Sapa, Cat Cat Village, Silver Waterfall, Hanoi, Ha Long Bay (Vietnam #3)

The night of March 31st, we flew from Da Nang (a city close to Hoi An) to Hanoi. The flight was about 1 hour long, a very short flight. After we landed, we took a taxi to the spot where we were going to get on our bus that would take us to Sapa. Sapa is a township in Vietnam, it is at the very top of Vietnam, almost into China. Its about the most North you can get. We had to wait a long time until our bus showed up. It was a bus that had laying down seats so that people could sleep, we would be on the bus until about 3 AM. 

About 90 minutes later our bus finally showed up. Everybody piled onto the bus, and we all got settled in. Here is what the inside of the bus looked like.



I did not really like the seats, because they did not lie completely flat on the ground. Despite that, I still slept a bit on the bus. I slept from about the time we got on the bus till around midnight where I woke up, and I found that we were parked at a building, and the bus was turned off and it was very hot. Since the bus was off, the air conditioner was not running and many people on the bus were sleeping. The next time I woke up was at 3 AM where we had arrived in Sapa. Everybody else was sleeping except for us 4. We all got off the bus and got our bags and walked up to our hotel. We had to walk up a lot of stairs to get to our hotel. 

We walked in our room, and it was a pretty good room. There was a large bathroom, and 2 rooms one with 1 bed for Levi and I, and the other room with 2 beds for Oma and my Mom. Since it was about 4 AM at the time, we immediately went to bed. 

The next morning was April 1st, and it was easter Sunday. Since we were pretty tired out from the previous night, we woke up around 9:10 AM. We went quickly down stairs because there is a breakfast each morning from 6:30 AM to 9:30 AM. Once we got down there, we got a lot of food, the breakfast was really good, they had a ton of options. I was even able to have an omelette made for me. I had a potato salad also, some bacon, some watermelon, some pumpkin soup, and some bread with jam. After breakfast we just chilled in our rooms for a while. Around noon time, my Mom, Levi and I all went out to try to walk to Cat Cat Village, which is a village close to Sapa. We walked around Sapa for a while. We walked through a small square, and saw these little children in cute outfits.

This is the square that we walked through, there you can see a small church in the background.

We were trying to figure out which way it was to walk to Cat Cat Village, and once we found a place with WiFi we saw it was the complete opposite direction we were walking in. We walked back the way we came, and I ran up to the hotel again because I had sandals, but I needed my real shoes to walk. My Mom and Levi waited while I got my shoes. When I found them again, they found out that a new train station had opened literally one day before we arrived in Sapa. The train would take us up into another building, then we would take a cable car from there to the highest point in Vietnam. The mountain is called Fansipan, and is the highest in Indochina at 3,143 meters high. The lady told us that if we tried to walk the distance that the cable car took us, it would take us 2 whole days, but by cable car it only takes 25 minutes.



That is a picture of the new train station, they are still working on the inside of the building. We bought a ticket for the train, and for the cable car. When we got inside of the cable car, we saw that it had 2 new Guinness world records. One of them was the longest non-stop three-roped cable car (6292 meters) and greatest elevation difference by a non-stop three-roped cable car (1410 meters).



It was stunning looking out the windows of the cable car. We were so high up, and we could see the villages of Sapa right below us. 






It took about 25 minutes for us to reach the top of the Fansipan. At the top of the mountain, there was this whole collection of buddhist temples, stairs and statues. It was very amazing. Since we were so high up in the sky, walking up the stairs was very difficult because we had to breathe more because of the lack of oxygen in the air.






From far below we were able to see this giant statue, but once we finally made it to the top we could check it out in person. It was gigantic, we continued to walk to the top of the mountain. We had to take many rests, but once we finally reached the top we saw a little statue that told us how high we were. There was also a very large flag of Vietnam.




We were very high up, we were higher than some of the clouds. We looked down and saw many clouds passing through the mountains and going around them. 



There was much more to explore on the top of this mountain then I would have thought. We entered many buddhist temples and saw many statues.





After we were finished exploring the Fansipan mountain, we walked back down all of the stairs to get back on the cable car. On the ride down the cable car, it was much more cloudy than the ride up. At one point when we went into the clouds, we could not see in any direction because it was all white cloud. 

