31 July: Sapa

It had rained the whole night, so we slept late without knowing it. We got up at around 09h00, finished up and with all our things we intended to post headed for breakfast at the usual place, with the usual, Pho Bo. After breakfast we walked around town trying to find the post office. When we found it at last, we needed to take inventory of everything, then were told we couldn't post back our data CD's containing our photos! In the end we just put it in the box with the rest of the stuff, don't think they noticed - there was not much service or attention of any kind... The box they had given us had seen better days, it had been used to transport 6 1.5L bottles of water, there were no post office boxes and it was soggy. I strapped the box with the see-through tape in every place possible, in the end many of the personnel just watched in amusement. We wrote on the postage address and then came the weighing, fees and the payment. The whole process took in excess of an hour and there were quite a few locals pushing in every time we were talking to the assistant.

We walked back looking for a bank where we could convert our Vietnamese Dong to Chinese Yuan, but the bank was closed. A shop owner across the road from it told us to come back at 14h00, so we headed back to the hotel, relaxing the rest of the afternoon. I made some calls to UK recruiters and a contact in Australia, but other than that the day was quiet and relaxing.

Lunch we tried a stall just across from the lady where we always ate, the food was good, but a little less than usual. After lunch we went to the bank only to find out that they could not convert the VND to C Y. We headed back to our hotel as the rain started again. Reading up on China, writing in our diaries was about as active as we could get. By dinner neither of us were very hungry due to our inactive day, we shared a vegetable soup and some banana's.