Hei there Mike,
Almost forgotten about your mail. Sorry for that.
Firstly I think we really had a great trip. Thumbs up for you guys. We were really glad to have you guys. It was really nice of you guys to help us ammend the iternary over and over again even till the last minute where we had trouble with our flight but you guys still able to solve all the rest of the problem for us. It really made our day.
Nice private van you have there to transport us from one place to another.
Good daily water supply.
Kim was a nice guide. He’s very friendly. Language and communication was perfect. He knows his stuffs pretty well. However it would be better if he could recommend us more good local food, street food. Probably that was what we were looking for. Cos some of these info were a little hard to get even on lonely planets as not many ppl would opt for street food. But we’d love to try the typical local food.
Ha from Sapa was great too. Communication was okay. Though his english had a little slang which sometimes harder to understand but he did try his best to convey all the infomation very well. He recommended some real good food, he even did the ordering for us. Whenever we had problem communicating with the locals, we just rang him up and he actually spoke on our behalf although once i think he was taking a nap. He even sat down with us to have coffee and also invited us for a drink with his friends. He got us a good deal for a jeep up to the Silver Waterfall. He brought us around to shop for coffee in Lao Cai. I think he’s the type of tourguide we are looking for. Kim was still great.
Oh ya, I think on the last day in Lao Cai, before taking a train back to Hanoi, we were rather dirty. So it’d be great if we could have a quick shower before going on the train. Ha drop us at a shop which one of the guys there brought us to the train station later. They do have a toilet with shower, we thought we could used it but we couldn’t. Probably something could be done there.
Also on the junk in Halong bay. Probably this is a little out of your control but i couldn’t really remember if they have a menu for the drinks. Probably they have it but i’m not sure if the stated a cup of hot water cost $1. But we paid like almost $8 for 8 cups of hot water. Something we weren’t expecting.
Hotel wise, Sunrise was okay, just initially the highest room had insufficient water supply, but later we had rooms at lower floors and they were fine. It’s still not terribly noisy.
In sapa, i think it’s thai binh, it’s rather hot though during the day, they should probably have a fan at least to allow the air to circulate. At night it was fine. The water heater was a gasburner type, so it’s rather hard to control the hot water supply. The boss was friendly.
The train was great. We were sent off and picked up right on time.
Staff in the company was friendly, too bad we didn’t get to meet the big boss, you.
Anyway, overall was great, it’ll be a memorable trip. Might be back again in the future. Will definitely recommend you guys to other friends.
Sorry for the long winded story. Have a nice day.
Lee Jih Houh
School of Mechanical Engineering,
Universiti Sains Malaysia,
14300 Nibong Tebal,
Penang, Malaysia.