7-15 Halong Bay to Hanoi, then to Sapa

The trip back to Hanoi was something we all wanted to get over with. We had a nice lunch at a restaurant overlooking Halong Bay, then were back on the road. It was a bit disturbing to drive past a minibus, just like the one we were in, run off the road into a flooded ditch. 5 hours later we were back at the Family Guesthouse. Jeff booked a flight departing that evening to Siem Reap in Cambodia, which is the city where all travelers stay while visiting the ancient temple complexes of the Angkor civilization, most namely, the temple of Angkor Wat. Matt booked a flight out for Bangkok that evening. He planned on spending a few days in Bangkok before arriving back home just in time to surprise his father on his birthday.
Chris and I were sad to see everyone go, but still excited for what lay ahead in our travels. When traveling, the experience you get when you're alone is much different that traveling with another person. Group travel with four other people is an even bigger jump. Chris and I now had 2 weeks of travel ahead of us where some of it would be solo. On July 31st we fly to Nepal, which is on the Northern border of India. It's not especially safe for solo travel. Chris and I had decided to book a 2 day trip to Sapa before heading South from Hanoi. Sapa is a fertile, mountainous region that is accessed by a 9 hour overnight train, then 90 min mini-bus ride. It's at 4,500ft elevevation so it became a popular location for French colonialists to escape from the muggy 100*F heat, such as we've been enduring in Hanoi and Halong Bay the past week. We said our goodbyes at the guesthouse and within an hour were on our train.

The arrangement on our train was different than we'd experienced in Thailand. The sleeper cars were a series of private cabins with locking doors and an exterior hallway running the length of the car. We stowed our gear under the lower bunk and Chris sneakily climbed up top before I could claim it. Soon after, our cabin got a lot more crowded. The two bunks opposite ours were now occupied by a a Vietnamese couple in their 40's. The husband took the lower bunk due to a fresh cast on his leg. After some very basic friendly chatting in both broken English and our poor attempts at Vietnamese, we learned that he'd been in a motorcycle accident-- big suprise. Chris has compared scars with fellow motorcylce accident victims on countless occaisions since it's such a common occurence in Asia. His wife gave us a snack of French bread with a sweet creamy dip, which was pretty good. I had heard that there was a dining car on the train, so I decided to locate it, not knowing which direction to head first. I went through 8 sleeper cars similar to our own, then through the cheaper soft-seat cars, where it's like an airplane or charter bus layout. After I passed through another 6 cars in the other direction from our car, I gave up. From the looks of it, there were maybe 5% Westerners on the train. Chris slept well, but the discomfort and anxiety caused by a bumpy ride and constant grinding noise of non-lubricated metal-on-metal underneath me kept me up reading almost the entire night.