1st Tour of Duty in Vietnam

OKI have been on the move this month, my last entry was in Laos I believe so I ll go from there! I flew from Ventine Laos (the capital city) the same day that I had arrived there. I really had not heard anything good about the city so I said goodbye to my 3 English buds that I was with and hopped on a jet plane for Hanoi, Vietnam! Flights in Asia are so cheap, it is much better to fly in some cases just to avoid the border towns. I have heard many stories of corrupt boarder crossing guards theat dont get paid much so they will try and get more money out of you. Anyway my flight was good I flew with an American and a Canadian girl that I had met a few weeks before. I landed in Hanoi and got crammed into this little bus that was supposed to take us to the Old Quarter, which is the main backpaker area in Hanoi. The guy would not leave until every seat was full so I waited like an extra hour till he filled his little mini bus. Then we were off in the absolute MADNESS that is traffic in Hanoi! There are motorbikes like flies all around any proper car or bus on the road, lanes dont mean anything, and the horn is the most important feature on any vehicle! Its an amazing experience, the bus driver would bob and weave his way through traffic and if he came up on a slow gravel hauling truck he would hold his horn on and flash is high beam lights on and off till the truch found room to move over while also blaring on his horn at motorbikes (with 3 or 4 people on them) telling them to move! When we would pass the truck finaly the drivers would smile at each other and move on! Un believable! Any one reading this think of what you would have done if you were the gravel truck driver after our bus passed, I bet you wouldnt have smiled! That is how the Vietnamese are! In Hanoi I seen mabey 2 or 3 sets of lights, on the route I took anyway, but most intersections are not controled at all! Imagine the first intersection at the bottom of the hill in St Albert with no light controls! Anyway I arrived at my hostel (after my death ride through Hanoi) which was nice. I spent one day trying to get my bearings, all the streets look the same and are very very narrow! They carry amazing things on the motorbikes here, I seen one guy had 3 pigs, full sized pigs strapped on either side of the bike and one behind him, and he was cruzing down the highway! I seen something unbeliveable every day! I went and vistited the war memorial museum in Hanoi and got to see a whole lot of old American and Vietnamese weapons and aircraft from the war. The Northern Vietnamese forces shot down captured and destroyed 33000 American and Southern Vietnamese and French planes in the war! There was Tanks and a crashed B 52 Bomber and even weapons dating back to the french colonial wars in Vietnam. These people have been at war since the early 20th century! The French were trying to occupy Vietnam when there wasent World Wars or the Vietnam War. Ho Chi Min was the communist hero of Vietnam, he made them independant from any foriegn control. He is on all their curency, and in pictures in most peoples houses. He was loved so much he was ( just like all other communist icons in history) embalmbed and is in his own building in Hanoi where all could view him. I couldnt see him because he was in Russia for 3 months getting "maintained" hair cut and toenails clipped! Haha.I then took a train north to the village of Sappa and spent 2 days treking around through ethnic villages and taking in the beautiful scenery! They are amazing people they have nothing but moutians and hills in the area but they have acutally stepped out the hills making small plots in which to grow rice. They use bamboo to run water to the rice paddies from a river and it trickles down the steps of paddies and fills them for growing! Really amazing people, we thing we have some small houses sometimes, there were 11 people that all lived in this little shack that I went to in the Cat Cat village, no bigger than 15ft by 15ft, with a small loft. They had a hole in the roof for light, and mom and dad had a thach bed. All the kids that werent potty trained just ran around naked from the waist down. All of them were happy, despite their rough living conditions absence of material goods, it was so great to see this! I will think twice about complaining now after seeing and talking to these people! The girls would get married and have kids by 20, they thought it the wierdest thing that I wasnt married! I walked with this one girl for 5 hours on our treck she had her 4mo old strapped on her back with a large colourfull cloth. He didnt make a noise the whole time, he slept and ocasionally looked up at me and stared with his dark eyes! Her name was Nei ( i think) but she told me that when they get married the girls wear large hoop earings instead of a ring. I seen a few of the older women and they all had big elongated ear lobes!I took the train back after a couple days and spent one more night in Hanoi. I then hopped a bus for Halong Bay which is east of Hanoi. It is a beautiful array islands that line the coast, almost all are like small mountians jutting up from the ocean. I borded a little vessel that toured us through the islands and took us to the biggest Island called Cat Ba Island. I stayed there for 1 night and got to know some amazing people that were on my tour with me. The first was Lawrence he had the best accent I have heard to date, he sounded like Geeves the butler or Jeffery from Fresh Prince of Bel Air. He would always be singing in his opera like voice and had a great knowlege of the Vietnam War. I also had a couple with their two kids who were 5 and 3 years old, the mom was Bolivian and a lawyer and the dad was Dutch and a business man. They lived in Mongolia and helped out farmers and other businesses grow and become more efficent. The kids amazed me they spoke english, spanish, dutch, and some mongolian! I also met a couple that was headding down to Oz to get married and live there! They had just lived in London for 6 years and had some great stories! We spent the next night on the boat, and had a great dinner on the boat as well, they had a dining room and a nice sun deck on top that you could jump off into the ocean! I learned to play 500 and met even more people that night! Even a HD Mechanic from Oz!I took the bus back to Hanoi and said good bye to my friends on the tour group and caught the next bus to Hue, a city 12hrs south of Hanoi. I got a great bus, it was a sleeper bus and all the seats were stacked like bunk beds and reclined way back into a bed. I got on the bus and all the beds had been taken so they had over booked the bus by one. I was quite happy to just catch the next bus the next day, but the driver and the ticket lady were yelling at each other in vietnamese and there was some mass confusion and eventually the ticket lady paid off one of the local passengers and gave her a mat on the floor to sleep on and another local man took her bed and I took his. Needless to say I felt pretty bad for her.I did arrive well rested in Hue and I hope she did too!