Cindy’s wanted to do the “Hike, Bike, and Kayak in Vietnam” Sierra Club trip since she heard about it four years ago. It’s fifteen days in northern Vietnam from the big city of Hanoi, to the mountains of Sa Pa and the water of Ha Long Bay.

We arrived in Hanoi on October 19, On the way to our hotel, we had our first taste of Hanoi traffic.

Hanoi is over a thousand years old, and has an estimated 7.7 million people in the municipal area, with about 3.5 million in the metro area, it’s dense with people, shops and mopeds!
We stayed in the Old Quarter whose narrow streets are lined with small stores, each street traditionally sold one type of merchandise, if you want banners there’s a street for that, if you need housewares, that’s on another street.

From Hanoi we traveled to Sa Pa, a resort town in the mountains. The highlight was a bike ride starting at top of the highest pass in Viet Nam, Tram Tom Pass. It was a down hill coast for ten miles! Then a ride through the countryside to the small working-class town of Tam Duong where we were the only Westerners.

Most of our travel was by chartered bus, but one night we took the overnight train back to Hanoi, our sleeper berths had four bunks each. The tour leader later asked if we’d have been open to having two overnight trains on the trip, we all agreed that once was enough.

We then traveled to the Halong Bay area. Halong Bay, is a UNESCO World Heritage site. The bay, part of the Gulf of Tonkin, is filled with limestone karsts, giving an otherworldly look to the bay.

To wrap things up we returned to Hanoi for a final night before the group either headed home or on to other places. Cindy and I, along with my sister Janet and friend Mary Ann who toured Vietnam with the Sierra Club group, went to Siem Reap Cambodia to tour the temples at Angkor Wat. (I’ll write about that later.)