track our trek

happy holidays friends and family! we are so fortunate to be able to spend this time traveling, but we miss our friends and family dearly & want you all to know we're thinking of you. we hope you're having a safe and happy holiday season! we spent christmas day in transit between vietnam and thailand...we had one last pain au chocolat and sent off our last postcards before heading to the hanoi airport. back in thailand, we anxiously awaited the christmas dinner at asha guesthouse. asha's been our home base for the last couple of months, so we were looking forward to celebrating our last couple of nights in thailand. michael, the brit who is part owner of asha, outdid himself cooking turkey, stuffing, pork loin, roasted potatatoes, cauliflower and ham for 50+ people. it was quite a spread! not the same as being at home with loved ones, but at least a taste of the christmas spirit! and a fine way to close out our stay in asia! we look forward to ringing in the new year in australia and starting the second quarter of our journey!

we joined a group tour for a day to visit tom coc, considered to be vietnam's ha long bay on land. more beautiful rock formations with villages and rice fields between. we spent a couple of hours being rowed along a river and enjoying the scenery. the next day we were on our own in ninh binh and took a day trip to cuc phuong national park. we went on an 8k hike to see a 1000 year old tree, and visited an endangered primate rescue center. the center rescues monkeys from illegal poachers and breeds them in captivity. there are over 20 species there, 5 of which are unique to vietnam! it is their hope that one day they'll be able to release the monkeys to the wild again. back in hanoi, we spent our last couple of days relaxing and visiting the women's museum and our favorite, the museum of ethnology. it's a great exhibit about the over 50 ethnic minorities that exist in vietnam. really interesting stuff!

statistically speaking, it was bound to happen sooner or later... the overnight train back to hanoi from sapa was pretty miserable. the empty bunk across from me was used by about 4 different train employees taking cat naps during the course of the night, and 2 at once at one point! dp and i slept w/ one eye open each keeping track of the activity. we got back to hanoi and checked into yet another of the hanoi guesthouse's "sister hotels." it was quite a let down to get back to such dingy digs after our night at the chau long, but we were determined to use the pleasant memories to shore us up...even when the water service was disconnected on the entire block mid-afternoon. but when we woke up in the morning, i noticed a couple tiny bloody smudges on the sheets...telltale signs of bed bugs...still groggy, i jumped up when two big bugs (apparently adults, which look like apple seeds) crawled out from under the blanket. yuuuuuccckkk! my skin is still crawling. while i frantically shook out all of our clothes and sleep sacks, dp killed the big ones, along with 3 babies, which are tiny and translucent except when filled with human blood. the good news is, we had slept wrapped in our sacks on top of the blankets and couldn't find any bites on ourselves...the bad news is, that must mean the blood was from the room's previous occupants...eeewww! unfortunately, the water service hadn't returned by morning, so we were forced to pack up and leave without showers...not that we'd have wanted to be in that room one minute longer at that point. good thing we'd had such good showers...er...2 days before at the chau long! it took me a good 30 mins of inspection and psyching myself up before i'd even sit on the bed at our next guesthouse! lol!

