Update 02.21.2007

I'm back in Hanoi and Starr is watching movies/taking a nap upstairs. We spent 3 days and 2 nights sailing around Ha Long Bay and 2 days with 3 nights hiking in Sa Pa since I last updated. We got into Hanoi today at 4am and Starr is leaving tomorrow morning on a flight to Ho Chi Minh City/Saigon. I'll take a bus in the same direction but I'm stopping in Hoi An and Mui Ne on the way, giving us a few days' break from each other.

The Ha Long trip was nice and I'm sure a lot of you have already flipped through a few of the photos I uploaded to Flickr. We originally booked tours to both Ha Long Bay and Sa Pa through the first hotel that we stayed at in Hanoi, the Funky Monkey (not to be confused with the Funky Monkey gay bar by the way), but the prices that we agreed to pay, $82 for Sa Pa and $74 for Ha Long Bay, turned out to be outrageous. We didn't pay a deposit on either of the trips, so we just made up a lame excuse about needing to get to Saigon (it turns out that our friend is flying in TOMORROW and not on the 23rd like we told you, sorry!) and tried to cancel the trip with them. The contract that we signed CLEARLY said in the event of a cancellation we would still need to pay 100% of the cost of the trip, but we acted like this was new information and argued the guy down to $10 a piece. Even with an additional $10 tacked onto the cost of the trip through our current hotel, the Golden Drum, it was much cheaper. We wound up spending (cancellation fee aside) $38 on Ha Long Bay and $70 on Sa Pa.

We were picked up at our hotel on the 16th by a tour bus. The trip to Ha Long City took about 4 hours and it probably took another hour to get on our boat. We were served lunch on the ship and met these two English-speaking Canadian women, Colleen and Jo. Colleen is an English teacher in a high school in Canada and takes every 6th year off to travel. They were both pretty cool I guess. There were 16 people on the boat including the four of us, 2 Korean girls, a Chinese married couple, 4 French nursing students, and 4 more Canadians that were only staying for one night so they left us on the second day.

The first day was spent sailing around Ha Long Bay and we landed on some small uninhabited island to explore its caves. There was a Japanese tour group inside so I chatted up some woman and she was FLOORED that I could speak Japanese as well as I can. She did not see that coming. It felt awesome.

We slept on the boat that night and it wasn't until Starr woke me up in the middle of the night in a panic that I realized there was a huge rat in the room with us somewhere, gnawing on something. For the next half an hour or so we both laid, wide awake, in our bed listening to footsteps, squeaking, and chewing. I dozed off but Starr woke me back up when she heard something jumping around. I would like to state that had Starr never pointed any of this out, I never would have noticed because it was Tet that night and the crew of the boat was getting drunk and running around, making a bunch of noise for most of the night. The next day we had breakfast on the boat, landed on Cat Ba Island (the only inhabited island in Ha Long Bay), hiked over the island's tallest mountain, checked into a hotel, went swimming (neither of us had our cameras), were served dinner, and basically went to bed. On the last day we took a motor boat ride through some more caves, had lunch back in Ha Long City and then took another 4 hour bus ride back to Hanoi.

The Sa Pa trip started on the same day that we returned from Ha Long Bay. We were again picked up at our hotel, but this time driven to the train station. We took an overnight sleeper train to Lao Cai station close to the border with China. We boarded the train at 10 and arrived at 6ish the next day. We took a nice bus ride through the mountains to Sa Pa, checked into our hotel, had breakfast, and then spent a few hours hiking. The next day was spent on a much longer hike and everything you need to know about that is in the pictures.

We stopped at a little trading post thing on the second day and our tour guide, Lan ang or Nan ang (I couldn't quite catch what she said), chopped the bark off of some sugar cane and served it to us. It's pretty good. Very watery and moist on the inside and tastes just how you would imagine, like sugar water. You chew the pulp up, drink whatever comes out of it, and then just spit the rest out somewhere. We saw the Black Hmong kids chewing it everywhere we went.

Our tour group for Sa Pa consisted of a geeky know-it-all former IT British guy, Peter, who said, among other things that annoyed me, 'Yeah you guys really fucked [the Native Americans] over,' and 'they live in reservations now? I guess that's just a nice word for concentration camp.' I'm not arguing with what he said, I just think a British guy should know better than to criticize our politics or foreign policy. And he should have said 'WE really fucked [the Native Americans] over' since I believe native peoples were getting fucked over long before we gave up their accents or citizenship. There were also these three lovely French people on our tour. Chantal, Philip, and Bris.

Oh yeah, and the last thing I'll write is that I almost got my ass kicked by about 20 Vietnamese taxi drivers. This one goofy guy, smiling ear-to-ear (which infuriated me for some reason), kept staring at Starr and me. This happens all the time, but this guy for some reason would NOT stop and it was something about him that made me hate him instantly. So, being the faux tough guy that I am, I started to stare back at him with daggers where my pupils should be. He didn't care and it even instigated him a bit. The only thing that ended our staring contest was when he went over to a few friends of his (there were about 20 other drivers all standing around with nothing to do), said SOMETHING, and then they all glanced over in turns and laughed together. So when that first guy again started to look me in the eyes I blew him a kiss and intensified my icy stare. His smile immediately dropped away and he looked shocked. Simply shocked. It wasn't an ambiguous gesture and he fully understood the 'fuck you' meaning behind it. He then turned to his buddies and they began milling around. I suddenly realized how badly I had fucked up. I didn't stop staring and gave off the same 'I'm so mother-fucking tough that I DARE you to start something' look, hoping that they wouldn't call my bluff. And they didn't either. They all began walking towards the path that led up to where we were sitting, but then they all went past it and around the corner. Damn. I don't know what I would have done if they all had come over to me and started something. But it doesn't matter. I look badass enough that I scared away 20 Vietnamese guys on their own turf. I had better come back to earth before I return to the US or I'm likely to get my face kicked in.