of Cat Ba Island

View of Halong Bay from Cat Ba Town beach number 1

Hidden Pagoda along a road (if you can call it that) on Cat Ba Island

....and, about a mile past the pagoda, we were told by workmen intentionally creating rockslides (kinda like how they do avalanche control in the Rocky Mountain West) that we hadta turn back.

So we turned around, took a different road, and saw some cool rice paddies.....

....and a piglet parade.

The Beautiful Game - Vietnam Countryside style!

Fishing vessels along the shore - Cat Ba Island

....but I have been performing acts of Social Evil since 1968!


Still, though - that'd be a great name for a band:  "Acts of Social Evil"






Travel time over.....back to work.....more soon.....




-E-

Made it back.....


Sadly, had to leave Sapa on Tuesday Morning.  Grabbed my laundry, packed up the skooter and headed off into the sunrise (well, no....not really - it was 1PM when I took off, but still).......


Took the back mountain roads of QL 4D (which was ripped to shit from landslides and a near-total lack of actual paving) and a much better QL 32 (which was only partially ripped to shit from landslides and had a partial lack of paving on it).


No place to stay along the road with Internet in it until I got to Ha Noi.  There was a cafe in a town called Nghia Lo that had Wi-Fi....but I really wasn't up for leaving my room, soooo......


By the time I got to Ha Noi Thursday Afternoon, it had struck me that this IS THEE closest that I am gonna get to enjoying  anything resembling a real city (and that term being used on Ha Noi is a stretch) forra while.  So, even though I had easy Internet access, I put away the computer and went out and hit the town Thursday Night......and the town hit me back!


Too much fun out in Ha Noi 'till the wee hours on Thursday Night led to a 1PM Friday Morning Afternoon departure and a few days of recuperation when I got back to Hai Phong!


I'm alive and missing Sapa badly.  Trying to talk my wife into moving there....explaining that we can milk cows for a living up there whilst we teach them English (the cows, not the residents).....


So, from Sapa to Ha Noi, here are some more National Geographic-style pics from the ride home!


Hope you enjoy 'em.....

More madcap, zany wild times from Hai Phong coming up in a week or so....


-E-

….and up the hill we go.....

For the hotel in Lao Cai, I got reeeaaallly lucky: Ha, the owner of the Anh Phoung II and her lovely English-speaking daughter “Tina” [DON'T THINK thass a native Viet name from ten centuries ago] gave me information, free moon cake, tea and cheap beer. Building was rather new, room was very clean and had new air-conditioning. GREAT staff....really helpful and friendly.

Lao Cai is the type of place that you PASS THROUGH on your was to Kunming, China or Sapa, Vietnam.....there really is no reason to stay in Lao Cai unless you need a rest and a place to crash. I needed both.

There is precious little info as to which hotels in Lao Cai don't suck....since nobody wants to write about Lao Cai except to say, like a policeman at a car crash - “There's nothing to see here...please keep moving”....so I got lucky that I found a real gem!

'Course, TRIED to pop this place onto Trip Advisor, and they come back with some shit like - “Uhhhh....yeeaaah. We don't know about this hotel, so bring it to our attention first, we'll look into it, and THEN we'll allow you to write a review on this place!”

I mean – after getting that response, I could only sit there, like, WHAT THE FUCK?? I mean – is TripAdvsor.com gonna FLY SOMEBODY OVER TO LAO CAI to verify this hotel?? Or do they have a network of spies in every town and village that they contact for verification??

Left Lao Cai around 1:30pm after doing about an hour's worth of research on Trip Advisor trying to find a hotel in Sapa that didn't blow. Spent AN HOUR doing this because I was over-confident that the skooter WOULD make it up the hill to Sapa.

Headed up the Sapa road. Sign said that I was 35Km away. The first 15 kilometres were a gradual rise and were OK and not terribly threatening.

THEN, the final 20Km is where things rapidly began to suck! The grade began getting steeeeep to the point where 30 kilometres per hour was taxing the engine BADLY, landslides would close the lane I was in every 5 kilometres (thank Christ I didn't encounter any live landslides....that woulda put a damper on my fun), and there was a heavy mist and a blinding fog and the temperature had dropped about 5 degrees (or about 9 degrees F) every two thousand feet. Plus, sheer vertical drops and no guardrails only added to the fun and games.

