The Final Countdown...

So we are almost at the end of our travels and counting down the days til we're back to good old Blighty. How fast the time has gone!! It seems like only yesterday we were saying our tearful goodbyes and getting scared about the next six months, now we're saying tearful goodbyes to our travelling friends and still getting scared about the next six months so not much has changed haha!

We have spent the last couple of weeks travelling in North Vietnam. Our first stop was a beautiful mountain town called Sapa, which is right up North, almost at the border with China. It's been something we've looked forward to for a long time, as we'd heard so many good reports about this place, and in our book it looked amazing... green rice paddies perched on the side of mountains, hill tribe people going about their daily duties, low clouds circling around the town... we couldn't wait to get there. We took an eight hour overnight train from Hanoi and arrived in Sapa bright and early at 5am! The drive to the main town from the train station takes you up, up and away into mountains and the clouds!
We met up with our travelling buddy Alan and he told us how he was doing an impromptu trek that day with some Hmong hill-tribe people he'd met the day before. Jon and I aren't one to ever turn down the chance of doing something different, so, despite being very tired, we chucked our bags in the hotel and joined him for the day!
The Hmong people are a genuine hilltribe, they originated from China years ago and settled into the mountains in Vietnam, where they live in little wooden huts with no modern appliances. We met with Ku and Sa (Alan's hilltribe friends) and they took us on the most amazing trek through rice paddies, down into the valley where they lived. The scenery was absolutely amazing, and they took us right off the beaten track where most of the trekkers went. We visited Ku's Grandma in her house (mud hut) and she cooked us dinner! (Which consisted of pig skin, raw bamboo and rice - absolutely disgusting lol).
Carrying on the trek we walked along the river until we got to Ku's house. Whilst we waited for Ku's mum to cook us dinner (hoping it was a lot better than lunch!) we tried on some traditional Hmong outfits! So funny! The Hmong people all wear the same thing, dyed indigo loose pants and long waistcoat for the boys, and leg warmers, skirt and decorated wrap around jacket for the girls, complete with funny hat! (See pictures on blog for a proper example!) We had dinner sitting in a little wooden hut right up in the mountains, while kids riding buffalo went past.... how amazing! One of those times in travelling I will always remember. We could hear a storm approaching, and we were about two hours walking back to Sapa, so we left Ku's house and started the long walk back (getting caught in the storm and thoroughly soaked by the rain!). The next day we all hired out motorbikes and zoomed around the hills in Sapa, another great day with picturesque views. Imagine riding a bike on mountain roads, about 1000m above the valleys, with clouds settling down all around you, driving past little hilltribe children working in the rice fields. Such an amazing place. The hotel that me and Jon were staying in told us that night that if we wanted to carry on staying there we would have to pay triple the room price from now on, as it was a Vietnamese holiday (thirty something years to the day when Vietnam won the war with America). So it turns out that EVERYTHING in Sapa has tripled or quadrupled in price - the hotels, the restaurants, even hiring motorbikes!! We thought about leaving but when we went into the travel agents they told us all the trains were booked up until Tuesday! (This was Friday). Oh no.... we're trapped in Sapa! We spent a good half a day tramping round the hotels in Sapa trying to find a cheaper room, before finally finding one above a cake shop (perfect!). The town was getting overrun with Vietnamese tourists by this point, you couldn't even walk down he road because there were so many people. Me and Jon retreated to our hotel room with a cup of tea and a cake :o)

I must mention at this point that the weather in Sapa was FREEZING!! Because it's so high up, the clouds settle right down on the town and it rained heavily while we were there. Me and Jon being totally unprepared as usual, hadn't brought any warm clothes with us. I had a woolly hat that I bought in Thailand, and I had to resort to buying a rather unfetching pink fluffy cardigan as I didn't have anything with long sleeves for our time there! So after four cold but interesting days in Sapa we finally managed to get a train back to the warmth of Hanoi.... oh the joy at going out in flipflops again and not wearing that shocking cardigan!!!

Our next stop was the beautiful Halong Bay, a prime tourist spot in Vietnam. Halong Bay is famed for it's huge limestone rocks that jut out of the water - now I thought maybe there'd be about 20 or so big rocks to look at, but I'm not kidding there are HUNDREDS! It's like someone has just planted these massive chunks of rock in the middle of the ocean and left them there. Very cool to see. We visited the area on a pre-booked tour from Hanoi, which we don't normally do but it seemed there was no other way to get there :o$ We spent one night on a boat in the middle of the ocean, this was really nice, the food was good and me and Jon had a wicked little room on top of the boat looking out onto the sea! The next day we done some kayaking (very hard) and also a mini bike ride around an island, then we were dropped off at our hotel for the night. Next day back to Hanoi for the third time, checked into yet another hotel and done some shopping! We also done the regular tourist spots in Hanoi, the Water Puppet Theatre (pretty bad show of puppets in water.... hard to explain lol) and the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum - very strange - Ho Chi Minh is the former leader of Vietnam, the one who won the war. Basically they have embalmed his body and put it in this huge vault, where everyone walks past and pays their respects to him. It was FREEZING inside, and it didn't even look like a real body, it looked fake! Oh well.... weird to see anyway.

We left Vietnam on 6th May and flew to Bangkok for our last week... eeeeek!! I must admit it does feel good to be back in a modern city, with nice food and clean hotels! We have a few days topping up our tans on Ko Samet, an island about four hours away from Bangkok, before we check into our five star hotel for the last three days and shop, shop, shop! I can't wait! Not long to go now before we are back to reality... we've already started looking at jobs and finding somewhere to live! How scary.... we are going to make the most of our last week in Asia before we fly home on the 15th May.