Thursday, December 27, 2012 Sapa next blog previous blog
travel 2012 travel 2013 neuage.org ALL TRAVEL
Vietnam December Blogs: First blog in Vietnam December 21; Christmas Day Hanoi December 25; Sapa Day 1 December 26; Sapa Trekking 1 December 27; Sapa Trekking 2 December 28; Cat Cat Village, Sapa December 29, 2012; Guangzhou January 02 2013
Slideshow of Hanoi photos. Photo slideshow of Sapa. For slideshow of 'on your bike' biking around Hanoi. Slideshow of Hội An
Videos: Hoian (youtube); Black H'mong tribal village of Sapa, (youtube); Hanoi (youtube); Christmas Eve in Hanoi (youtube); Cat Cat (on youtube); Sapa (youtube)
The train did not look anything like the photos but rather a world-war II vintage of a China train (just my opinion). We got the first class soft sleepers though the translation in Vietnamese of the word soft is a hard one inch mat on a metal frame. Four of us in the room; most of the tourist as always in Nam were Australian and Dutch. In our ‘first-class-sleeper’ the Dutch were friendly and they exchanged with Narda stories and drank beer. The two in our room were a young couple from Canada and they promptly put in earplugs and went to sleep.
I struggled to get a couple hours of sleep as the train made as much noise and shook as much as possible on the track. I am not at all complaining and happily, worse for wear, we dragged out sorry asses out of the train at six am.
Our hotel room was not ready so we went walking for five hours then got into our room and slept two hours and went out walking again. Sapa, I suppose for this time of year – though it could be year-round, was in the clouds or in our terms, foggy. We will probably rent motor scooters tomorrow but the fact that we can see barely a meter in front of us may curb our cycling enthusiasm.
The local tribe people who are constantly selling their goods no matter how many times no comes out; they follow you down the street and keep selling, are quite colourful and a big part of their business is trekking – or we do the trekking and follow them to their village. It is all supposed to be quite the thing to do here but some villages are ten kilometers away and we feel like it has been a trek going a dozen blocks. It is very mountainous. Sapa is like an outlet mall for ‘The North Face’ brand of clothes. Shop after shop sells coats that would sell in the States for hundreds of dollars for $25 - $35 US. Narda bought ‘The Northface’ walking shoes and I got waterproof pants with their ‘gore-tex’ insulations for like 900,000 dongs or $42 for the lot. The pants cost close to a hundred in shops in the West. ‘The North Face’ brand are made in Vietnam so I suppose we are helping the local economy. We did other stuff to help the local economy and fill our suitcases by buying other stuff that we could probably do without.
The above picture shows how foggy it is here and this is with an extreme close-up.
I have heaps of photos in my Facebook and Google+ and they will be at
http://neuage.us/2012/vietnam next week once we are back in China. And videos too as I cannot edit them on this computer.
And that is it for today.
contact Myanmar 2014
Blog updated February 15, 2014 K - 12 technology (updated February 04, 2014). Travel Site (2014) updated February 15, 2014. Videos/Blogs on Youtube, Twitter, Wordpress, Photo albums. Updated 15 Second Street, Round Lake, New York and photos from parent's 1943 wedding as well as Leigh's page. Farmville page updated Thursday, March 17, 2011 5:58 PM. neuage.org updated February 11, 2014 10:31 PM neuage.us updated February 05, 2014 7:21 PM. Resume updated February 05, 2014
Technology Coordinator and Computer Teacher at Dalian American International School, 2 Dianchi Road, Golden Pebble Beach, Dealian Development Area 116650 P.R. China
Blog updated / Integrating Technology Blog February 10, 2014. also: terrell.neuage.us and/or neuage.me
Today working on picture poem links starting around "better" (). Picture poems are the digital format of work I did as a street artist in New Orleans in the 1970s, as well as New York City, Honolulu, San Francisco and Adelaide South Australia. Follow @neuage
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