What Is With All The Junk?

We arrived in Hanoi and were ready for the chaos of Vietnam's capital city, expecting a similar shock and awe as when we arrived in Saigon. However, we were surprised as it seemed much more organized and quiet. Maybe it was or maybe we have become accustomed to this country which has a higher population density than China. Either way we settled in quickly and toured the city center by foot amongst all the motorbikes and scheduled our itinerary to visit the Sapa region and Halong Bay.

Our first excursion was to Sapa which is in the north west corner of Vietnam lying close to the border with China. We opted for the overnight sleeper train again and rolled the dice on the conditions of the train. It was much better than our previous experience, obviously this side route to Sapa is not used as much since the cars were clean and comfortable. Upon arriving, our first impressions were that the train went the wrong way and we were back in Peru with the sights of mountains and terraces. Our short two day stay in Sapa was made up of hiking about 10kms each day through local villages, past terraced rice paddies and taking in the mountainous region in the distance that bordered China. The Sapa area is home to many of Vietnam's minorities who are quite poor and survive in the mountains by farming. The locals have a very tough life of work, work and more work for very little gain to the extent that we had local women and girls trek all day with us just for the slight possibility that we may buy a handicraft from them at the end of the day. We also got to visit a primary school where we could observe a class in session, needless to say Jacquie was appalled at the traditional values where a child is asked to stand and can not sit until they arrive at the correct answer to a question....probably even harder to do when you have a bunch of foreigners staring at you and Jacquie trying to gesture her the answer through the doorway!!! After a couple days we headed back to Hanoi on the sleeper train.

With an early morning arrival we took the day to rest, walk the markets one last time and got a chance to catch a water puppet performance before our trip to Halong Bay. Water puppets are traditional marionettes controlled underwater by bamboo poles and mainly performed in the north of Vietnam. We all went not expecting much and were assuming we were going to watch a glorified version of sock puppets that you might see by your kids but we all really enjoyed it. I'm still not really sure if we understood the storyline or if something was lost in translation since we seemed to be the only ones laughing in the whole theatre.

Next morning we were off to Halong Bay for an overnight cruise on a traditional Junk. Halong Bay is one of many of the UNESCO Heritage sites we have visited and has been named as one of nature's seven wonders of the world (there are many of these seven wonder lists in case you are trying to count the seven out right now). Halong Bay is comprised of close to 2000 limestone karsts (islands) and I've heard the salad dressing here is twice as good as ours...badumpdump!! Turns out our traditional junk was more of a luxury boat that looked like a traditional junk called the Galaxy (www.halonggalaxycruise.com)..awesome!!!! The boat was fantastic, the food was incredible but much too much seafood for the girl's tastes and the scenery was stunning. The only thing disappointing was the quality of the water; the amount of garbage, pollution and floating human waste was appalling which made our kayak trip around the islands a little hard to enjoy. Vietnam currently only treats approximately 14% of their water with the rest being flushed into the sewer. With a culture of littering and 400 junks plus commercial fishing working here the water pollution is definitely evident and makes one wonder how long they can sustain tourism especially to the western visitors. Anywhoo...after a post kayak shower we anchored for the night with a choice of activities; swimming-"um, thanks but no thanks", karaoke-"we'll let the Asian guests on the tour have our turn" or squid fishing-"we're in!". Although we didn't catch any squid with our bamboo pole jigs it was a lot of fun. It was even more funny watching the kids and their Aussie mates on the boat trying to catch jellyfish and identifying the floating items in the water (eg. "oooohh gross that's human poo!"). It was a lot of fun on the boat regardless and also took part in a spring roll cooking class.

Overall, Vietnam has exceeded our expectations with beautiful scenery, cheap prices and a people that are very friendly, helpful and eager to help. This is a country trying to catch up to their fast paced cities and ballooning tourism industry but will get there soon. The biggest thing we noticed is that there is no education towards waste disposal, people throw anything on the ground with other people coming buy to pick through the garbage for recyclables and finally it is then flushed or swept into the sewers for final disposal. There is big difference between the younger generation here and the older ones; the younger adults are leaving the farms for the city for better paying jobs and to learn english while the older generation work the farms which the government now promotes communal farming to make up for the loss of farm labour. We would definitely come back to Vietnam since there are a couple places we felt we have missed which we would like to see but we know it will be a different Vietnam.

Speaking with other travelers you tend to learn where to visit and where to avoid. We initially left Cambodia off the itinerary due to advice from a travel agent and we weren't sure the kids could handle the Killing Fields but in speaking with other people, Cambodia is a must see. So we have adjusted our itinerary and are heading back south to leave Vietnam a few days early and are stealing some days from our Laos stay to make time for Cambodia. It is not the most efficient route but using some travel vouchers we received from one of our airlines it is costing us next to nothing to make our way there.

Bye for now.