In an effort to save money, as well as get my sister to come to Wellington, we drove home with her after our few days in Hamilton. It’s real long drive, about 8 hours without stops! But the scenery is beautiful even if you’ve seen it all many times before.

The Desert Road is one of my favourite stretches. It’s desolate, covered in tufty grasses and rocky creeks. It’s often misty and the three volcanic mountains hold snow on their peaks. Tongariro National Park is a dreamscape.

Mt Ruapehu // Desert Road // Mt Ngauruhoe // Bulls // Blossoms // Mt Ruapehu // Lake Taupo

Having done our transport research online we asked for seats with the Hoang Long bus company for our trip from Haiphong to Ninh Binh. This got us a sleeper bus for 2 hours, which we thought would mean space and comfort for our (comparatively) short journey. Ha! Hahahahaha.

Shoes off on the bus and we discover our seat/beds are right down the back on the bottom row. Right down the back means 5 seats/beds lined up next to each other in a row like one big mattress which we all lie on like sardines. A cheeky Vietnamese guy had stolen my window seat and refused to move so Brend I are were squashed in the middle. NOT FUN. The cheeky Vietnamese guy practised his English for the trip, asking us about New Zealand, and then telling me about his life. He was currently having girl troubles as he was on the bus to go south for a month for work. His lady friend was not happy about this and was refusing to take his calls. He asked for advice and so I told him he just had to make sure she knows he loves her, and to not let the communication fall away. He was sweet. But still a seat stealer.

Before leaving for Ninh Binh we tried searching for a map online, but there were none to be found. A place not even searchable by google maps (it is now so it’s either been added since or was blocked in Vietnam). We clumsily got someone to understand our attempts at Vietnamese saying words like hotel and train station and got a finger pointing the general way, thankfully the right way. Wandering down an alley way we thought was the right place we were stopped by a guy on a moto. Moto guy was Mr Dai, the manager/trip organiser/receptionist of a hotel in the area. He handed us an exercise book full of recommendations written in English and French and other non Vietnamese languages from people who had stayed with him before. He seemed genuine, the price was right, and the room didn’t seem to have any bed bugs!

We settled, napped, organised a moto tour for the next day, and then bought train tickets for our trip to Hue. Mr Dai asked if we liked music and invited us to a bar that night. But when it came time to leave it was him and his friend, both tipsy, that were to be doing the driving. Being the sensible one in the group I flat out refused to drive with an even slightly drunk driver on the back of motorbike in Vietnam. So I made the boys walk with me to this bar which was apparently not too far away.

After a number of false starts and the eerie feeling of walking around streets when you stick out like a sore thumb, we found the place which turned out to be more of a karaoke bar. Mr Dai sang a few songs and then, in Vietnamese, introduced his friends from New Zealand to the whole place. We heard “New Zealand” and “guitar” and then felt the eyes of everyone in the room. Thankfully they were all on the boys who were apparently going to play guitar. Darian, the chicken, refused. Brend took one for the team though and they loved it despite it not at all resembling the going brand of Vietnamese pop love song.

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The real draw of Ninh Binh though was our moto tour. I was terrified to get on the back of the bike but once I did it was so much fun! They didn’t speed and the roads were good. We were dropped in Tam Coc, the touristy village, and given time to do the usual boat tour. We didn’t want to do the touristy thing though so we set off on foot.

Best. Decision. Ever.

We saw the mountains and rice paddies and at the end of a long winding road we found Thai Vy temple being kept by an old French speaking Vietnamese man and his wife. The man looks like a great old sage with a long long white beard.
He shows us how to pray correctly using incense, and gives us a history lesson in French about the Mongols invading Vietnam.

The sage shows us some of the traditional instruments he has and gives us some lessons, we buy some old postcards from his wife, and we’re off. Back to Tam Coc centre to have some of their famous goat meat for lunch.

