Vietnam ’24

Well I thought that was that. But I’d forgotten the stopover in Hanoi. How could I forget a stopover in Hanoi. Only a few hours, but a few hours in Hanoi is different.   We had only one specific planned: a trip to the market, for the interest but also with vague intentions of picking up […]

Not the most promising start, as we opened the curtains to the first pouring rain we’ve seen in many a week. Oo-er. But the forecasts were promising all day sunshine! But the forecasts have been consistently wrong. But, but… Oh well, it’ll be what it’ll be. We’re going to have a great last day, whatever

Well that was full on. We’d decided to hire a bike and head off to the national park, and go for a bit of a trek. First stop was ‘Hospital cave’, which we’d been told was ‘hardly worth the visit’. But I for one was keen to see it. A hospital built inside a cave,

And now we look like a pair of tomatoes. We’d forgotten how long it’s been since we did any serious sunnery. We’ve been mostly doing things, as against soaking up rays. And the weather’s been pretty so-so for a long while. So even though today has been mostly whispy sun, with patches of overcast, we’ve

Virle had a rougher night of it than me, sleeping fitfully on the bus, which proved to be a fairly elderly sleeper, lacking basic amenities like curtains to keep out the LED displays which seem to adorn just about any Vietnamese settlement of any size. Sleeper seats are never the best at best – just

The bus for Cat Ba isn’t till seven this evening, so we decided to take a little trek up to the viewpoint above Ha Giang. And it did prove quite a trek – up and up and up to the top of what turned out to be a pretty sizeable hill. By the time we

Day four dawned much better than day three. No mortar attack. Instead, a nice breakfast of fried egg and pancakes with banana and honey, then back on the road for the return to Ha Giang city. A pretty uneventful day in truth, though the bike convoys were back in force, and as infuriating as ever.

THUD! Unh? THUD! Virle: What the goodness gracious was that? (I paraphrase.) THUD! RATATATATATAT! THUD! I grope for my phone. It’s 7am and we appear to have come under mortar attack.  The noise seems to be coming from upstairs. I pull on some pants and go up to investigate. Nope. Nothing going on up there.

The bikes, dood, the bikes! YeGods! We knew we weren’t the only ones who thought doing the Ha Giang loop would be a great way to spend a few days, but we never imagined… They were everywhere. Hundreds of the bleeders. We got to the first viewpoint on today’s route, and we couldn’t get near

Well, we can’t say we weren’t warned.  Everyone said the cops lie in wait, pull you over, demand your International Driving Licence, then hit you with a million dong fine when you don’t have one. We thought we might outsmart them by leaving at noon, hoping they’d be hard at lunch by the time we