Even more delinquent

I know that we are falling ever further behind on our blog. We spent so many hours in front of the computer in Hanoi working on financial aid applications that we simply have not had the time to write much here - and several of the days were not really worth reporting. (Woke up, ate, did financial aid, ate, more financial aid, you get the point).

Here's a short run down of what we did:

On Feb 18, we walked across a small river to cross from China into Vietnam, at the border crossing town of Lao Cai (the Chinese city is Hekku). We let the somewhat overpriced travel desk at the border crossing book us minibus tickets to Sa Pa, an old French hill station, and arrived in time for lunch. Sa Pa gets high marks in the guidebooks, but we did not see much: It was foggy and cold both days that we were there. We still managed to take a short walk down to an ethnic minority village (H'mong, I believe), which was full of touts selling soda and local textiles; there was a pretty enough waterfall right below the village. On the whole, though, we'll have to trust other people's reports that the trekking and views are magnificent.

Our experience heading to Hanoi the next day was anything but fun. We booked first class, soft sleeper seats from a travel agent in Sa Pa, but were told that we'd have to pick up the physical tickets back in Lao Cai, the nearest train station. The bus from Sa Pa dropped us off at a cafe opposite the train station, and the driver assured me that the cafe staff could pick up the tickets for us. They did - but for crummier sleeping berths in separate compartments on the wrong train. Unfortunately, they got them to us about 1 minute before the train left, so we pretty much had to take it, or wait for another day before heading to Hanoi. We were had.

We got into Hanoi very early on the 20th, 5 AM, before any of the hotels opened. We shared a cab with an Australian couple to the old quarter of town, and, after walking the deserted streets for a bit, woke up a hotel clerk and had some coffee until the rest of the city woke up. The couple stayed at that hotel, but we poked around and found a delightful little place, the Prince 2, that offered great rooms with in-room internet access. Financial aid applications occupied the next couple of days, with a few hours thrown in here and there for tourism: Walking through the colonial quarter, tea (coffee) and an all-you-can-eat afternoon chocolate bar at the Metropole, Hanoi's old colonial hotel, haircuts at the Metropole, walking by Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum and tours of a few temples. We also took a day trip to the Perfume Pagoda, an old holy site in a cave a two hour drive from Hanoi. The highlight of that trip, I thought, was the hour-long rowboat ride from the parking lot to the trail leading up to the cave. The two or three km trail itself was chockablock with touts. For Meryl, one of the highlights of Hanoi may have been discovering that the Vietnamese do, indeed, still bake pain au chocolat.

On Feb. 24, we left for a three day tour of Halong Bay, which looks a bit like Yangshuo would if you flooded it. More than 1600 karst mountains rise dramatically out of the sea. We spent one of the nights on a fairly charming wooden boat, the next in a hotel on Cat Bay island in the bay. We both enjoyed the trip, but were feeling a bit cooped up by the end of it - too many hours on buses and boats for my taste.

We returned to Hanoi on the evening of the 26th, and spent the day of the 27th doing more financial aid applications. That evening we caught a train to Hue, the first major town south of the old dividing line between North and South, and the site of the national capital from about 1800 to 1945. I thought Hue was a bit disappointing, but we spent some pleasant hours touring the site of the old palace and bicycling out to two of the old emperors' park-like mausoleums outside of town. Much less pleasant was a tour of the DMZ. We ended up spending something like 12 hours crammed into a bus being driven from place to place along the DMZ with minimal explanation of the sites and virtually no time whatsoever to actually explore them or appreciate the history of the war. It was a bit of a shame, because the history could have been so well presented. I do wonder what the non-Americans - only 4 of the 20 or more of us on the trip were American - made of it.

We left Hue on the 4th to travel to Hoi An, a popular tourist town several hours train ride south of Hue. I find it, too, overrated, though some of our discontent may be that we have not seen the sun in weeks and it is cold here - we're both ready for some sun. Aside from the gloom, it is jam-packed with tourists, aggressive touts and overpriced goods. We did cave in and order some of the local specialty, tailor-made clothes, but are not in love with the results. They're not terrible, they just don't fit as well as we hoped and are not the bargain we'd been led to believe before we arrived here.

Touring My Son, a ruined Cham temple site dating to the 7th-13th centuries, was definitely the highlight of Hoi An. The ruins, set amid a beautiful, jungle-filled valley, are extraordinarily atmospheric, and got us excited about seeing Angkor in a few weeks.

Tomorrow, March 7, we're fleeing another couple of hundred miles south in hope of finding some warmth. We'll spend the night of March 8 in Nha Trang, a big beach-side resort town catering to foreigners, and will then spend the next couple of days at a remote, minimalist beach resort 40 km north of there - we're not sure if we'll have internet or not. If you need to get in touch, you could try our Vietnamese cell phone, +84 91 526 3892. After that we hope to arrange a two-day elephant trek in a national park along the Vietnamese-Cambodian border.

On a different note, we both received wonderful news on the law school front. Michigan has offered us both Darrow fellowships, which would cover full tuition as well as giving us an annual stipend for living expenses. It is a great option for us to consider, and made us feel that the hours of financial aid and scholarship applications are paying off!

More to come soon, I hope!