Driving down back alleys on the way back to the hotel we stop at an area on the map called Mua Cave. The cave is accessed by boat but we’re here to climb the 500 steps to pagoda with an insane view of the landscape. Seeing the wind swirling through the rice paddies was awe inspiring.

There’s not long after our tour till we have to get on our overnight train to Hue. We have some iced tea and sandwiches and practise our squatting, something only Brend was able to fully master.

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On the train it was Darian’s turn to have his bed stolen. Which worked out ok as our cabin only had Brend and I in it so he joined us instead. We ate cookies, drank Wall Street whisky, played cards, and tried our hardest to sleep on wafer thin mattresses.

[Brend's account of Ninh Binh]
[Photos in the next post I promise]

It was Brendan’s one request that while visiting Mum in Ngaruawahia we see the Hamilton Gardens. I hadn’t been for years but remembered them being quite spectacular and well themed.

The weather was awful but we were only in Hams for two days so we braved the rain with my friend Kezz to take a look. The rain really packed in by the end of our visit so we left soaked and hungry. Worth it.

On Saturday I took my very first trip on the Overlander, the train that runs from Wellington to Auckland. Mum is in Hamilton so our journey wasn’t quite as far as Auckland, but still a good 10 hours.

Thankfully I’d had a bit of train practice in Asia. In Asia we bought cheap tickets and ended up with a) seats with no leg room, b) hard sleepers, which are planks of wood with thin covers and bed bugs, or c) plastic chairs. There was none of that in the Overlander. Lots of leg room, some bigger couches in a lounge at the back of the coach and clean enough toilets. Though in typical train fashion the door to the toilet was extremely awkward to get through I’m not sure that anyone much bigger than me would have been able to manage it.

Our carriage did come with the requisite “conspiracy theorists” though. Grow From Here on twitter was kind enough to explain to me how odd people are assigned on public transport: “they are allocated by the travel people – sometimes you get screaming kid instead- or paper rustling snarler”. Pleased to say I only had to deal with a guy explaining to me how an Egyptian prince and a Jewish Princess were married way back to broke a deal between feuding families (etc etc on and off for 10 hours). Cool story bro.

But thankfully no screaming children.

Waiting for 7am to check in // My favourite stretch of highway with views to Kapiti // You can see the South Island in good weather, that faint shape in the distance // Ohakune for a pie and coffee break (shit coffee good pie) // Art in Ohakune // Crossing one of the tall viaducts // The windows were annoyingly reflective // What NZ does well – farms

From Ha Long bay we traveled by bus, then boat to Hai Phong. It was around this point in the trip I finally felt like I was in Vietnam.

The Vietnamese people were fascinated by us whiteys, a couple of ladies gave me frights by putting their fingers in my stretched lobes, and guys on the street stopped their conversations to stare at us as we walked past. We only saw a few other tourists while in Hai Phong, it was really hard to tell we were in the third most populated city in Vietnam. (Though there is 4.5 million between Hanoi – the second most populated – and Hai Phong.) I was totally unprepared for white people to still be a ‘thing’.

After getting ripped off by a taxi driver, staying in a hotel for a couple of nights (with the added bonus of bed bugs for Brendan!), and discovering our first bar covered in sunflower seed shells we trekked over to the bus station to book a ride to the next town with a train track. I think the guys hanging out at the bus stop were even more fascinated by me than the ladies on the bus. They asked me, in the international language of sign language, if my tattoo was real or if it would come off. They delighted in our poor pronunciation of Ninh Binh when asking for bus tickets, apparently the ‘nh’ sound is more like a g!

Bonus memories: The pretty gardens running through the center of town; string cottage cheese at Big Man Bia; watching guys do round house kicks on the shuttlecocks while playing jianzi; trying Vietnamese coffee for the first time; seeing the huge town square full of small communist children doing a choreographed dance!!

See Brend’s memories of Hai Phong.

As I’ve said before Ha Long Bay is really beautiful. But it’s hard not to get scammed.

