Hanoi - final day

Ngoc here.

We love to hate on this town - it's hard to keep coming back here in between our mini-trips around the north. Fortunately, it's raining today so it's not to scorching yet (at 8am).

At 4:30am this morning, we arrived in Hanoi from our overnight train ride from hell. We were coming back from Sapa, near the border of China. We spent a magical two days there, and would have spent a few more days there.

Cool, breezy weather. A nice escape from the rest of Vietnam's heat. Hip restaurants, cafes, and bars. Incredible views. Everyone is friendly. Charming minority hilltribes. I visited Sapa in 2004 with three friends, and it was about 1/100th of the size it is today. It really has exploded! There is SO much more to do now, and everything looks is a million times more developed. I remember trekking down to a village four years ago and having to take a jeep back to town alongside the rocky muddy mountain cliffs and being afraid for my life. This time, the ride was in a nice SUV on completely paved road. I'm not too sure how I feel about tourism being a primary source of income for the tribes these days, but I suppose it's better than being eradicated completely (the area was wiped out for a while after multiple struggles with France and China, but was rebuilt and restored in 1990 by the Vietnamese government for tourism). Dave took a lot of fantastic shots with his camera, so we're excited to post them when we're back in the states.

Funny story! On our train ride to Sapa, we shared our 4-bunk cabin with a mother/son pair from Korea. I had taken a gnarly fall in Ha Long Bay during our epic climbing day, and sliced open one of my toes. I was changing out my bandaid on the train, and asked Dave to whip out our Neosporin. The Korean mother jumped out of her seat, looked at my wound, and said "I have something for you." She took out a kit with little incense sticks and some sort of thick beige paste.

Her son translated for us, letting us know that his mother is a professor of acupuncture in Korea and was going to heal me. I tried to fight back, insisting that I didn't need any special treatment and that my cut was just fine. Alas, she grabbed my foot, took a tiny bit of the paste, and wedged it inside my wound. Then, she took the incense stick, lit it on fire, and then lit the paste on fire with the stick. You can guess what happened next - the paste burned inside my wound, and she took her fingers and squeezed my cut to get the paste even deeper. She repeated this proces 5-6 more times. By then, I had already screamed a couple of times because having fire inside an open wound just did not feel good.

Today, a few days later, I'm not sure if the cut is better or worse. It doesn't hurt so it's probably better now, but I think this black burn mark on my toe is likely permanent.

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As for Sapa, it's probably in the top 5 of my favorite places in the world. Dave and I didn't try too hard to resist from the amazing shopping. He had a ball negotiating with the local H'mong tribe people and scored an authentic jacket for only 80,000 Vietnamese dollars! That's a little under 5 dollars. He also got a day bag and a cool shirt.

I got a beautiful new purse and some jewelry. It's a good thing our cash was slowly running out, and that we didn't have any ATM options. Otherwise, we may have gone for broke there.

We did have some trouble saying no to certain salespeople. They are either too cute or too sad to resist. We did a very long trek (from 10am - 2:30pm) yesterday, and had an army of tribe people following us all day. They helped us avoid falling down the cliffs during the more steep and difficult parts, and of course, at the end of it, begged us to buy some of their handcrafted merchandise. We each had one person who took care of us so we felt obligated to repay them somehow (and we definitely knew that this was their plan all along). Dave tried to give his woman some money for holding an umbrella over his head the entire trek to protect him from the sun, but she insisted on having him buy something. Their conversation was quite cute, she tried to teach him how "it all works":

Dave: I don't need that.
Tribe woman: 100,000!
Dave: That's too much, I really don't need it.
Tribe woman: 90,000!
Dave: No...
Tribe woman: 80,000
Dave: No, thank you
Tribe woman: No, you go down, I go up...50,000
Dave: No, no no
Tribe woman: You go down, I go up, you say 40,000
Dave: Uh....40,000?
Tribe woman: Good job!
Dave: But no, I don't want it

Obviously, Dave did give her the 40,000 for a pillow cover. I got ripped off and spent 50,000 on a belt, but my person felt bad and gave me a friendship bracelet for free! Also, Dave has developed a British accent for certain words. I hope it sticks, it's pretty fun to catch him accidentally sounding British.

We have a long long journey ahead of us. We need to find a hotel room to take a much needed nap so that we can hop on another overnight train this evening. Next stop, Hue, but we may try to go straight to Hoi An from there. Hue is nice and all, but I don't know if we have that extra night to spare since Saigon is still so very far away.