North Vietnam tour

25.8.2010 | Day 25 | 13 162 km | Sapa, Vietnam

Before the journey started, Vietnam was a big question mark for me. I didn’t know much about it, but the impression I had was that it’s a nice place to visit. Now, almost a week in Vietnam, a nice place to visit is a huge understatement. I didn’t know just how much this country can offer for a traveller; City life, paradise islands and trekking the mountains up north.

Our flight landed in Hanoi, so we booked a two-night stay in the city’s old quarters. Only a two hour flight from China, but everything changed instantly. The first impression is pretty wild, as our taxi driver took us through very unorganized traffic to our hotel. Everyone is flashing their headlights, honking the horns and changing lanes like their life depends on the few extra seconds gained of the overtaking. But, the longer you look the traffic, you’ll just get used to it. In the end, no accidents in sight even though there are thousands and thousands of motorbikes navigating between cars… It just works!

This time Hanoi won’t get much praise words, because at this point we only had seen big cities and we were dying to get somewhere to recharge ourselves. For that, we booked a trip to Cat Ba Island. Only 160 km away from Hanoi, but still a combination of taxi-bus-another bus-ferry-a third bus. Somebody could argue that there would be easier way to do it, but nevertheless once we got to the island, it looked like a dream come true - a real paradise island.

Cat Co 2 beach at Cat Ba Island from a kayak

Cat Ba Island is simply beautiful. Excellent beaches and mountains climbing up from the sea made our two day stay feel a week too less. We rented motorbikes and drove the winding coast and mountain roads up and down, until we got serious sunburns. Of course, it just had to happen! But then we just parked our bikes and rented a bungalow 50 meters from the Cat Co 2 beach shoreline, swam in the ocean and hung our hammocks under coconut trees. I probably haven’t had such a relaxing moment in my life ever before. It was too bad we once again chose to make a too tight schedule, since I really wanted to stay in Cat Ba for much, much longer.

Next stop was a small town called Sapa, almost at the border of China. We’ll claim 23th of August, 2010 the most useless day so far, since it only consisted of traveling. This time a combination of bus-junk-bus-walk-taxi-train-minibus took a full 24 hours to do, with only about 500 km in length. We were totally exhausted when arriving to Sapa, but luckily we could already check in to our Guesthouse room with a mountain view. Strange, first two weeks our hostels and hotels neither did have windows or the views were other buildings or alleys. Now, first we had a beach view and now spectacular mountains!

Twisty Sapa mountain roads, not a bad place to drive a motorbike...

After we slept some of the sleep debt away, we again rented motorbikes to see Silver Waterfalls and climbed the twisty roads up to 2 km in altitude. It’s hard to write how much fun it is to feel the open road in a motorbike, especially with these views. Our luck however was about to change, as about 10 km away from Sapa, a loud bang stopped our trip - My rear tire blew up. Aleksi drove back to the town to get help, while I just stood beside the mountain road for a time felt like eternity, as every passing motorbike or a car or a truck looked at me and laughed. Oh well, to be honest, no-one were being evil but just shouting hello’s for me happily :) But it can worn you down after the 50th time, as you are pissed off about what happened.

Blown tire in the middle of nowhere

Even though I didn’t hit anything and the outer tire was perfectly fine, we had to pay for the repairs. So a warning for anyone who wishes to rent a motorbike in Asia; Be sure to go through what you will have to pay if something breaks. If the engine dies along the way, you will probably have to pay for it! We were strongly arguing that we’re not going to pay, as the tire most likely blew because of too much pressure, but as we found out the price of 150 000 dongs ($8) we agreed to pay just to get hell out from the middle of nowhere before dark.

Today, we were supposed to go trekking, but as we woke up, we couldn’t even see out of the balcony because of heavy fog and rain falling down. We cancelled our trek, which actually in the end is just for good as we need the rest. So, finally a day we’re not going to do anything but just sleep and sleep some more...