Well, so far we can say we've had a very bitter sweet experience in the North of Vietnam. Some people have been just great, and other experiences have been pretty bad. Let's start with the good though...
Sapa
Perfume (the lady at our guesthouse) booked us on a great Sapa tour and pretty decent Halong Bay tour, and gave us a good price on each. For the Sapa tour, we took an overnight sleeper train. (So nice! not used to having beds with pillows and blankets to sleep on! Had two other Vietnamese guys sharing our berth, who were nice although slurped chicken feet for about an hour when they first got on - gross!) Then took a mini bus from Lao Cai to Sapa, passing beautiful scenery on the way. Huge mountains and rice fields. In Sapa we were dropped off at a really nice hotel where we ate an amazing buffet breakfast before heading out on our trek. As soon as we got off the bus we were surrounded by little ladies from the local tribes who were dressed in traditional clothing, and they ended up following us on our trek too. They walk with you the whole way and help you on the slippery parts in hopes that you will buy something from them after. They were actually quite funny and it wasn't as annoying as we expected it would be. They all asked the same three questions - "Where you from? What your name? How old are you?" The lady who chose to focus on me was named Za, and she was pretty cool. 50 years old but looked whithered enough to be 70 or 80. She made me a few little gifts out of grass and flowers along the way, and helped me from bailing into a rice pool at one point (the trails we walked on were VERY slippery and muddy as it rained a lot up there, and sometimes you had to walk on little rock ledges between rice paddy terraces/pools). So we didn't feel too bad buying a souvenir from her at the bottom. She deserved it. All of the ladies sell about the same 7 souvenirs. Same colour, everything. I think she liked us, as she gave us free bracelets afterwards. Either that or she was marking us as suckers. :)
We hiked to our guide and Za's village for lunch (Lo Chai? Lai Chao?) and fortunately no other village ladies followed us after that. Then we hiked to the Te Van village to our homestay where we would spend the night. It was really more like an inn for travelers, which was kind of weird, but we still get a cool experience of watching the people in the village pass by with all their animals, and there were chickens and all sorts of animals running around our homestay, including a pack of about 8 puppies!!! They were soooo cute. I spent most of the night playing with them. There was also an old pool table and some games to entertain us.
Our guide, Chi, was AWESOME. She was sooo funny. Spoke very good English and would say just the funniest English phrases, like "bloody hell". She was a cute little 25 year old with a gold tooth who again looked older, and would yell at us to "slow down! My legs are too short! Your legs are long!" She called Mike a cheeky monkey at one point. Mike and I joked around with her all the time, and she loved us. She really made the trip for us.
The second day we hiked to another village and a waterfall (not that impressive), then back to the hotel to spend the night there. It was a very deluxe room, with a jet shower! I have never even seen one of those before! For the last day, we hiked in the POURING rain to Cat Cat village and another waterfall. This time we stopped in one of the village houses (very dark, no windows, and smoky since they cook over the fire, a lot had TVs), and got to see the old fashioned machines they use to remove the shell of rice and corn off the cob.
All in all we really enjoyed the tour. We had one sour moment though upon return to Hanoi, when our hotel forgot to pick us up from the train station at 5:30 am in the morning. And of course I had lost the little hotel business card and we had left the map at the hotel, and turns out none of the taxi or motorcycle drivers know where F Hotel is! (Although they try to get you to hop in anyway, which is ridiculous.) So we had to walk there blindly, and it ended up taking us an hour and a half since we got lost a few times and didn't know exactly where it was. It was brutal. When we arrived at the hotel, Perfume's brother was there (sleeping) and realized he had forgotten to come get us, and was very sorry. Clearly not as competent as Perfume. He took $5 off our Halong Bay trip, which we fortunately were still able to book for an hour and a half later.
Halong Bay
Our Halong Bay tour was also quite good, although you always feel like you are being hearded from vehicle to boat to vehicle/etc, so it's not very relaxing and there's a fair bit of waiting around. It's amazing how many different people and companies these tours coordinate in order to transport you around and do the various activities. First we took a bus to Halong City, where we then caught a gorgeous "junk" boat out to Halong Bay. It was so nice, our bedroom was big (for a boat), air conditioned and had its own bathroom, the top deck had lawn chairs, etc. We were served fresh sea food for all of our meals, including large prawns, fish and shellfish. Oh, and delicious crab cakes cooked in half the shell too.
Halong Bay was gorgeous, although very un-environmentally friendly. There were locals who lived in little floaty houses on the water, and they just threw their garbage into the water! There were lots of plastic bags and water bottles floating around all over the place, it was really a shame. Especially for a world heritage sight. People seem to have very little regard for the environment here, which really bothers me. There were TONS of boats in Halong bay so it felt very touristy, but it was still beautiful, with tons of little limestone karst islands. The first day we went to a cave that was also very touristy, all sorts of coloured lights shining on the various structures. Still a very amazing cave though. Then we stopped on an island with a lookout point you could hike up to and a beach where we swam. The water didn't seem too bad there. That night we slept on the boat.