Mud-caked, cold, wet, pissy, and just fucking relived......I pulled into the village of Sapa an hour later.

AND, after driving around the village for another hour, I FINALLY found one of the six hotels I had put on my “seems acceptable list” for Sapa. Finally found the Sapa Summit hotel. Decent place with a nice view for 350,000VND, but a 1 KM hike into the main downtown area of the village (where the markets, shops, bars, cafes, etc. are). GREAT walk down to the village....SHITTY walk back up to the hotel (given that I haven't resided at elevation in over six years and that I “accidentally forgot” to quit smoking).

So, tried a couple other hotels over the next couple days while eating curry from an Indian restaurant, French toast from a Western restaurant, shopping, and just bumming around town, dancing with happiness that I finally found Tay food again, when I decided to text my bud Finchy.

“So, how was the Northern Route?”

“Great! Awesome! So, we're in Viet Quang and we're gonna vege and check the marketplace in Bac Ha village tomorrow morning!”

“Viet Quang???!? Bac Ha?!!? Dude, on my map thass a fucking HAUL over some not-nice roads to Sapa. You SURE that you're gonna make it to Sapa tomorrow before sundown?” (like we had agreed upon)

“Uhhh....gonna hang here and catch the marketplace at [some little tiny bumblefuk village] that only happens on Tuesdays. So, we'll prolly be in Sapa on Tuesday.”

“WHAT?? Uhhh, Dude?? We had agreed a couple days ago that we are to meet up in Sapa on SUNDAY! I have been hanging here since Friday Afternoon! What the fuck??!? Naw, Dude, I ain't hanging here for another four days! Besides, we hafta make it to Dien Bien Phu (where Vietnamese peasants/fighters defeated the French in 1953) and Mai Chau (cool looking White Thai ethnic minority village near the Laos border)!!!”

“Ahhh.....yeaaahh....wellllll.....just come on up and meet us here in [inset name of some little tiny bumblefuk village here] and catch up with us there. Ummm....yeah, well.....we kinda took too long on The far northern loop that we took, and we really want to see these marketplaces, so we're gonna hafta take a pass on Dien Bien Phu and Mai Chau........”

“Uhhh...we had agreed to meet in Sapa on Sunday, otherwise I wouldn'ta rushed up here!! And I do NOT feel like fucking back-tracking....and I really wanted to see Mai Chau and Dien Bien Phu!! WTF? Woulda been nice for you to tell me this BEFORE I hit Sapa. Fine, whatever.....I'll be heading out on my own.”

Reeeaaaalllly truthfully pissed me off, as it pretty much wrecked the entire ride that we'd been planning for over a year and fucked up my vacation.....a vacation that I caught A LOT OF SHIT FOR from my wife an several friends on Facebook for taking off from home for 2 ½ weeks!

So, I thought that I would just vege in Sapa and enjoy the perpetual wall of white (BLINDING cloud fog) that resided outside my balcony all day/every day.

Truthfully?? I REEAAALLLY enjoyed it! It reminded me of home, and the roads outside of Sapa reminded me, both – climate and geography – of Highway 6 throgh Oregon's Coast Mountain Range! This bought MUCH happiness to me, made me less homesick, and thusly, I was in NO hurry to get back to the hell hole that is Hai Phong. Took a stunning ride further up into the mountains and stopped by a tiny Hmong hamlet and bought a couple gifts for Tam and Emily.

It was Saturday afternoon here, so I figgered I'd eat happily, drink at a few bars, shop a bit and vege and, on Sunday at midnight, I'd watch the Bills debacle online (since Sapa is a reasonably developed tourist village with lotsa Wi-Fi), crash after The Bills game at 4AM and leave Tuesday morning for Hai Phong!

On Sunday at noon, got to my next hotel, got to my room.....computer connects to Wi-Fi, but Wi-Fi does NOT connect to Internet. Told the front desk....they said they'd have somebody repair it this afternoon.

Six PM.....no Internet....getting nervous.....

Finally at 6:30pm, a guy comes over and starts looking at the Internet and Wi-Fi routers.  The Wi-Fi router in the first floor lobby/cafe works fine, but the one on the top floor of the hotel ain't connecting to The 'Net!!  This guy really did not appear to have a clue, so I took matters into my own hands.  I grab a stool to stand on, reach the router, pull the plug out for five minutes, plug it back in. 

