quick visits to the main sights of northern Vietnam

I couldn’t leave the country without visiting Halong Bay or getting a glimpse of the hill tribes in SaPa, so I booked a couple of tours through my hostel.

I’d read a few reports that Halong Bay gets too overcrowded with tourists these days, but I didn’t feel that seeing a few other tourist boats made any difference to the experience.  It’s a beautiful place, with some 2,000 ‘islands’ (limestone pinnacles) jutting out of the sea, some with impressive caves running through them, , one of which we visited.  We also did a side-trip in local style bamboo boats into a lagoon.  It made for a great day trip - helped by a very good lunch buffet on the boat, and some nice fellow travellers to chat with.

SaPa is further from Hanoi, so I needed to do an overnight trip, spending one night in a village in what was described as a homestay but was actually a separate building built specially to accommodate tourists - with modern rooms and bathrooms - so not a real homestay experience, but comfortable.  I wasn't complaining..  Much of the trip, apart from the drive there and back, involved hiking along small paths through the rice paddies and a small bamboo forest, to get from the main town to a tradtional village - to enjoy the local scenery, spot a few Hmong hill tribe people in their traditional clothes, and hopefully (from their point of view) to spend money on souvenirs.  Of course I cannot buy stuff - one of the side-effects of travelling long-term which I mostly find to be a good thing, as I prefer to spend my money on epxeriences than on stuff.  I was nervous about the trip as the weather forecast was for two full days of rain, but thankfully the weather forecasters got it completely wrong as we did not get a single drp of rain!  & we did get to see a few older women still wearing the traditional clothing.


& all too quickly, my month in Hanoi was over, and it was on to the next country.

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