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Hello all just a quick blog from us on our last day in Vietnam.
Our last blog we were up the mountains in Sapa hoping for the fog to clear so we could do some trekking. Luckily the next day was slightly clearer and warmer so we bought a map and headed down to Cat Cat Village. It was a great couple of hours trek through the village and onto a waterfall. The scenery was amazing endless rice paddy terraces, wild pigs, water buffalo and views of the misty summit Fansipan. Highlight of the walk was a little Hmong villager telling a larger tourist 'You too fat!' The next day we walked around the town and in and out of the markets, around the lake which we could actually see this time! Had lunch at Sapa Rooms which takes former street children that have completed their two year course in Koto in Hanoi where we had eaten when there.
Having bought our train ticket back to Hanoi, we caught the bus to the station in Lao Cai to get the train, or so we thought. After two hours of being ignored, sent from person to person and being laughed at no-one would exchange our voucher for our tickets. Needless to say we missed the train and got very very annoyed! Eventually one of the ticket office guys handed Fay a phone on the other end was the guy we bought our ticket from in Sapa. He explained that something had gone wrong with our booking and that we were going to be put on a sleeper bus and refunded the difference, so all in all not bad. The people seemed like they had never seen westerners on the bus with the driver and his mate practising their english on us. After surprisingly comfy night on the bus we arrived at god knows where at 5am, surrounded by the usual toting and shouting. We made it into Hanoi town and killed the 6 hours before we could check in getting out Laos Visa from the embassy, where security was surprisingly lapse as we just wandered in.
Spent the last couple of days seeing the bits of Hanoi we had missed before. We also managed to see the incredibly rare sight of a giant turtle in Hoan Kiem Lake, which is supposed to bring us and the 200 people crowded around good luck. We spent Saturday out on the town in Le Pub watching the footy and drinking the local brew. Sadly we hunted in vain for the B52 lake but it proved impossible to find, we did see the One Pillar Pagoda and Hoa Lo prison aka the Hanoi Hilton where the US pilots that were captured were kept during the war.
At the minute we are waiting around for our bus to Luang Prabang in Laos which takes around 30 hours, should be gruelling fun!
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