Sapa, Vietnam

I left Yichang China on a 5 hour train to end up in Wuhan China. That evening I took a night train which I expected to be there sometime that next morning. I didn't realize that train ride was going to take 32 hours and I didn't account for the extra day of traveling. When I arrived in Kunming China I had to immediately hop on a bus and exit the country otherwise my visa would have expired and I would have got a 110 USD fine for each day I overstayed. After being in motion for around 40 hours now and immediately getting on a night bus which for a guy my size you could say a nightmare bus for 16 hours, it didn't seem too appealing. I decided to grin and bear it and by the time I arrived in Vietnam from 3 solid days of trains and buses, I was exhausted. My first stop in Vietnam was a really cool mountain village called Sapa. My first though was, "Holy cow there are a lot of tourist in Vietnam." As far as Sapa goes the place is beautiful and a visit to the local tribes (Black Mong) will really amaze you with their colorful outfits and interesting habits. One really sad thing about the people in this area is they have a bad addiction problems with drugs (Heroin) and while talking to some of the locals around, many of the children are addicted to drugs and Aids is running rampant through out the tribe. I met a guy from Germany who was trying to adopt a little girl who has a bad addiction to heroin at the age of 7 and both of her parents are dying of Aids. He is trying desperately to get her from them before she contract aids from her parents since they are all drug users. Outside of the local tribes the Vietnamese people definitely seem very different from the Chinese. Before I left I would have had no clue on how to tell the difference and I really can't describe it in words, but it is very noticeable. For my time in Sapa, I met a couple of friends to hang out with within an hour of arrival and for the most part walked around or rented a scooter to go see the out lying villages.