No dice.

Punch the "reset" button in the back of the thing for ten seconds.....

....no dice.

Gave up - figgering that either the wiring is bad or the router itself (which did not have "Made in USA" or "Made in Japan" on the back of it, but rather "Made in Hurry") was shot.  Ask to change to a different room in a different part of the hotel and looked at three different rooms and the Wi-Fi reception was shit in all of them.  This is due to the fact that the Vietnamese have NO structures made of wood or gypsum drywall, but rather thee thickest, most durable concrete known to man!

Wi-Fi don't be liking thick, durable concrete, so it was a shit signal no matter WHICH room I chose.  So, I grabbed a room abut 30 metres from the Wi-Fi router in the lobby/cafe.  Put the laptop on a bamboo desk that I moved to right in front of the wooden door and got a tolerable signal.

Surfed the 'Net, called my wife and then my mom, and at 11:30pm, settled down and watched the pre-game show!

11:55PM - 5 minutes before the Bills-Patriots kickoff.....*Boooooooooo-whooop*!

Power cut. Unreal.....

I followed what appeared to be a really exciting football game on my cell fone (NO video or audio - just text play-by-play) until halftime, when my battery died!

Juice came back on at 11AM - 11 hours later.

Power cuts are a fact of life in Vietnam.  In the main part of the country, during the summer drought this year, Hai Phong lost power once every two days for 12 hours at a time.  But in Sapa, they have power outages during the best of times (something about how, due to their location, they get their electricity from China or some shit like that).  But when the Bills offense finally woke up this season, the Sapa power grid took a nap!

Figures.....

So I'm writing this whole thing off and decided to see Mai Chau another time (IF there IS another time before we move back to The States), heading out back towards Hai Phong tomorrow morning (Tuesday).  Gonna take a back mountain route back to Hanoi then Hai Phong ('cause I'd already seen whass on the way when I took the main road here).  This will prolly consist of a buncha tiny-ass villages and Internet on this route should be about as common as, say, the Bills making the playoffs. 

I'll try to post NEXT stop where I can get Internet.....if zero Internet, I'll be back in Hanoi Thursday or Friday....and I KNOW they got working Internet there.

In the meantime - enjoy some National Geographic-type pics -

Main street of Sapa Village

Views from the balconies of various hotels in Sapa...

The road from Lao Cai to Sapa!

NO!  Jes' givin' ya shit....this appeared to be some sort of power line trail I saw on the ride to this little remote Hmong village about 10 miles outside of Sapa.  Went up another 500 feet or so in elevation....saw waterfalls and got Tam and Emily some gifts there.

More views from the ride up to the remote Hmong village at the Lao Cai - Lai Chau provincial border.

Brekker in the dark during the power outage.

Hmong people

 *******************************

Hell, we'll throw in a coupla videos shot frm the balcony of my hotel room at the Hotel Pinocchio taken a few hours apart -

More from wherever I get Internet on the way back to Hai Phong!!

-E-


P.S. - For further reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sa_Pa

Lao Cai.....

Made the easy 80 kilometre ride into Lao Cai.  Thought I'd give myself a break and an easy ride and just roam around the town a bit and vege.  I took off two days behind my friend Finchy and his friend Glen and I just decided that it'd be best to meet them on the road instead of attempting to catch them.  They ended up going to far Northern Vietnam going straight North from Hanoi and then looping West, then South, whilst I headed due Northwest from Hanoi and went off towards Lao Cai.  Been texting them, and I guess the game plan is to meet them in Sapa on either Saturday or Sunday.

The tourist village of Sapa is about 35 kilometres South of Lao Cai...but from everything I had heard in Hai Phong, it's NOT a nice 35 kilometres!!  I had heard horror stories (created in traditional Vietnamese fashion - that being from second-and-third-person accounts) about big rocks jutting up out of this dirt road and a sheer vertical ascent and aliens and Sasquach and things of that sort.

I could not find ANYTHING about the surface composition of the road itself online, but did some Geographical research, and DID discover that, whilst not exactly sheer vertical, the ascent is 1500 metres over 35 kilometres....or a grade of 4800 feet over 21 miles.

THIS is what I was dreading......