The next day in the morning it was very foggy, and we did not think that it was going to be a good day. We decided to walk to Cat Cat Village, which was formed in the 19th century by some families that were living in the mountainous areas of North Vietnam. I had the idea to rent a scooter that we could all ride on for the day, so thats what we did. Before we rented the scooter, I rode it up and down the street just to try it out.



All 3 of us got on one scooter, and I drove us first to Cat Cat Village. We had to park at a certain place then walk down to the village. Since there are a lot of hills and you need flat ground to grow food, they would take layers of the mountain and make them flat like this:

This is Levi and I in front of the Cat Cat sign.

There was a bamboo bridge that we walked on over a small pond. 




We walked down further into the village, and after walking down these steep stairs, we found a huge hidden village. There was a large river, a bridge and many shops and things near the water. There were 4 of these huge circular things that were turning because of the rivers flow.

This is a good view of the hidden village from the stairs we walked down.

These were the circular things that were turning because of the small river.

There was a seesaw by the river, and there was also this cute little coffee shop we passed by.



We continued to walk up the river until we had to go off the path. We climbed over rocks and over the grass to go up the river as far as we could. We saw the path all the people were walking on and managed to climb up the steep side of the hill to get to the path, instead of having to go back around and up the stairs which all the other people were doing.

This is the hill we climbed up to get to the path.

We followed the path and we passed by some shops, and we came upon a red bridge that went over the river we had been walking on. We walked over the bridge and then it was a 600 meter walk back to where our scooter was parked. There were a lot of people waiting to give people rides back to the beginning, but we just walked back. Once we got back to our bike, we got back on and drove back to our hotel.

Here is Levi, my Mom and I all on the scooter.

 It was around noon, and we parked our bike down by the new train station and walked back up to our hotel to take a short rest.

We took a short rest, then we decided to go to visit Silver Waterfall. It is a waterfall that is about 100 meters tall and about 12 km away from Sapa. We went back down to our scooter and I drove us from Sapa to Silver Waterfall. The roads were very twisty, but it was a very beautiful view. It took us about 30 minutes driving to get to the waterfall. We parked once we got there, got tickets, and went to walk up the stairs that would show us the large waterfall.

It was a very large waterfall. We went up one way, and crossed a bridge then walked down on the other side of the waterfall. We stopped and sat on some benches on the walk down. I found that there was another observation place just a 5 minute drive from the waterfall we were at. We went back to our scooter and drove to that place. We had to pay, and it turns out it was a huge walk. We walked down a long path with a bunch of stairs, and we found an old abandoned house and some water buffalo. The water buffalo are really nice, you can walk up to them and basically touch them and they don't mind.

This is a picture my Mom took of a Water Buffalo.

After the stop at that house, we continued on that path. It led us down by a river that we walked next to. 



We walked on that path, up many stairs and followed the river for a long time. There were many little pools on the way including this one.



We continued to walk along the river and on the path until we made it to the main place, which was a large pool at the bottom of a big waterfall. It was a perfect place to swim, and we had brought our 2 swimsuits and 2 towels because we thought that we would be able to swim at the Silver Waterfall. We were not able to swim at the Silver Waterfall, but we were able to swim here, but the water was freezing. 

This was the main place that Levi and I swam at.

I tried to ease my way into the water because how cold it was. After I swam around a bit, it became less cold to me. 

After I swam there for about 30 minutes, we continued to walk on the path back down the way we came. The path led us back to the same path that we used to walk down to the river. We walked up the many stairs to get back to the beginning. We got back on our bike and drove 12 km back to our hotel. This time we actually found the road that let us drive our bike right up to the front door of our hotel. We had another short rest, it was about 4:45 PM. Oma was in the room when we got back just laying down chillin. She said she did not want any dinner, so my Mom, Levi and I found the #1 restaurant in Sapa and started to drive there on our bike. The restaurants name was Luckydaisy's Bamboo Bar. 

It was 45 minutes away from Sapa by driving. We had our bike, and we started to follow the map, and we were on this road that was on the side of a mountain so to the right of us always was a cliff. Here is a view from the road we were riding on.

We stopped a couple times on the edge of the road to check our map.

