Sapa

After a while a place becomes like home, you begin to recognise the people, the street names, the same tuktuk guys asking you if you want them for an hour.
Hanoi was very quiet during Tet, quiet in that all of the shops and many of the businesses were closed. Yet it was still really busy with what seemed like most of the extended families converging upon this city with great force.On New Years Eve we went down to the lake, which is a central part of life here, and joined with the masses to watch the fireworks and wander around the lake buying popcorn, sausages on sticks and balloons. It was great fun to see these otherwise rather reserved people really cheering and whooping with joy with the explosion of 15 minutes of fireworks.

After being in Hanoi for a week Cat and I joined a tour in Sapa, which is in the very north of Vietnam. We had been talking to people who had come back from Sapa the day before we left, and with them came the news that it was freezing cold, completely overcast but still a nice little trip. But really, not worth the trouble.

Boarding the night train with an air of complete trepidation, we began our trip. The train was nothing like we had expected, the beds were very comfortable, they provided water, and the toilet was actually of western standards! No squatting to the floor while on a moving vehicle! What we're loving right now...
On arrival we wandered around the village for a while and were instantly accompanied by Hmong women, maybe about 6 of them following us around for 4 of us girls. At this point we met the Shelias. (Loan and Jules) who became our main buddies for the trip.
On returning to the travel agent we met our tour guide with whom we walked about 16k to the homestay. The day was fantastically sunny and I got massively burned! (I blame the malaria tablets...damn them making my skin all sensitive!) Obviously it was completely muddy and slippy, but it was worth it. The views were just fantastic and the group we walked with were a cool bunch of people.One of our member fell into a rice paddy and handled it brilliantly. I will post pictures, but right now I'm unable to. While we were walking we passed a lot of children and women, but i could count on one hand the number of men we passed. Everyone seemed to be chewing on sugar cane, so I gave it a try. It tasted like chewing on a really mild sugar flavoured watermelon. So very refreshing, but I'm sure there are very few redeeming qualities within a sugar cane!
On one of our stops we hung out with some little lads who were playing a game that seemed to be rather popular. Find a really big stone and throw smaller stones off it to try and smash it. Over the next few days we saw a lot of that sort of game. I love how kids really can just amuse themselves with the oddest games!
When we arrived at the homestay we all took a short time to recover from our walk then we drank beer in the fading light and chatted with each other. Watching the dinner being prepared was something else though! The host family killed a couple of ducks right in the kitchen, and bled them, they then prepared a duck blood soup with herbs and garlic. Unfortunately, this was not something that we got to eat, I would have loved to try it! We ate the most amazing banquet of food, rice, spring rolls, vegetables, beef chicken..and lots of other stuff. But i think by this point they could have fed us poo and we would have eaten it, we were famished!

The following day we at crepes for breakfast and were on our way, up and down through the muddy marshes and across the rice paddies, then we reached the waterfall, a quick stop for pictures and then onwards to the base of the waterfall. Out tour guide promised us that it was far too cold to go swimming, but we were made of tougher stuff than that! In we went..and my god it was freezing. Certainly more refreshing than chewing on sugar cane!
We managed to gather quite a crowd of fascinated locals who thought that we were all a bit crazy!

This was slightly rushed but i wanted to get this up before going to Ha Long bay, when I'm sure that more excited and hilarious things will happen.
And my goodness, I hate my writing style here. Guh!