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, bu...