I was trying to think of all of my geographic knowledge of Colorado and the places that I've been there (and I've been ALL OVER Colorado).....yet, thee only place that I could think of that might compare is Pagosa Springs to the summit of Wolf Creek Pass.

Nope.....

Looked it up: Thass only a 3600 foot elevation gain over 21.8 miles.......

Oh - and did I mention that I am attempting this on a 114cc AUTOMATIC skooter carring MY fat ass AND about 12 kilograms of gear on it.

Ohhhh......this has got "SUCK" written all over it....and there literally IS a good chance that my bike won't make it up that hill.....

....SHIT!!  My mechanic warned me NOT to try this......

Guess we'll see tomorrow.....I got a fiddy placed on a bet in Vegas for a fried tranny, fried clutch or a blown engine for this farce.

Anyways, the ride today was nice...stunning low-fog-clouds-obscuring-the-mountaintops sort of scenery, and not much traffic.  Saw a bunch of women about 40 kilometres outside of Lao Cai (basically in the middle of nowhere) wearing the traditional garb and carrying big-ass baskets strapped to their backs like backpacks.....straight outta National Geographic.....just too fucking weird.

Soooo, when we do hit the tourist village of Sapa, I guess these folks DON'T just dress up for the tourists, but they actually wear these clothes and carry these big-ass baskets and DO this kinda stuff every day!

In a fucked-up kinda way.....it's good to see that modern Western influences have not permeated every corner of the globe yet....

Got to Lao Cai around 2PM....stopped at a Wi-Fi cafe and had a beer and looked at GoogleMaps to find out where I was.  Grabbed a rather nice hotel room for 300,000 Dong (sixteen bucks), and walked around the town a lot.  Blew a twenty on the video slot machines (that were manufactured in 1997 - no shit!  Seriously!) over the course of about an hour at a casino that didn't allow alcohol on the casino floor and paid you out in Chinese currency (RMB), since Lao Cai is right on the Chinese border.  In Vietnam, The Government allows anything that they consider to be a four-star hotel or higher to have, like, ten table games and about 75 video slot machines, BUT the only access to the casino is for FOREIGN PASSPORT HOLDERS ONLY.

Fortunately, since I was on the Chinese border, I got to eat Chinese food!!  This brought MUCH happiness to me, as I don't really eat Vietnamese food at all, and on this ride, I was getting really tired of Bun and Pho!

I won't go into much detail about my passion for Vietnamese food here....but about 95% of Vietnamese dishes are some sort of soup based products with different names....yet there is very little variance between them at all!!  It's a huge-ass bowl of Pho and a side of white steamed rice for brekker, lunch and dinner.  I mean, I like rice (preferably fried) and I can dig a good bowl of soup....but I mean - EVERY SO OFTEN!!  So, my dietary intake on this ride generally consists of one bowl of  Pho (Vietnamese for "soup-like product"), Bun (Vietnamese for "soup-of-a-different-name") or a Hotpot (Vietnamese for "Holy shit!!  Yet MORE soup") a day so far......

......Christ - no wonder these folks are twigs when compared to other Asians and are absolute NEEDLES when compared to Americans or Australians.....

So, because this hotel (down the street from where I'm staying at) IS a "four-star" (and I use that term veeeerrrry loosely) hotel, they SHOULD have some Tay food....

....if they don't, then you can find my corpse somewhere betwen Lao Cai and Sapa.  

Coupla pics.....

No, I didn't take this pic....but this is basically what I saw 40Km outside of Lao Cai (except these ladies in the picture are Black Hmong....whereas the ladies that I saw had much more colourful attire on....*THINK* they might be called "Flower Hmong"....not sure).

Just felt like snapping this pic looking out from inside a small restaurant whilst eating a bowl of Bun as the lady attends to a makeshift fire pit whilst the men stare vacantly out into the street.....

Main border gate between Lao Cai and the Chinese town of 河口瑤族自治縣.  Didn't grab a visa for China (where ya hafta bribe a travel agent in Hanoi and wait three days......) and wish I had prepared better!

ON SECOND THOUGHT.....the railway bridge looks rather unprotected......

(Naw.....my wife woulda kicked my ass....thought better of THAT idea).

....and finally, after a hard day of adventures, I open the fridge in my hotel room and see this.  Uhhh....."Corn Tea"??  I really don't know what to say......

More soon,

-E-