Vietnam 2006 Part 4 : Off to the Hills

Day 4(Tue) : Back from Ha Long Bay and off to Sa Pa

A Perfect Morning
If ever there is a morning that I’ll be happy to wake up to, this will probably be it. A cool cloudy morning in emerald green waters, the boat slowly cruising through the bay as we are surrounded by majestic mountains rising out of the waters like dragon spine in the mist.

Here’s a short clip to capture the moment.

Our slow tour of the bay finally came to an end around noon as the boat reached the jetty at Ha Long City. We were led to a nearby restaurant where we were served Vietnamese styled Chinese cooking.

Back to Hanoi
It was back to Hanoi after lunch. We arrived at Hanoi before 4pm. The van offloaded the four of us in front of the hotel where we previously stayed. Thinking twice whether to give the hotel owner a piece of our mind regarding his over-charging of the trip, we decided to overlook it and regard it as a lesson well learnt.

(Lesson #1 : We paid US$45 for the Ha Long Bay tour, expecting a bigger boat but later found out that some of our fellow passengers had paid US$35 or less for the same trip.

Lesson #2 : We were billed an extra 10% tax for the tour and hotel room. Later we found out that other hotels do not slap taxes. Even the receipt given looked dodgy without any proper company name and address. Thinking we could get a tax refund at the airport, we found no counters catering to such needs. )

We spent the next few hours drinking coffee at a Parisian Styled Café (Paris Deli), searching for a elusive lake near the train station, and having dinner while watching the local version of ‘Who wants to be a Millionaire’ at a local restaurant.

What we had for tea ...

Midnight Train
We got on our train at 9:10pm. Found our bunk with the four soft sleepers. It was narrow with hardly any place for four guys to stand up all at once, but it will do for the night. The train left the station punctually.

We spent the next few hours playing ‘Bridge’. We managed to squeeze in a few hours of sleep after we had enough laughs from the game that was punctuated with first timer Wee Loong’s unorthodox Bridge moves.

The train rumbled on through the night, briefly stopping at stations along the way to Lao Cai. The drone of the engine might be hypnotic to some but for me it led to uneasy sleep. The stops did not help either as they totally broke the sleeping spell. Lao Cai was the final stop, located near the Chinese border. It was also the gateway to the hill stations of Sa Pa and Bac Ha.