Posted Nov. 25:
Sitting in a coffee shop in Saigon with one of our new friends, while outside rages the worst storm to hit Saigon in 10 or 20 years. Everything’s cool for us!
"Pro-life" (??!) pickup on the streets of Saigon:
Also Nov. 25:
Journey from Ha Giang town to Ma Pi Leng. Finally catching up to one of our special days from a week ago. These mountains are hard granite, with very little water for living. Here you will often see large boulders and sharp, deep canyons, reminiscent of Tolkien’s description of the Misty Mountains. In some places you will see lush vegetation, where somehow the plants have managed to hide the forbidding rocky soil on which they grow. We were fortunate to have good weather for most of the day. As we wound our way up to Ma Pi Leng pass on the dangerously narrow road with steep drop off to our right we were too distracted to notice the high steep mountain on our left that threatened to bend over upon us, until we reached the top where the hazards of our just-completed journey were more apparent. As dusk approached we stopped by a monument that served as a memorial to those who died during the construction of the dangerous road. The intermittent fog filled valleys that we knew were deep, but looking down over the edge of the road all we could see was endless fog beneath us, with no sign of a bottom. Dusk turned the large boulders into goblins, and the strangely shaped peaks into the rock-throwing giants of Tolkien’s Misty Mountains, and the only thing lacking from Bilbo’s journey was thunder and lightning.
Misty Mountains:
More from Nov. 25:
At the end of our first day in the “Misty Mountains” we found our Rivendell in Dong Van at Hmong Homestay.
Also from Nov. 25:
Catch up, from our second day in Ha Giang. Visited Lùng Cu and finished the day in Yen Minh. Lùng Cu is a tower marking the northernmost point in Vietnam.
Lung Cu tower:
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