we spent one nightmarish afternoon in desperate search of a working atm, when we realized we would run out of dong before we could pay for our accommodations...turns out sapa only has 2 atm's, neither of which takes foreign mastercard atm cards! completely our fault for not reading up ahead of time...so we hopped on a van after our trek in hopes of making it down the mountain to lao cai where we were told we'd easily find cash. an hour and a half later we made it into town, after circling sapa no fewer than 3 times with horn beeping until the 12 passenger van was filled with 16 people and luggage. (vietnamese van drivers don't go anywhere until the van is bursting at the seams!) we also had to stop twice for two more people to be sick on the side of the road. the driver tried to charge us 30,000vnd apiece. (the standard fare is 25,000vnd per person.) i refused, insisting he could have 50,000vnd or zero. finding no atm near the train station, as we'd hoped, we set about asking at several guesthouses...not an easy feat as almost no one spoke any english...one nice woman managed to pantomime something about walking 2km. finally we found a travel agent who helped us arrange two motorbikes to carry us to lao cai's 3 atm's to try them out. we agreed to a price of 6000vnd per person each way...half an hour later, having tried all of lao cai's atm's in vain, the motorbike drivers brought us back to the train station & demanded 7000vnd each instead. sigh...did i mention the reason we were there in the first place was that we were running out of dong?? to make matters worse, as there are no trains arriving from hanoi after 5pm, there are no buses returning to sapa...we made several inquiries and were told we could hire a car or motorbike for prices ranging from 300,000vnd to 700,000vnd or spend the night in lao cai and return in the morning. quite an increase from the standard 50,000vnd for 2 people! after an hour of hanging around the train station asking numerous people for help, we were quite frustrated...if we'd had 700,000vnd to throw away, we wouldn't be in lao cai in the first place! finally, a young boy at a restaurant agreed to call his "friend" to take us for 200,000vnd. that left us with exactly enough cash to pay for our previous night's stay and retrieve our bags and passports from the cat cat hotel...and it was 9pm. (hotels in vietnam retain your passports at the front desk for the duration of your stay...that was a bit hard to swallow at first.)
exhausted and disgusted, we decided we needed to turn the evening around. short of calling family in desperation to arrange some western union help, our best option was to find an expensive hotel that would accept credit cards and give us a cash advance. so we  trudged to the lovely chau long hotel, where they gave us a cash advance on our credit card, & we promptly checked into a beautiful superior room (with working electric heater) for $90. phew! in our three months of travel, we have not spent more than $13/night for hotel accommodations, except for our week in japan! that one night in the chau long was like heaven!! we took 2 loonnnng hot showers apiece, one before bed and one after the delicious buffet breakfast! and we lounged around until about 3 minutes before check out time! we gotta do that more than once very 3 months! btw, we learned our lesson and now carry a handful of us dollars everywhere in case of emergency...

after a yummy croque monsieur, chocolate croissants, and fresh ginger tea at baguette and chocolat, we headed back to our cozy little room...it was fairly early, but the place had shut down, & we were eager to get the fire going in our room, since the temperature had plummeted when the sun went down. back at the cat cat, our room was freezing! we huddled wrapped up in our sweatshirts and windbreakers, w/ fists balled in our pockets until one of the hotel staff came to light our fire. (obviously neither of us has any campfire experience!) unfortunately, the young lady either didn't have much experience of her own, or was preoccupied, b/c she put the entire bundle of wood into the tiny little fireplace & set it afire w/ a little petrol for accelerant! the fireplace was so small and the wood was so long that it hung halfway out of the opening, and before long our "cozy" little room was a smoke trap! we were coughing and wheezing w/ burning eyes! oy vey! naturally we had to open the door to let the smoke out, so what little warmth the blazing inferno was providing went right out into the night air! it was a nightmare! lol!
the next day, we went on a 5 hour trek to 3 ethnic villages. our guide, za, came from lao chai village, a h'mong village 8km away from sapa. the hike was quite a bit more difficult than we expected, but really fun! (the woman at our hotel had said "this one is easy...even old people do it.") we started out the walk on a paved winding road, then along the way, we stopped at a little pavilion where children were selling walking sticks...we declined, but quickly discovered why they were selling them there! lol!! when we left the road, the going got much rougher! i cannot imagine any old people picking their way across muddy, slippery rocks at the edge of rice embankments, or half walking, half sliding down those muddy trails! hard work, but the countryside is incredibly beautiful! at the end of our trek, za and i hopped on the back of one bike, and daryll hopped on another for the 30 minute ride back to sapa! apparently vietnam wasn't going to let me avoid conquering my fear of motorbikes!

