Prologue
Well, we are coming up on 4 months! What’s hard is burnout from making decisions! We are taking more days off, often due to colds, and letting others help plan and set up our activities. We actually don’t travel, as in pack up and move rooms that often. Maybe every 3 days at most. In Hanoi we packed smaller packs for some treks and left the bigger packs at the hotel we returned to! So it’s not so much schlepping. It’s been cold and wet, so wearing the same clothes for a couple of days is easy.
I have to admit I’m becoming a fan of Uncle Ho! He says all the right things in quotes you read about the revolution in the museums.
I’m easing up on being guilty for the war as an American. I’m glad my family and I were always protesters back then. I know on many levels it’s propaganda here, but the Vietnamese are really smart resistant fighters. It’s only been since 1975, and they are really moving on with their goals! Currently, I can only hope for the USA. We have to keep going, even when it feels so ludicrous!
We are both a bit homesick, but not enough to come home yet. We have a few more crazy things to do like see Orangutans, ride on the back of motorcycles for 3 days on the Ha Long loop, and trek to some Hmong Villi ages for homestays. Look it up on YouTube if you want to see how nuts we are!
Then we head south to rest and relax, go to an ecolodge, then get on the cruise ship to Sydney. That is when I will really need book and Netflix/Amazon recommendations please. Internet will be sketchy I suspect, so we plan to download some things before we depart.
As always, it would be nice to hear from people.
Hang in there Minnesota it will warm up!
Several days pass…
Epilogue
Sapa was so cold, rainy, and foggy, we cancelled the motorcycles and village treks with homestays. I am so glad we did.
We converted the trip to a car tour, drove to the villages, had breaks in the fog with sun and saw beautiful rice fields and terraced gardens! We also kept warm!!!!
More on Sapa in the blog.
We had a lovely guide, who has 3 children already. She is probably 26-29 years old. She told us all about getting married here at 14-16, or then you probably won’t. She plans on being a grandmother by 35.
We bought a beautiful hand-made batik table cloth from a local artist.
Women leave their family for their husband’s. She hopes her children will do whatever they want, but her son will be the one to take care of her when she gets old. I can’t help wonder what this place will be like in 5 years.
Ellen
For more exciting Sapa news, read the next posts…
Netflix: The Six Tripple Eight (black WACs in WWIi- True Story), Back in Action, Man on the Inside (short Series- Ted Danson), Extraordinary Attorney Woo (Korean Series), Dark Winds (series – based on Tony Hillerman books)
Hope you relax sometimes – you’ve set quite a pace!
I’m going on the Danube soon (Budapest to Prague), Ireland in May with family, and Savanna,-Charleston-Asheville in April. Hope I can power through that much activity – you’ve set quite a standard – you guys are rock stars!