The road started to get bad, there were so many bumps, and chunks of the concrete road torn out. I had to slow down so many times for the bumps, and the motor of our bike kept shutting off because we were going down hill, and since we were not using the motor it would just shut off. Luckily starting the motor on our bike is very easy so whenever we needed to actually use it again I would just quickly start it up. It took us more than 1 hour to get there, because how bad the roads were.

The restaurant was located in a small village called Ta Van Village. Once we actually got there, it was still very difficult to find the restaurant because my Moms map kept glitching. We drove around the village a lot until my Mom asked these 2 people if they knew where it was, and they directed us in the right direction. We finally got there around 6:30 PM. 

Luckily the food at the restaurant was amazing. We got a salad, and I got french fries. For my main dish I got Pork with lemon leaves. The pork was delicious and Levi got skewers of Chicken. The salad had many vegetables and peanuts in it, it was amazing.






We had massages at our hotel planned at 8 PM, and my Mom called to ask if we could do them at 9 PM, because we wound not be back to Sapa by 8 PM. We also had to return our bike before the night ended. We did not get dessert so that we could leave quicker, but the food was amazing, I also had 2 mango smoothies. It got dark about half way through our dinner, so once we left it was very dark. We tried to figure out how to turn our light on so we could see, a guy helped us to turn the light on. Good thing he did also, because without that light we wouldn't have been able to see anything. 



We started to drive back, and as you can see the road is very curvy. This time we were going up hill, which was much easier than going down hill, because we were always using the motor. It was pitch black, and the light off of our bike was the only thing letting us see the road ahead. At one point there was a huge puddle of water and we had a little slip and fell over, but we got back on and got to the place to return the bike. We gave the key to the people inside the hotel above, then made it back to our hotel by 8:15 PM. It was a very adventurous day.

April 3rd we woke up and we had to be checked out of our hotel room by noon. We went down to breakfast around 9 AM and had a delicious breakfast like we had had the past 2 mornings. After that we packed everything and at noon we left our room. I stayed in the lobby of our hotel while Levi, my Mom and my Oma went around to go shopping. The bus that would drive us back to Hanoi would pick us up at 3 PM. I did some homework while I was in the lobby of the hotel, and when Oma, Levi and my Mom came back they had bought a lot of snacks for the bus ride. Around 2:30 PM we all walked down to our bus and got on. This bus was not a bus that had a lot of beds on it, just regular chairs. It was a really nice bus though, because we had a lot of room and the chairs were very large. 

We started to drive away from Sapa, through the mountains. We stopped at a couple of places. The second place we stopped at, Levi and I both got Ice Cream. That was around 8 PM. We arrived in Hanoi around 10 PM, and our next Air B&B was only a 10 minute walk from where we got dropped off, so we walked there. To get to our house we had to walk through a very sketchy and narrow alley way in-between buildings, but once we got in the house, it was nice. 


We went to sleep since we had to get up early on Wednesday. Wednesday morning was April 4th, and we woke up around 7:30 AM. We were told to pack our backpacks with an extra pair of clothes and anything else we needed. We got a taxi to take us to the airport which was about 45 minutes away. Once we got there we went to our gate. I knew what we were doing but Levi did not. There were some advertizements of the planes that could land on the water and Levi said "wow it would be cool to go on one of those". We took a bus to our plane and Levi was surprised.



We were flying to halong bay. We got a short safety briefing before we boarded the plane. There were only about 10 seats on the entire plane, and they were like seats in a van. We took of from the land, but once we arrived in halong bay 1 hour later, we landed in the water. When flying over halong bay we could see a super awesome sight from the plane of the bay. All of these small and tall rocky islands.




 The pilot drove the plane onto land and we got off the plane. We then waited in this little building until we could board our cruise. We were going to take a 1 night cruise around halong bay. Once we got on the boat around 12:30 PM, we went up to the sun deck for welcome drinks and a safety briefing. Then we went to the restaurant on the 1st floor of the boat for Lunch. They had a lot of good food for lunch, fruit, many different dishes with meat and noodles. I got a mango smoothie also. 

After lunch, we had some time to chill. Levi was reading his book outside of our room. 




We were passing by a ton of small tall round islands. It was so amazing. Our first stop was a cave. We all got off to see the cave, we had to climb 150 steps before we were able to enter the cave though. Once inside the cave, it was much colder. It was a very large cave.

Here is us walking on the pathway after the cave to get to our boat. 

