June 1st - 5th, 2024 - Northern Vietnam

July 1st - 2nd, 2024

Started my day with breakfast at the hostel called the one. It was the best breakfast I’ve had a hostel yet. A crepe with bananas and chocolate sauce and some fruit. I worked extensively on my blog this day and even posted some things from my bipolar journal. I also went to the temple of literature. Surprisingly there wasn’t much to read there it was just a nice park with some cool architecture. I couldn’t seem to figure out how to get my e sim to work so I just bought a SIM card from the hostel. Kept it simple. Later that day I went swimming at the rooftop pool. I talked to many people. It’s pretty easy to make temporary friends. You just go up to them and ask where they are from. The conversations usually go the same but it’s fun to interact with others rather than just keeping to myself. I think it’s going to help me approach girls in bars when I go back to Canada, although, not sure asking someone where they are from will be the best opening. I’ll have to think of something. I booked a sleeper bus to Ha Giang. I had no idea what to expect. It was a normal bus size but it had three rows of bunk beds and you weren’t lying down completely it was more like a 45 degree angle. They are built for Vietnamese people so the space that is yours is rather small. It was uncomfortable and even though I took extra quetiapene I couldn’t fall asleep. It picked me up at 7:30pm and I got to my destination at 2 am.

July 2nd, 2024

Woke up at 8 am and had breakfast. Then packed for my 4 day, 3 night trip for the Ha Giang loop. People I’ve talked to from all kinds of backgrounds say that this trip is the highlight of their trip to Vietnam. It’s weird, I feel conflicted. On one hand I have high expectations for this but I’m also like non challant about it and am taking it all in as i go and be like let’s see what happens. I have no idea what I’m in for kind of vibe. A couple hours into our trip it started to rain so we stopped on the side of the road and the drivers had rain gear for everyone and it was head to toe coverage. We were able to ride for a bit but it turned into very heavy rain so we stopped at a rest stop with a shelter and waited for about an hour before the rain stopped and we could keep driving. I must say the views are spectacular and I didn’t mind driving in the rain. It was kinda cool. Hopefully we do get some sun but it’s unlikely. The forecast is 90% chance of rain due the rest of the trip. Luckily it doesn’t rain for very long. With rain comes fog and it’s cool the way it divides itself in the mountains and visibility changes very quickly. We had a nice lunch and then carried on for that rest of the day. My easy rider has a Bluetooth speaker so I was listening to music the whole time. It was really nice. We made it to our destination. I took a shower then played some pool until dinner. We had shareable plates just like we did for lunch. Then we sang some karaoke and went to bed.

July 3rd-5th, 2024

The rest of the loop was much of the same. A little rain and some good views. We saw countless waterfalls. Lots of minor landslides that were covering half the road but still passable. I am really thankful for my motorbike driver on the trip. He was a very safe driver and although he didn’t speak any English we still got along nicely and used google translate to communicate. One of the days we went to this huge waterfall. It was so big you could jump off near the top of it and land in the water and be fine. Some people were even diving in head first. I just jumped in normally. It was difficult to swim to the shore as we were technically in a river, which showed me I will definitely need to get better at swimming if I ever want to surf. The next day we did more driving around. The elevation gain was so high that some days you couldn’t even see the view at all at some of the viewpoints. It was consistently traveling up and down the mountains. The mountains were very picturesque and had sharp peaks and valleys. They were also very green with a lot of deciduous plants and trees. It don’t seem like many of the mountains were climbable because of their vegetation and steepness. Even if there was an option for a hike I wouldn’t want to do it. Our meals for lunch and dinner were all the same at each day at each of the stops and home stays. It was ok food but got a bit tiresome after the second day. Our breakfast had 4 options but I always chose the bananas and crepes options. I guess they do this to keep things simple and be able to provide a meal that everyone will like as there is something for everyone. There was a pork chicken beef, and tofu. Rice. Noodles. Spring roles. Rice cakes, spinach. Egg. Cucumbers and watermelon for dessert. Not a bad spread but again 7 of our meals were these options. On the final day we had a full day of sunshine/ cloudy day. We were supposed to go on a boat trip but the electrical plant had flooded so it made it not possible. So instead we did something not originally on the itinerary and not something most tours got to do which was exploring a cave. I think I would have preferred the cave over the boat trip anyway. To recap, the days started with 4 choices for breakfast and you had to pay for coffee. We left around 9:30 am each day and drove till 5/5:30 each day. We had multiple stops to give our butts a break and to see all the different viewpoints. Lunch was around 12 or 1 each day. Then when it came to dinner it was at 7 pm. The whole crew showered between 6:30 and 7 pm and we all stayed in a huge group room where all the beds were laid out quite close to each other with mosquito nets protecting us from the bugs although there weren’t many bugs thankfully. We would have dinner and they would try and persuade me to do a shot of happy water but I never did it because I’ve tried it once before and didn’t like it. Happy water is a rice wine liquor. We would then sing karaoke till ten pm and then go to bed as we had to be up at 8 am the next day. I always went to bed at 9 pm as I was too tired and needed some time alone. All in all a good trip , but I think if I were to do it again I would do the 2 night 3 days instead.