we spent another day and a half in hanoi before heading to sapa, and visited the hao lo prison (hanoi hilton) - famous for having held political prisoners during the revolution against the french colonists and american pilots shot down during the american war. we also saw the history museum and the museum of vietnamese revolutionaries. phew! this country has quite a lot of history of turmoil and struggle for independence, and museums are plentiful, if not terribly user-friendly for foreigners. sapa is reputed to be one of vietnam's honeymoon destinations...to get there, you must take a 10 hour train ride to the northeast of hanoi to lao cai, than an hour by minibus up to sapa at the base of fansipan mountain. winding our way up the mountain, we took in the breathtaking views of all the rice terraces in the morning mist. one of our poor seat mates in the back of the overcrowded van (more on that later) got car sick, and there was a flurry of passing barf bags and napkins back to her & she heaved miserably for several minutes. yikes!
it is cold in sapa! easily in the low fifties at night, and in the sixties by day...since we're chasing the sun on this world tour, we had to wear almost all of our clothing to keep warm! jokes...it's a sleepy little town, with women from the villages selling their hand-dyed, hand embroidered crafts, vegetable markets, and lots of little french cafes. vietnamese coffee is delicious, by the way! and i am no coffee drinker...but we had a few cups of coffee w/ coconut milk and condensed milk...yum. to avoid the virtual mob of people trying to sell us rooms in their hotels when we got off the van, we ducked into one of those cafes, viet emotion, and opted to have breakfast and regroup. the owner, nam, was kind enough to offer to let us leave our big packs there while we trudged around looking for a room. it's much easier to search and negotiate a good price when you don't look tired and heavy laden...not to mention, we were guaranteed to be followed by the aforementioned mob if we'd carried our packs with us. we set out and found a cozy little room w/ a fireplace for $8 at the cat cat hotel. we thought we had several recommendations about the place...unfortunately, it wasn't until the next morning that we realized the recommendations were for the cat cat guesthouse which was next door...grrr. after we settled in, we hiked down through cat cat village, a h'mong village on the mountainsude. on the way we passed lots of folks offering motorbike rides, but i was not interested in putting my life in any of their hands on the windy mountain roads! after a couple of hours' winding our way down into the valley and hiking through the rice fields, my feelings about riding on the back of a motorbike had changed. lol! we paid an extortionate price for 2 bikes to carry us back up the mountain...we didn't have much haggling power since we were tired at the bottom...it was basically agree to the price or walk. sigh...

we decided against trying to cram in as many things as possible into two weeks at a frantic pace. instead, we spent a day and a half walking around hanoi and the lovely lake in the middle. we visited the ho chi minh museum and the temple of literature, and saw a water puppet performance. on our third day, we joined a two day tour to ha long bay. a four hour bus ride from hanoi, ha long bay is filled w/ beautiful rock formations. (over 3000 islands!) at thin's recommendation, we opted to sleep on the boat in the bay, rather than a hotel on one of the islands. we boarded the boat by mid-day, sailed out a bit and stopped for a seafood lunch. the scenery is really dramatic! the rock formations rise straight up out of the sea as far as the eye can see. after lunch, we got our room keys & dropped our overnight bags below deck. that's when we realized the place was absolutely crawling with roaches! and i do mean crawling...in broad daylight, they were marching across the ceiling, walls, floor, and even out from between the bed sheets! at dinner (which was served w/out a tablecloth) we could see roaches crawling around between the wicker table and the glass top!!! talk about grossed out! and with nowhere to go! sleeping below deck was out of the question for us...even with the drawstring on my sleep sack, i am not that hard core! we'd struck up a friendship w/ claire and shane from britian, and almost convinced them to camp with us on the top deck under the stars (claire was equally disgusted)...no one else seemed alarmed. it turned out to be quite nice actually, sleeping up top. the deck loungers were comfortable, and the clouds cleared away so we could watch the stars & the twinkling lights from the other boats in the bay! quite romantic, until a cold wind rolled in around 3 am...going below deck in the pitch darkness was also out of the question, so we just snuggled up & tried to keep each other warm until morning. jokes! the sunrise was beautiful over the mountains! if it hadn't been for our pesky cabin mates, we'd have missed it! we spent a couple more relaxing hours motoring around the bay & headed back to hanoi.

