Actually leaving Japan felt kinda like leaving home again because Shanghai and Japan both felt so close to the western way of life that it could be compared to home and Vietnam was definately not goig to be all that. I managed to screw up on reading the time table for my scheduled departure from Osaka and spend 24 h at the airport! Fortunately for me the place had its own manga kissa where you could use the Internet, read comics, drink beverages and eat a shitload of icecream. Hurrah for the Japanese subcultures!
I arrived Hanoi at 9 PM local time which ment that not alot of busses were heading out the city. For some reason you couldnt change your money to Vietnamese dong at the Osaka airport and it was even a bigger suprise when I found out that the foreign currency exchange office was closed at the Hanoi airport. That leaves me with hundreds of dollars and alot to hope for. Fortunately dollar is a payable currency in Vietnam so I manage to get a taxi to the host I'm staying with in Hanoi, another couchsurffer. Mark is a university professor who has pretty much done and seen it all. Being a traveler for 4 years all around the world can leave a man with alot of stories to tell. He hosted me for a week at his pad which offered free wakeup calls in the form of jackhammers and motorbike horns from 7 AM in the morning.
As for Hanoi I can say only that its not much of a tourist town. Great bars and cafes and tons of lovely cheap local food but other than that it was just a place for me to catch up on some reading. I want to do it properly when my counterpart arrives here :). Managed to read two books during that week. The first being a one man adventure story about survival on your own without money, accomodation or transportation called Into The Wild. A decent book to read while your traveling but doesnt reach my top 5 books so far. The other book was of corse the one I've been trying read for a month now, George Orwel's 1984. God what book. Hope we wont have to endure anything of that sort in our lifetime although there are some signs in the air...
Anyway after one week of staying in Hanoi I decided to check out the lovely hill station in the northern Vietnam called Sapa. Filled all around with gigantic hills and local minorities making it a place deffo worth visiting. The day of arrival I checked in to a cheap hotel headed out to the local villages near the town. At the bottom of the valley lies the village of Cat Cat with waterfalls and rivers running through the villages, creating small ponds where to swim, relax and bathe in the sun. Most tourist decided only to look from a distance and take pictures so it was a really great experience mixing with the local kids in their water sports (throwing rocks into the water next to people to get them wet).
Also managed to meet two italian guys named Criss and Gabri with whom we spend the next day cruising the countryside with motorbikes and getting into some sticky situations on the outskirts of Sapa. Basically we went on a dirtroad that supposedly lead to a minority village but the road was so bad we had to dump the bikes midway where we talked to some local folk. After the visit we came back to the bikes to find them a bit out of shape and took a while to find out that the locals (god knows for what reason) had made some adjustment to the bike that made them run like shit. After a little figuring out we managed to fix the problems and drived into the sunset like the cowboys we are! Now its time the head back to Hanoi to meet my beautiful girlfriend who will be here in a matter of days!
More pictures at:
http://picasaweb.google.com/timo.laaksonen/
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