We really really wanted to go Hanoi > Ha Long Bay > Cat Ba Island > Haiphong, so we googled around and found the most highly recommended travel agency in Hanoi. Yes they were straight up and yes they gave us what we paid for, but of course no one is going to tell you the full story when they’re not going to make money from it. According to them there was absolutely no way we could go from Hanoi to Cat Ba Island in one day. No explanation offered, just that it couldn’t be done. So we booked their one day return trip tour from Hanoi to Ha Long Bay and got a few dollars knocked off because we wouldn’t be coming back to Hanoi.

The initial tour of Ha Long Bay went well, seafood lunch was provided, a cave was visited, limestone karsts in the shape of kissing chickens were seen. Back on the tourist wharf we spotted a travel agency and Darian, being team leader* at the time, went in to book a boat to Cat Ba Island the next day. We were promised many things, the most significant being that the boat would get us to the Cat Ba town side of the island and not the other side of the National Park from Cat Ba town end of Cat Ba Island.

You can guess where this is going.

Thankfully there were a number of other people on the boat from different tour companies that had been told they were going straight to Cat Ba town as well so they had a bus waiting for them. Then we realised why we were told at the start of the trip that the bus was NOT included in our tickets. (We had all heard this, we just dismissed it though because we weren’t planning on catching a bus anywhere.)

Fuck. That. Shit.

By the time we got off the boat I was so incensed and scared that we would have to spend the night outside in the cold that no one could have made me get off that bus.

The whole debacle ruined my memories of Ha Long Bay.

We only stayed one night on Cat Ba Island, but it was nice. We were mobbed on the street by people trying to get us to stay at their hotels so got a real cheap room and woke up to a bay full of little boats. Beautiful. I ate fresh crab from the shell for the first time, and we had a few drinks in a Kiwi bar.

While we waited for the boat to Haiphong the boys pulled out their guitars and played to a few people who joined us in the gazebo to listen.

*It was the team leaders responsibility to find transport to the city they were in charge of, accommodation, suggest some activities, and make decisions about where to eat when no one could decide. The role rotated to the next in line every time we moved cities. I highly recommend this approach, especially if you’re gone for a long time and moving often. It gives everyone a chance to relax sometimes and be a visitor rather than a tour leader.

Read Brendan’s opinion of our trip to Ha Long Bay.
See all of the Ha Long Bay photos on Flickr.

BLAH!

We flew into Vietnam to avoid the 24+ hour bus from Vientiane. Darian did take the bus though and didn’t think it was too bad. Apparently the roads are a lot better now than when it was known as the 24 hour death bus. If I had to do it again I’d take the bus, if only to save a couple of hundred dollars. Actually, that’s a lie. I just wouldn’t go to Hanoi.

I do remember a few good thing about this place. The water puppet theatre. Learning how to cross 6 lanes of traffic. OK, a couple of good things.

Other than that it’s all tiny streets, too much heat, bad smells, bad food, and power outages. Oh and that one time I read about our hotel online and someone said the owners let hookers use guests rooms while the guests are out and then the door opened and a girl and guy were at the door and they quickly apologised and went away.

A few days in the stinking hot heat and we were outta there, on our way to Halong Bay. Lots of people love the business of Hanoi. I really…don’t.

I didn’t take any photos in Hanoi, this is one of Brend’s. I didn’t not take any on purpose. It was just too hot to think about anything other than not getting run over.

On our first night in Vietnam a woman selling pineapple from one of those excellent bamboo pole shoulder things (technical term!) came up to me and asked if I wanted some. I said no. So she took off her conical hat and bamboo pole shoulder thing and put them on me, started telling Brendan to take a photo, insisted it was free to take a photo, all the while I’m protesting and trying to give her stuff back. Those poles are heavy yo!

Another minibus, another drive between cities. After being dropped at the out of town bus station in Laos’ capital we jumped in a cramped shuttle with a bunch of other tourists from the minibus and were taken into town. Like a few others in the shuttle we hadn’t booked accommodation in advance, thinking we could wing it like we’d been able to so far. We didn’t count on it being a holiday weekend though.

