Vang Vieng

Me again:)
Our next stop on the Laos trail was to Vang Vieng. It's a beautiful place, settled right into a valley with huge karst cliffs towering over you and a river running through everything. Quite picturesque indeed. So naturally, it turned into a huge party spot. People start upriver and float down from bar to bar until they're back in town. Now, at one time, I think there were 20-some bars and it was a complete shit-show. Like, 21-year-olds dying of cardiac arrest from drinking too much. Or breaking their necks on a flying fox that goes over the river. However, after enough of these horrible things happened they decided to scale things down a bit. Now it's four bars, and you can't ride a 40 ft flying fox while wasted...because that is a terrible idea. Yet, despite the scaling back, it's still quite a party and the opportunities for messiness were certainly not omitted.
We made it Vang Vieng by bus, and on the way we met four travelling buddies: Eilis (Ireland), Keith (Ireland), Nikola (Scotland) and Ewen (Scotland). They came with us to Pan's, a guesthouse we all ended up staying at. We spent the afternoon chatting about where we'd been travelling, where we were going, what we'd seen along the way. That sort of thing. That night I went for a walk with the girls to the river. They were landing hot air balloons in the river, those crazy buggers.


Such a pretty view from our hostel
The next morning, it was no funny business- time to get tubing! Kidding, of course it took us until noon to get organized. Asking 6 backpackers to do anything in a timely fashion is like herding cats.

Here is our crew

I could narrate the experience bar by bar, but why take away from the magic? We had a great time, there may have been a mud-pit/volleyball court at the last bar and it got pretty real.
Next up- Luang Prabang!

Vientiane

Hi Guys,
From Hanoi we took a plane to Vientiane, the capital of Laos. This is the first time we took a plane since arriving in SE Asia. After getting off the plane and dropping off bags at the hostel we rented some bikes and headed for the COPE Centre- the Cooperative Orthotic and Prosthetic Enterprise. Here they have an interpretive centre educating people about the UXO (unexploded ordnance) left behind after the Vietnam War and how hazardous it is for the Laotian people in rural areas. I was blown away by so many of the things I learned, like how more bombs were dropped on Laos by the Americans than by both sides combined in WWII. And why? because the Viet Cong were using parts of Laos as their supply line (the Ho Chi Minh trail), so the Americans kept trying to sever it. Also, when the American bomber planes didn't find the targets they intended to strike, they would just dump them indiscriminately over Laos because it was too dangerous to land with them on board! When you broke it down, the Americans flew a bombing mission every 8 minutes, 24 hours per day, for 9 years! Not all the bombs exploded on contact, so what is still left to blow up is called UXO. It's this UXO that is preventing Laotians from farming large tracts of land because they are afraid they will be injured or killed. It's pretty hard for a country to industrialize when they don't have the land base to feed their people. By most estimates, there is about 84,000 km2 needing to be cleared of UXO. To put it into perspective, international organizations are clearing the Laos countryside at a rate of 40 km2 per year. You do the math, if we don't increase the rate of clearing, that's 2100 years before the whole country is safe. So this COPE Centre not only raises awareness, but also produces prosthetic limbs for victims of UXO, polio and club foot.


Jared checking out the exhibits


Some facts for more learning


After this we biked to the Arc de Triomphe, a replica of the one in France. Rumor has it the French government had donated the concrete for a bridge project, but they decided to make this instead.

Until next time!

Hanoi

Hey guys!

So this is kind of two trips squished into one blog, made to seem like one trip but just go with it ☺️

The first thing we did in Hanoi was take a cab to the Ho Chi Minh Museum. It's basically a shrine to Vietnam's favourite revolutionary- the Che Guevara of Vietnam. He was a Vietnamese Communist revolutionary, he was both the prime minister and the president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV). He was on the ground floor in the formation of the DRV, the People's Army of Vietnam and the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War. The museum to him was really, really crazy. Full of artifacts from his life, slips of paper he had written on, his spectacles, the cabin he had lived in was moved onto the museum grounds. Jared kept expecting to turn the corner and find toilet paper he had used :S

The outside of the museum

Uncle Ho himself

And his spectacles

This is his mausoleum, his fully embalmed body resides here but spends one month out of the year in Moscow being refurbished......whatever that means. We weren't there at the right time to view him so we missed out on the opportunity to see Ho Chi Minh preserved. Not too sure how I feel about that.

