Ah chocolate buffet, I'm sorry I missed you but I will be back. Heather doesn't seem to appreciate that with hyper-inflation you will cost at least 8 times more on my return in 2 weeks, but I will still have you.

We left our glorious hotel by taxi to the train station to get a sleeper train up to the far North. I had already been posted our tickets but I foolishly did not figure out that the the phrase "passenger ticket" on these so-called ticket in fact meant "I am not  actually a ticket, I am but a voucher for a ticket, you must redeem me at the dubious-sounding Mango Hotel a short walk from the station". After sorting this out and getting over my momentary hatred of all things Vietmanese we got through onto a train platform - the wrong platform, of course. Showing our ticket to official-looking trainy people all we got in return was hand signals pointing up the platform. On our third showing-of-ticket-to-an-official a Vietmanese guy came over and grabbed both our bags, not in an "I'm mugging you way" but in an "I'm being kind and helping you, but you will pay me for my troubles" kind of way. As I only had reasonably big notes in my pocket I knew I was about to make this entreprenurial soul's day. We followed our helper straight across two sets of tracks and down between two trains to our cabin; should have figured that one out.

The train cabin was pretty nice and, in my opinion, beat the decor of the Edinburgh to London sleeper. We had booked out 4 berths so we could have a cabin to ourselves and setlled down for a nice sleep. However when the train got going I became convinvced that the tracks must have just been for show in the station and that for the rest of the 7 hour journey the train was just going for it across the rough countryside.

After not much sleep we arrived in the mountains. After a mild panic of seeing all the passengers having left the train but Heather casually dabbing on suncream in her underwear (Heather edit: lies, I tell you!) we managed to get off to be enveloped by sign holders all trying to pick up their correct foreigners to take to their mountainous destinations. We found ours and got into an air-conditioned minibus.

The Northern Highlands of Vietnam are home to about 50 different ethnic minority groups, famed for their traditional colourful costumes. The area was only opened to tourists in 1993, but is now a major draw for visitors coming to trek among the tribal villages and soak up the local markets. The hub of all this activity is a town called Sa Pa, but we were headed somewhere a bit more remote. After two hours of driving up the mountainside past terrace after terrace of rice and heavily decorated women with baskets we arrived at the Topas Ecolodge: a collection of holiday bungalows at the top of a hill with spectacular views of a hydro-electric plant. Actually the views really are spectacular, but I will let the photos speak for themselves. We were greeted by a group of Red Dao women, an ethnic minority who originally emigrated to Vietnam from China 300 years ago. It was a lovely welcome; little would we know that these women would later become the bane of our mountain existence.

Our bungalow was built by the Danish and is very nice, with a wooden verandah looking down the valley. We unpacked and went to have our breakfast. All of our meals are included whilst we stay here and the food is good, basically every meal is an all-you-can-eat buffet with a nice mix of traditional and western food (mostly pancakes) to satisfy both our palates.  The rest of the day was spent catching up on sleep and making sure we ate all of the meals laid on for us. At about 6pm the insects were turned on outside and everthing went very dark.

The next day, after breakfast, we thought we would go for a little wander. As soon as we had left the holiday cottages we were accosted by a friendly smily Red Dao women with a basket on her back;  ah well, we thought, let's go with it. She took us down through some rice terraces where we met up with her friend with a baby on her back and we continued through to her house, a big wooden barn, and then to some more rice terraces. The scenery was incredible. The baby started crying and this was the cue for the two women to start giving us the hard sell on their hand made items. Not having learnt from my last mistake I still only had large notes on me and so 200,000 dong later we had aquired a migraine-inducing bag which some lucky person will be getting as a gift upon our return. About an hour into our walk we managed to convince our laughing guide that we needed to go back, and she led us back to the road through what seemed like a previously untrodden route. We were suitably covered in mud on our return but we felt like we had got to know a bit of the mountain life. We headed back to our bungalow, showered and relaxed for the rest of the day.

