Good morning SE Asia!: 22/10/13 - 24/10/13

So the options in and around Ha Giang (pronounced ha zang) were basically to have a look at the town, or take a tour back out to a landmark or town we had already seen. We took the shiny bikes the 5km into town for a look around. It was a decently sized town, wide streets and a main street full of shops and businesses and banks and restaurants, but seemed oddly characterless. The shops were not arranged in clusters but spread out and we didn't find any interesting comfortable food area to hang about in. Instead we pedalled back to the topically named A-Lo! café that we passed on the way in and was mentioned in the guide books. We had a coffee and thought about what to do with our day. The coffee here is great, more like a dessert really. It is super strong espresso beans that taste almost like dark chocolate, filtered through a metal filter that sits on top of a glass which is already filled with around 5mm of super-sweetened condensed milk. It tastes like cloudy honey on its own. Once stirred the potent concoction gives you enough caffeine and sugar energy to drink the mega strong green tea that it is always served with. They drink a lot of tea here. They like it strong enough to make you suck air through your teeth after a sip.

After the booster we decided to go back into town looking for more shops as we needed a few things. This time we found the market area and had a look about. Everything and anything is piled high and sold cheap. Fruit, clothes, meat, domestic stuff, electronics. The meat areas of these markets are pungent, especially after lunch when most cuts have been sold and the drains are a bit full of wash-off. We wandered around noticing most vendors were having a kip, feeling obtrusive as they always woke up from their post-lunch dozing as we perused their wares. It's funny, they just have a kip in the produce, on top of bags of clothes, between crates of fruit, prostrated on a shelf between alarm clocks. The lucky ones are already selling mattresses!

The next day we decided to head to some hot springs that we had heard about, but 70km later and a wasted morning spent touring on a moped we returned untreated to the bungalow. I was feeling a bit under the weather anyway for some reason, like a cold, so we had a quiet afternoon and got the washing done etc.

The next morning I was worse and decided to take some of the antibiotics we brought with us (they are actually malaria pills) to get rid of the lurgi, a bit worried that I couldn't shake it off. We had another quiet day and just wandered about the area, then had a hotpot meal in the evening as suggested by one of the boys that ran the place. It is basically a pot of boiling soup which you can cook various meats, noodles and veg in to make a tasty dish. Really good and you can eat an awful lot if you try hard enough.