After lunch and a few Vietnamese coffees (picture half coffee, half sweetened condensed milk) we took a tour around the Old Quarter. There are an insane amount of scooters here, by the way.

Walking around the Old Quarter was quite a treat. We probably covered our tracks 5 times over, but it seemed like a brand new place when approached from a different angle. So much going on, so much food, I was in heaven!

Cat Ba Island

From the folks at World Vet Adventures....i.e. Jared and Roberta, we apologize for this ridiculously long hiatus from blogging. Somewhere along the way (perhaps our third time through Thailand) we got so behind we kind of threw in the towel and figured we'd get the blogs churned out in no time once we were back in Canada with 'good internet.' Well, here we are 8 1/2 months after arriving home and we haven't done a single blog.....shit. But all is not lost, we kept a journal and have so very many pictures we need to share! So here goes, a bit of a trip down  memory lane for us, and we promise to be better next time....
We return now to your regular viewing:

Hello all,
In real life, we took a night bus up to Hanoi, spent an afternoon, then another night bus to Sapa, spend a few days, then a night bus to Cat Ba, which is what this blog is about. Then we bussed back to Hanoi and spent a few days there before leaving for Laos. However, we squished those two separate Hanoi experiences into one blog, the next in the sequence. Not that any of this matters, I'll get back to the good stuff.

Lots of people had told us about how beautiful Halong Bay was, but it was a shame because so many people go there, of all ages, and they had ruined the experience with the myriad of boats and noise. The 'cool kids' will tell you to go to Cat Ba, and explore the other side of the bay; same scenery, less developed, less people. We're in. We took a night bus from Sapa (I know, can't get enough of these things) and it was actually quite posh. There were about 5 seats in the back that all reclined in a row so it was the closest thing to a bed on a bus we'd seen yet and we thought we were living quite high.
We got to Halong harbour and from here had to taxi to a different/ less touristy harbour where we would catch a boat for Cat Ba. We had been warned in the Lonely Planet that they run a scam where you catch the ferry just in time to miss the last bus on the other side. We figured we were fine because it was still first thing in the morning and had time to get across. Unfortunately, when we got to the harbour we learned the next bus bound for Cat Ba Island wasn't leaving until 3 pm. So we trounced all over the two sides of the harbour and finally found some guys that would take their little boat over for us. The saga continued on the other side as we had to haggle for a couple of moto taxis to take us over to the other side of the island where Cat Ba town (and our hotel) actually were. It ended up costing way more this way, but eventually we got over and it was all good.
We lounged around that day, but made a plan to do some kayaking in the bay the next day. Here's some pictures:

Some people live out in the bay on floating houses, raising fish in cages under their homes

The next day we grabbed some scooters and decided to make a loop around the island (it's pretty small).

We were just about to the end of the smallest loop when we came across a pile of boulders on the road. The work crews were using explosives and I think they got a little over-zealous. So we had to turn around and go pretty much the entire way back to Cat Ba town. From there, we headed up the only other road on the island towards the National Park. National parks in SE Asia are kind of weird, this one had a bunch of monkies caged up as you walked down a road going apparently nowhere. Eventually we came to a trailhead and started walking in the jungle. We took the Ngu Lam Peak walk for about 1 1/2 hours and ended up on top of the jungle- with some amazing views.

 

On the drive back we toured a hospital that had been carved out of the inside of a mountain- completely safe from air attacks during the Vietnam War. I had foolishly assumed a place as remote as Cat Ba Island wouldn't have even been involved in the fighting but that was obviously not the case. We walked through the narrow tunnels and got an appreciation for how incredibly hard the Vietnamese people had to work to win the war.


View from the entrance to the hospital cave looking out

Climbing out of the hospital cave

That night we made plans to head back to Hanoi. Until next time!