The next day, we went to Cat Ba island (the only populated island in Halong Bay). A very slow boat took us through the karsts near Cat Ba, which turned out to be even more beautiful and much less touristed (we only saw maybe one other tour boat) than those in the rest of Halong Bay...however, there were far more locals living there who had fish farms, and so the water was even dirtier than before! We stopped at "Monkey Island", where Mike and I hiked up this path to a lookout. There was a very old monkey sitting right in the middle of the path about halfway up, and he wouldn't move! We just had to walk past him! It was so funny! Fortunately he didn't attack us or try to steal anything from us. We saw a few other monkeys later on by the beach.
After that we went biking on Cat Ba to a little village, and from there hiked through the jungle to a cave. Then we went and had dinner/stayed in a very nice hotel on Cat Ba. It was normally $65 a night, which is really expensive here! Our whole tour only cost us $85! It was also a very good tour, but by the end we got really tired of the same food for every meal (which was pretty much the same in Sapa - rice, greens, stir fry, prawns and spring rolls). We vowed not to eat rice again for the next few days we are so sick of it, and went for a good old Western pizza when we returned to Hanoi. It was delicious. Hanoi was a bit nicer when we returned, now that we were getting used to the pace and crossing crazy traffic streets. We walked along the lake and it had all sorts of pretty, coloured lanterns hanging from the trees. We had delicious icecream too. However, we were still very ready to move on further South.
Ninh Binh/Tam Coc
Perfume tried for a long time to convince us to book an open bus tour with her, and I think she was pretty choked when we wouldn't. We looked up the company she was selling us, Camel, and read in hundreds of blogs about the horrible experiences people had with their open bus tours. She seemed to genuinely think it was ok, but we just had to go with the advice from other travelers. I think she was annoyed with us because the bus she booked us on for Ninh Binh was overpriced and turned out to be a tour! Mike and I had to stop with them at these temples at Hoa Lu (the ancient capital of Vietnam) for 45 minutes, and even though we weren't that interested we didn't want to wait around, and so we had to pay extra money to go with them. Then they dropped us off on the edge of Ninh Binh city and we had to walk for at least 15-20 minutes just to find someone who could speak English! We were feeling a little bit fed up with Northern Vietnam and all the scams, so we decided we would just spend the day at Tam Coc and then take an overnight bus south to Hue. Apparently people in the south are more relaxed, nicer and don't try to scam you as much.
Fortunately we found a nice guy at a hotel who booked us on an overnight sleeper bus (only 50% more expensive than what should have been a 2 hour bus we took from Hanoi to Ninh Binh!) rented us bicycles to bike to Tam Coc, let us store our bags for the day and let us shower afterwards! Even better, another very nice guy at the hotel offered to bike with us and show us the way through the local village streets and alleys, for free! This is SO rare in Vietnam! We thought for sure there would be some catch, but he just biked with us the whole time, and even waited for us when we stopped for each activity! He even refused to let us pay for parking our bikes at the pagoda (he paid) and refused to let us buy him a beer/drink after! It was really nice, and we totally appreciated it, especially after our horrible experience on the river boat....
Tam Coc is basically Halong Bay inland, on a river. The best way to explore it is to have a little lady row you in a row boat 4 km down the river and through the caves on route. So that's what we did. And it was absolutely gorgeous, with rice fields on either side and large, towering limestone karsts. I may have even liked it better than Halong Bay. However, we were wondering why all the tourists heading back in the other direction (the ones on the day tours from Hanoi) had sour looks on their faces. We soon found out. When we reached the turn around point, we were the only boat in the river besides boats selling drinks and things. First, some lady came up to us and pressured us to buy a drink for our rower. We thought, why not, even though it was overpriced, we'll be nice. It was a long way to row. Then about 2 minutes later our rower lady stopped and started hounding us to buy something from her. Everything she was offering was WAY overpriced, up to $20!! We didn't want any of it. We tried to just tip her a smaller amount, but she would not accept nor relent with her sales pitches. Worse, all the ladies around started pressuring us too. We only had 200000 D on us for the rest of the day, still had to buy dinner and water, and the ATMs don't work on sundays! We showed her what we had, yet still she kept saying 300000 D and 250000 D! She refused to row until we finally bought something from her for 60000. We barely had enough to pay for dinner, and we have nothing left over for arriving in Hue tomorrow. It was really a horrible experience, and we felt totally cornered, because the only way back to solid ground was down a 4km river. At the end she wanted a tip too, but we refused. Had we not had such a fantastic bicycle guide, it really would have soured us to Vietnam (still did a bit).
After the river trip we went to a pagoda nestled against the limestone karsts, and it was so beautiful! The whole place was really magical. It would have been nice to have more time to explore the area, but we are just really done with Northern Vietnam and had already booked our bus trip south. The hotel has been great to us since (free internet), and we will definitely recommend them to other travelers. But on to Hue! Hope our sleeper bus is what we were told it is!
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