We found a cheap room, good enough and even came with a small window; unlike a few of the others we’d looked at. It wasn’t the most comfortable place though so we decided to head out to the Rivertime Resort and Ecolodge 30km from town. Being a hot hot holiday day we were sufficiently overcharged for our trip out to the “resort” (my excellent haggling skills got us an aircon minivan for the same price as a tuk tuk though!). We hadn’t booked, again, because we weren’t able to get hold of anyone on the phone the day before. I almost died when we were initially told they had no room for us. Thankfully it was just a communication mix up with neither of us speaking the other’s language.

Rivertime’s floating restaurant and “pool”

Is it just me, or do you expect snakeless bathrooms, rooms without huge bugs crawling up through the sizable gaps in the floorboards, and actual showers when you hear the word resort? In an ecolodge in Laos you’d be wrong to expect that. One night in the 3 bed dorm with outside bathroom and I’d had enough. I paid the difference for the 3 of us to be moved to a room with an en suite just so I could go to the bathroom in the night and not have to bathe in the river.
During the day the lodge was lovely, green, and relaxing sitting in the floating restaurant. Once the sun went down it turned into a bugfest so bad I almost wanted to go home. It’s one of the 3 worst things I remember about the trip.

Anyway. A few days later I convinced the boys it was time to leave and we went back to Vientiane, and back to exactly the same room we’d had when we first arrived. 4 days till our flight to Hanoi was plenty enough time for me to be eaten alive by bedbugs. I’d never encountered the critters before so I just assumed I was covered in mosquito bites, which wasn’t an unreasonable assumption considering the state of my legs before we arrived in Vientiane. But by the last night I noticed the patterns of two and three bites and spent an uncomfortable night terrified I was going to see the bugs crawling all over me as I tried to sleep. Ugh.

So long and good riddance Vientiane.

The Mekong River border with Thailand



Patuxai – The Victory Gate monument in the centre of Vientiane. Built with funds and concrete given to Laos from America to build a new airport.

See all the Vientiane photos on Flickr

Poor Vang Vieng has a fairly bad reputation thanks to more than a few Scheiß tourists. Maybe that’s not fair, but that’s my opinion regarding people that travel to another country in order to drink “happy shakes” in bars that play endless reruns of Friends; and get drunk while floating down an invariably swollen fast moving or shallow and rocky river.

With that in mind I was reluctant to even go to Vang Vieng, but the boys were not going to miss the chance to tube down a dirty river for a few hours. We agreed to not stop at any of the bars along the river therefore getting to float along it by ourselves while all the other tourists started drinking before they’d even gotten wet.

At one point during our stay it didn’t look like the river tubing was going to happen. We got hit with a spell of rainy weather and were warned the river would be freezing the day after a big rain. Thankfully we extended our stay by a day and the beautiful morning weather convinced me to forget the freezing water warnings and get in on the action. It turns out the river wasn’t cold at all. The rain that pelted us for half of our float was though.

It wasn’t a problem though, we enjoyed the float and stopped only twice to have a quick nip of something to warm us a little. And we scoffed at the tourists we saw boating back to town instead of tubing. At least they were smart enough not too float down the river for a couple of hours while smashed off their faces.

Vang Vieng is actually quite pretty if you can get past the fact it’s a tourist wasteland. We met some really nice Laotians and learnt a bit about Lao property laws and world economics from the man who was looking after our hostel. And I ended up eating my words against river tubing, it was one of the highlights of the trip.

The rains continued on our drive from Luang Prabang to Vang Vieng//Engrish//Half gin half tonic//We used the riverside pool at a fancy hotel for $2. Worth it.//The limestone cliffs, orange bridge, stairs, and clear blue swimming hole that surround Tham Jang Cave//America’s gift to Vang Vieng, an abandoned airstrip from the Vietnam War

Aren’t the limestone peaks a beautiful backdrop to this backpacker ghetto!
See all the Vang Vieng photos on Flickr