11º giorno: First (and hope last) bad day in Vietnam

Bus arrived in Ha Giang at noon...the bus station is in the middle of nowhere. No one there speaks English. I was totally lost so i took a motorbike to go to an hotel (and it was just 500m far...so, my first 10000dong spent for nothing). Then arrived in this hotel, i thought probably the only one here. He told me he had no single rooms avaiable, so he let me pay (in advance, stupid me) 20000dong more for a double one. 220000dong: quite a lot for that place and that kind of hotel. But ok, no choice, I took it. I just put my bag there and went away: my plan was to rent a motorbike, have a trip on the mountain (the most interesting attraction there....actually, the only one, as I discovered soon) and the next morning taking the bus to Bao Cang (6h far). 

What a good plan: well...motorbike rent place was closed. Everything around was closed, besides internet bars, full of young guys playing, chatting and so on. Finding a Wi-Fi was very hard. 

I came back to bus station, asking for a taxi. Well, they asked me about 140euro for that. What a cheat. I said no, of course. So i came back to the rent place and wait 2h til it opened, rent a manual motorbike (never tried before, but it was the only option and I really wanted to escape from that horrible city). He asked me 200000dong...what????? just for 4 hours.

 I finally arranged to pay 100000, that s still too much. But, as I already told, I really wanted to go away from there.

So, once free to move I went to mountains...and that was kind of ok..nothing special. And for sure nothing worthy a 6h trip and the amount of money I used there. During this trip i learnt everything about how to obtain rice, though.

By the way, the only nice experience was in the way back to the city: it was still early, around 5pm and I didn't want to give back the motorbike so early, since I had payed so much. But there was really nothing around (even tried to drive around the city but it was not nice at all). So, i finally decided to stop and have a coffee. The Vietnamese girl who served me couldn't speak English at all, but even so she wanted to talk to me. So we started this weird conversation using the google translator app...I love technology!!! And she was very nice!

Lucky me, going back to hotel I saw a night bus going to Hanoi, so i finally took one of that (and I didn't get the refund of what I payed in the hotel) and escaped from that awful place.

Probably, if you go there with group of friends and a car or motorbike it would be better (and pics can tell it).

But this was my experience: just me, probably the only tourist in that city. And it was crappy.

Forgetting the food: since I didn't see any place to have lunch, waiting for the rent place to open I went to a kind of minimarket, that was bad too. I chose what looked to me the best tasting stuff: coconut cookies...finally they were tasting as plastic. And a really bad plastic.maybe petrol. Bleah.