we arrived mid-morning at the surprisingly calm and modern hanoi airport after a 2-hour flight from bangkok. no huge crowds of people or would-be taxi drivers offering rides into the city...we headed to the cluster of atm's and stocked up on vietnamese dong (16,000vnd to $1) & by that time, a gentleman from our guest house had arrived to pick us up. the ride from the airport takes 45 minutes through countryside w/ rice and vegetable fields and alternating manufacturing plants, like panasonic and hitachi. hanoi guesthouse is in the old quarter where the narrow, busy streets are lined w/ shops, and filled with motorbikes and cars and pedestrians and women carrying their wares in the famous two baskets slung across their shoulders. buildings are tall and skinny...someone told us people pay taxes based on the width of their property here. thin greeted us with a smile and some hot tea & asked right away what things we'd like to do during our stay. as usual, we hadn't a clue...we never seem to be ahead of ourselves enough to have a discernable itinerary when we land in a new place. not to worry, she asked us how many days we had, and quickly laid out a whirlwind two-week itinerary, complete with train times and schedules and tour package prices! then after thoroughly charming us, she announced that the rooms in hanoi guesthouse were all full (with an apologetic look on her face), but that they had reserved us a room at their sister hotel for the same price. hmmm...just a block away, the room at the thuy lam seemed perfectly acceptable, so we dropped our things, freshened up and hit the streets to explore...it turns out hanoi is quite a charming, walkable city...in scale anyway... though there are sidewalks, they are completely taken over by motorbike parking and plastic stools and tables from sidewalk eateries...so you must always walk in the street, dodging motorbike traffic as you go. rumor has it, ho chi minh city is a hundred times worse! motorbikes obey traffic signals only 50% of the time, so if you want to cross the street, you must take a deep breath, and simply step out into oncoming traffic...the rule is to move slowly and steadily in one direction. do not stop or go backwards, as drivers are calculating their paths to go around you! what an experience!!

well, it's officially official...daryll suggested we go to dinner last night at lemongrass (a nice restaurant leigh recommended in bangkok.) after we'd ordered and were sipping on our sweet lemongrass iced tea, he took my hand, & with a nervous smile, he popped the question! of course we'd already decided months ago to get married when we return from our travels. (so no need for the nervous smile!) but the official proposal was romantic! and the sweetest part is that daryll managed to have a beautiful sapphire ring made for me in secret while we were in india! he conspired with the famous satish, who coordinated it all in hindi w/ a jeweler while i was sitting right there looking at necklaces and earrings completely unaware! we are both thrilled & excited to start a new journey together when we get back from this one!

what we could not have imagined would happen to us on our trip to india, was that we would come away having made a new friend. we are sure we would not have had as enjoyable experience had we not met and traveled with satish. all along the way, he gave us good advice on the best place for a saffron lassi, the best restaurant for tandoori chicken, the best times to visit attractions so we could avoid the crowds as much as possible. and he shared lots of stories with us about his wife and two children. at the end of our tour, he invited us to meet his family on our final night in delhi. it was wonderful to meet his parents, his wife vandana, 6 year old son shivam, and 9 year old daughter vartika. shivam and vartika both compete in swimming and tae kwon do. the kaushik family welcomed us warmly. we played games with the kids (both fierce competitors), and we ate delicious homemade indian food from aloo parantha to carrot pudding. yum! but most of all, we got a rest from the road, and we were happy to see satish at home with his family...he is sometimes away on tours with tourists for 3 and 4 weeks at a time! when we come back to india, we will be sure to travel with satish again. (only next time we'll contact him directly instead of paying the 40% extra we discovered his boss charges b/c of the hotel's lonely planet notoriety!) at the end of our visit, satish left us at the train station where we took the overnight train to mumbai to catch our flight back to bangkok... it was a surprisingly decent ride, given the fact that our expectations were quite low! the train stopped running before it reached mumbai central station, and we had to jump on a local train the rest of the way... compared to cities in rajastan, mumbai seemed very clean, and the people were considerably less obnoxious about selling wares. we had only a day to spend there, so we stored our packs at the salvation army hotel, walked around a bit, watched casino royale, then headed to the airport around 11pm to wait for our 5:20am flight...by that time, we were exhausted and more than ready to get back to our bangkok home away from home!