Halong Bay, 'Nam

It's been a while since the last update.. mostly because we've been chillaxing so deep. I really did just say that. Anyway now we have a stable internet connection (for a few hours at least)-- here are some pics from Halong Bay, which is an incredible collection of limestone karsts (look under karst topography on wikipedia). I'm no geologist, but what I learned was that an incomprehensible number of years ago, the whole area was underwater, and a thick layer of limestone formed on the ocean floor. Eventually the water receded, and rain falling through the atmosphere became acidic (acid rain) and ate through the layer of limestone... that, combined with bioerosion and erosion from water, created the bizarre landscape pictured below:

It's hard to get to / around halong bay, so we went with an organized tour that also took us to some pretty ridiculous caves... which were great to be in, because it was 100 degrees and humid with no air conditioning anywhere

Finally, below are pictures of Meng and I relaxing on the boat (note the strange ways in which Meng chooses to relax)

More Sapa: Drinking and Driving

Awesome Vietnamese spring rolls and Ha Noi beer in our favorite restaurant in Sapa:

After lunch, we rented a motorbike from some guy outside our hotel and took off into the mountains.  It's a beautiful ride, going up into the the clouds its cool and drizzly and you cant see 10 feet ahead of you, though once in a while the clouds break and you can see into the valley.  As you go lower it gets really hot but the view gets much better. 

Me and my ride- note the mud in the background. This would soon be caked on to my shoes / legs after I tried to take the bike through a muddy mountain pass and got stuck.

We rode out to this waterfall

Later on, went back to that great outdoor restauraunt for more beer and spring rolls

Proof that I am an artist-- try to find Meng in the picture below....

View from our $15 / night hotel:

Sapa

Finally made it to Vietnam. We started our journey in Kunming, where we boarded a sleeper bus bound for Hekou, a town on the China-Vietnam border.  Sleeper bus sounds cute but as we quickly learned it is not a hygenic way to travel, and is it is far more popular with the locals than with tourists.  When we planned the trip we expected to be able to sleep on the bus, but after getting on, it looked unlikely. Not only were the beds built for people 5'3 or below and made of metal, but we were traveling on dirt/rock roads across mountain ranges with no guard rails, and the air was hard to breathe because people smoked throughout the night. 

Surprisingly, I think we both managed to get more sleep on this 12 hour bus ride than on our flight to Hong Kong. 

This is a picture of the border between Hekou and Lao Cai, Vietnam- we had to wait from 7-8AM in a very depressing chinese town for the crossing to open for the day. Although we did get a chance to have an interesting conversation about the price of Berkshire Hathaway stock with a local who knew more about it than us..??!!

After getting to Sapa, we spent our first full day doing a 'trek' of local terraced rice paddies, which are incredible.  I've seen other terraced rice paddies in China, but these are much more impressive because they are perfectly built, the hills are very high and are not too rocky so they are completely covered, and the constant fog makes everything look like a dream.  

1999 World Horticultural Expo - Kunming

IN 1999, Kunming, a city in Yunnan province in China, hosted a world's fair themed "Man and nature, marching into the 21st century".  The city now uses this area as a tourist attraction- it's only sort of in disrepair.  The most interesting part about it was that many countries had their own exhibition areas (including Israel and Palestine), and each province in China had its own area (including Taiwan).  

The government paved over a huge area of the city to create this expo:

But some of the exhibits were quite well maintained, especially the Chinese ones:

We found the Pakistan garden.. it was one of the few gardens that was unstaffed, so I took up the post for a while.. charged people 10RMB to take a picture with a live pakistani