Later on in the evening they had a chef teaching a group of people how to make spring rolls the traditional style of near halong bay. You would take a sheet of rice paper and put it on a wet towel. Then you would take a little bit of lettuce, then on top of that add some thin slices of carrots, red pepper and cucumber. Then you would roll that up a bit, while still leaving space for a bit of thin pork and some shrimp. 

This is me making my own.

Later Wednesday night on the boat from 8:30 PM to 10:30 PM, they were showing the movie Kong: Skull Island. It was cool because some of the movie was filmed in Vietnam, including Halong bay which is where we were when we watched the movie. I had never seen the movie before, but I had been to an attraction about it when I was at Universal Studios in Orlando. I liked the movie very much. 

The next morning we woke up around 7:30 AM so that we could get off of the boat for a chance to go swimming at a beach and climb about 400 stairs to the top of this mountain. I did not want to swim, but my Mom and Levi hung out at the beach while I climbed the stairs to get to the top of the mountain. After I was back down, I watched Levi while my Mom climbed the mountain. It was a pretty nice view from the top, but there were a lot of stairs.



After we got back on the boat, we had Brunch which would be our final meal. We then started to head back to land. Around 11 AM, we all got off the boat and went back to our sea plane. We flew back to Hanoi and got a taxi back to our Air B&B. 

Thursday night we went out to eat.

The food was delicious. The next day Friday, was more of a chill and relax day. We did want to go out to get food, so I chose a cafe to go get breakfast at. The name was called the Kalina Cafe. They had mostly waffles, so Levi and I each got waffles, and we got smoothies also. It was a very rainy day Friday, so the walk there, Levi and I got soaked. It was only about a 15 minute walk. We walked to a bookstore after Levi and I finished our waffles. It was 3 minutes from the Cafe. They had a lot of interesting books, Levi got a new book that he was going to read on the plane rides home. We then went back outside to walk home. 

Saturday, April 7 was our last full day in Vietnam and we had a tour that we went on. We woke up around 7:30 AM to get ready. We were picked up in a van with some other people from places such as South Korea and California, other tourists. We drove 2.5 hours south of Hanoi to get to the Bai Dinh Pagoda. It is the largest pagoda in Vietnam, that was built from 2003-2010. There are 500 statues of different buddhas in lines inside the giant pagoda. The entrance was a large bridge to a main gate.

We walked along the walls of the pagoda and there were 250 buddha statues on each side. Each statue had a different color near the knees because people would touch the statues and the oil on their hands would make the stone more shiny. They believe that if they touch the buddha statue, their prayers will be answered. 




We came to the top of the pagoda where there was this main building. There was a giant buddha, it weighed many tonnes, I cant remember exactly how many but I remember thinking it should have been impossible to transport with how heavy it was. 

After we were finished visiting the biggest pagoda in Vietnam, we got back on the bus that would take us for Lunch. We arrived at a large building with a buffet, many other busses with tourists were here. We got food from the buffet, they had good food. I had a lot of noodles, pumpkin soup and french fries. After Lunch our whole group went to take a bike ride. The bikes were not that easy to control. We first stopped at this river place. 



It was a bit muddy in this area, and Levi tipped while riding his bike and got a bit muddy. We then turned around and biked back to the place to put back our bikes.



We got back in the van and were taken to our coolest part of the day. We were going in boats, and going to be rowed around on a river, and we even went under many caves that were half above water it seemed. We helped paddle our boat so we could overtake other slower boats, it was fun. 








After the boat ride, we got back in the van and traveled back to Hanoi. That night at 10 PM, we headed to the airport to catch our flight. It was at 1 AM. The flight was a very long flight. I did not sleep a lot because it was very hard to sleep while I was sitting upright in my chair. I watched a lot of shows and listened to a lot of music. I think I might have gotten 1-2 hours of sleep at one point. I woke up thinking we were a few hours until we had to land, but I checked and we still had 6 more hours to fly. Once we landed, we had 1 more short flight. We got back to Ireland and arrived at our house around Noon. It is much easier trying to adjust from Vietnam time to Dublin time, because I was not tired during the day, I was just tired around 8 PM which is good, because I got a ton of sleep that night. The few days after I also fell asleep around 8-9 PM and woke up around 7 AM automatically just because I had been in Vietnam.

March 31 - April 8, 2018