The weather is a lot cooler in the mountains with it seeming to average around the 23 degree mark with it cooling off in the evening. In the mornings and the evenings there is a lot of mist that obscures everything, but by mid-day it has all cleared. The following day we arrranged to go on a guided treck down into the valley to see a couple more villages. We were met an hour late at 10am by our guide, a softly spoken Vietmanese man with the name of "Bang". He apologised for his bike having broken down whilst getting here. I'm surprised bikes can make it up the road at all to be honest. We set off and the first piece of advice Bang gave us was to be quiet with the Red Dao women. We picked up two Red Daos on exit, which dropped to one after half an hour and finally to none after another hour or so when she eventually realised that we had all the luminescent bags we required.

Our trek took us down the steep sides of the mountain through foresty jungle-type foliage. Heather fell in a hole. We came out of the forest and into a small village where Bang took us into the local primary school, a small building brightly painted with playful scenes, and, inside, one classroom of children going through the 8 meanings of the word "thu". (Heather edit: Vietnamese is a tonal language, so each combination of letters can be pronounced with up to six different pitch patterns.) A big group of kids came out to see us chanting, "hello, bonbon, hello, bonbon", and we were off. An hour or so later we stopped for a snack of Snicker bars and had a good chat with Bang about the hydro electric plant, the Vietnamese economy, and his hatred of the Chinese. Did I mention that Heather fell in a hole?

We arrived into a larger village (Heather edit: Ban Ho, a Tay minority village. The Tay are the earliest-known minority group to have settled in Vietnam)(Mike edit: the tay are considered to be the most attractive in Vietnam), and to a large cedar house that we would later be having lunch at. Bang introduced us to the owners and then we headed on through the village. This villiage, Bang told us, was a more affluent area and each house had its own garden space where people grew sweet potatoes and water pumpkins among other things. There were dirt paths everywhere with a few overladen motorbikes buzzing up and down. In the centre, opened-faced barns were filled with groceries and some with mobile phones, a lot of the locals were dressed in a very western way which did not blend with the environment.  Bang led us over two rickety metal bridges with big rusted holes looking 50 feet below in to the water. Motorbikes were still wizzing quite happily across the bridge. At this point Bang said something along the lines of "It is about an hour walk in that direction to the next village, you know your way back? Ok then, bye!".  We headed off, side-stepping everytime we heard the sound of a motorbike. Little huts rested beside rice terraces covered in grazing buffalow. Ocassionally a small child carrying a machete would pass by.

45 minutes of uphill plod later we came to a small ramshackle collection of buildings (some of which were on stilts) guarded by a sleeping buffalow surrounded by ducks, lots of pigs of all sizes and a dog. (Heather edit: this was Nam Samg, home to around 400 Xa Pho residents. The Xa Pho, who speak a unique Tibeto-Burmese language, are apparently fast dwindling in number due to their reluctance to marry outside their ethnic group.) We didn't stick around for long as it felt a bit like we were intruding. We followed our footsteps back to the first villiage, and after a couple of wrong turns found it back to the house where we would have lunch; beef noodle soup. We said our goodbyes and headed back on to the road to get a lift back up to the bungalows. We passed a shiny new minibus awaiting a group of tourists and got in an old, battered, ex-army Russian jeep. Everyone was a bit dozy on the way back, I got a laugh from Bang by waking myself up by bashing my head on the glass; I aim to please.

Our final full day was spent doing as little as possilble and reading a lot. The all you could eat buffet changed to an A La Carte affair, to Heather and my despair, but we figured it was just because there were not enough people staying to justify the buffet and not because of Heather going back for sixths. In the evening it was back to the good old buffet.

I am now sitting here on the morning of the day we leave for the fun sleeper train. We are going to catch a bus into the mountain town of Sapa at 2pm, have a couple of hours kicking about and then make the journey to the train station for another bumpy night back to Hanoi. From Hanoi we catch a flight to central Vietnam; right now we are in the far north.

This stupid computer has a Linux OS installed, so I am now going to see if I can figure out how to change the size of a photo. These opensource monkies seem to have prioritised features like being able to theme your desktop to look like Tron over useful stuff.