We went to Hanoi(Capital of Vietnam), and only stayed for a night, the next morning we towards the east for Halong Bay, a 2 days 1 night cruise.
We also visited the cave while we are at Halong Bay (which obviously are lit with wonderful lighting for the tourists)We spend only around 4 hours in Hanoi upon returning from Halong bay, then we proceed to take a 9 hou overnight train ride to the town of Lao Cai, and another 1.5 hrs of bus ride up to the mountain of Sapa.
You can see the some of the locals villagers from the H-mong tribe still wearing their traiditional clothing in this picture. Whether it is because they are doing it for the tourist business, I do not know. We have a tour guide for this 2 days in Sapa, she is a H-mong too (but doesn't wear the traditional clothing), she speaks good english and seem to be enjoying herself a lot in this job.
I ask her if she had gone anywhere else, she mention Hanoi and much prefer Sapa more than any place else on this earth. She says even if she is given a free tour to go any place else in the world she would desire just for a tour, she would not go, she love Sapa too much.
That set me thinking, I would like to visit places, maybe not to stay there, but just for a short trip would be great. But it is always due to money that I am not able to do that. But she just doesn't wanna leave Sapa, amazing huh.
Some dangerous mountain trails we walk by. Just one step to the right, and you would have fall off the cliff. You can see, there isn't plenty of space to go by.
We took an overnight train back to Hanoi and spend half a day there just to realize that most tourist attraction, (such as the museum) is closed due to the APEC visitors. Well...
Some photos of the traffic condition in old quarters of Hanoi. Who cares about traffic light? Don't waste time in between the red and green.We visited some of the usual tourist attraction, not very interesting. Most of the places we wanted to go have been block off due to APEC meeting too.
In Hanoi, all the raodside foodstall seats and table are all pretty short and small, I wonder why. Maybe it is easier to bring along.
Click here for the rest of the uploaded photos. (It's not that I only took this amount of photos, but I decide only to put up the nicer ones, taken on a Canon A40, only 2Meg pix cam)
