From the insanity of Hanoi to the near peacefulness of Sapa

Sorry I've been kind of slack on the blogging for the last week, I've been moving around a fair bit and "today I rode a bus for 11 hours, found a hotel, went to sleep and got up and road a different bus for 9 hours," does not make fascinating reading.

I am in Vietnam right now, finally into a new country for the first time in far too long. I arrived in a Hanoi 4 days ago and was only really about to survive about 24 hours of it. The hustle and bustle of the city was simply overwhelming, there were motorscooters everywhere and as in all developing countries the blare of car horns is near constant. Crossing the street there requires real nerve as one must simply cross the street and count on the fact that the river of motor scooters will flow around you and not over you. However, either I am too big of a target, or plain lucky I've been fortune not to be clipped even once. It's strange though, in China you find the gaps in the cars and you cross when there is space in Hanoi you simply cross.

Sapa is quite different though. It is a mountain village about 900meters about sea level and in the mountainous region that runs between Southern China and Northern Vietnam. It is a beautiful part of the world with epic mountain peaks and rice paddies terraced through the lower parts of the vallies.

Yesterday afternoon I was up at half seven to go explore some of these peaks and valleys with my latest temporary travel companion a lovely French-Canadian girl from Montreal who I'd met the night before in Hanoi. It was a great experience as two local ladies of different ethnic minorities joined us as our defacto guides. They showed us through their homes and rice paddies, the local school and some more remote sights that bigger tour groups simply would not get to experience. It was a lovely afternoon and well worth the 6$ dollars I had to pay for a friendship bracelet at the end.

This morning I purchased my night train ticket back to Hanoi and from there I will travel onto Halong Bay which looks absolutely amazing.