The trip is gonna be coming to an end soon (Don’t worry, as I write this I’m only four days away from a vacation to Japan, and a JP2024 series is coming up next!) as we now head for another long car drive to Ha Long Bay, which is on the entire other side of Vietnam. Ha Long Bay is at the ocean, far away from the mountains of Sapa where we were currently at.
The night before, I had a lot of trouble sleeping because if you recall in Part 15, we had visited a supposedly “haunted” floor of the hotel, where we had stumbled into a dark hallway and Casey had claimed to have spotted someone watching us. Was this place dangerous? We didn’t know. But it kept me up all night, which was bad enough because I don’t do very well in situations like those. After waking up in the morning and eating breakfast, we talked again about what we had seen last night. Surely there wasn’t something bad up on the 18th floor, but Casey again pointed out that he had seen someone watching us, which made me sure going up there again would be a great adventure. To figure this out, the four of us agreed to meet again right before we left Sapa hotel in order to uncover the mystery of Floor 18.
We took some time to pack up first, before we headed out of the hotel. We said goodbye to the hotel room and the great view of the mountains, and after a couple more hours we met Mia and Koia in the lobby late in the morning. We were going straight back to Floor 18 to figure out what was really there. I recorded the video of us going back on my phone just in case we saw a ghost… and then the door opened. It wasn’t dark. There was nothing to be afraid of. It was a normal hallway of hotel rooms.
“You guys were freaking out over nothing,” Casey said, and we quickly explored the area, discovering a staircase to the roof. Our conclusion was that there was literally nothing to be afraid of- it was simply dark.
A little emboldened by this, we decided to look around the hotel to find anymore rooms that were dark while we still had time. Looking around, we eventually discovered a ballroom in the hotel that was dark but had a small amount of natural light because of the windows that was huge, empty, and frankly would have been good in a horror movie. Then we went to floor 3 to see if we could find anything, and we soon discovered a normal hotel hallway, only it was dark again. The dark didn’t scare us this time, however. All four of us pulled out our phone torches and walked bravely into the darkness, and then… we ran back to the elevator as soon as it started to close.
Anyway, with the Mystery of Floor 18 now solved, we were now set to leave Sapa with our driver and head all the way across the nation, back to Hanoi and eventually to Ha Long Bay, the next location in our travels. There was a lot of excitement surrounding Ha Long Bay, and pretty soon we would see if it actually lived up to the hype.
First off, however, we had to get there, and we had another extremely long drive ahead of us, which you’re probably tired of reading about at this point. We drove all the way back to the city of Lao Cai before then heading south through the various provinces of the region, getting lunch somewhere on the way to Hanoi. We also took a cat picture here as well.
Once we arrived in Hanoi, we didn’t stop and continued, as there were still two more hours left in the journey. We took a quick pee break once we were past the main part of Hanoi, but could still see the main city in the distance as we drove by. There wasn’t much else to say about Hanoi in this part of the trip other than the fact that Casey wanted snacks and we peed in some bushes just outside the city ( they were actually cow farms).
On the way to Haiphong, we also retold the story of everything we did in Thailand to Mia and Koia, because apparently we hadn’t described it to them well beforehand.
Not much else happened in Hanoi, and we continued to Ha Long, passing by another city called Hai Phong before finally reaching Ha Long in the evening. Immediately, everything we saw was instantly going to be recognizable. The view was amazing, first of all. There were loads of green covered islands as far as you looked, blended in with the metropolis that Ha Long also is. We found next to the highway an army of military vehicles as well as huge bridges, one of which we got on to reach an island where our dinner and hotel were.
Our dinner was set in a huge restaurant, easily one of the biggest we’d seen so far. Our whole family sat down at one of the tables and ate. We also took a political compass test for fun towards the end of the car ride as we were driving on the island just for fun (to those of you who know the political compass test, I got a relatively conservative score with a negative x-value and y-value, but Mia and the others helped influence that decision a lot.) I don’t remember very much about the restaurant’s food, but I very vividly remember knowing that they had a small aquarium filled with fish.
Our hotel was a short distance just down the road, and it was extremely tall- probably the largest building in the area, the largest building on the island, and the largest building in the city. After checking in, the pair of shoes I got in Long An (ALLLLL the way back in like Part 3) started to break apart and it sorta discarded after a while.
Anyway, we headed up to see our hotel room again. For reference, here are the layouts of the hotel rooms we booked in other cities throughout the entire trip:
Phuket: 2 floors with a hot tub and a balcony giving a great view of the Thai beach. They also served free breakfast.
Bangkok: 2 separate hotel rooms connected by a small hallway, each hotel room having a MASSIVE bathroom (I’m talking twice the size of an average bathroom), a kitchen, beds, and a place to eat. The view wasn’t amazing, but other things like being near a massive mall, having a pool, and just downright having oversized hotel rooms. This place had to be at least a third the square footage of my sized up American house, seriously.
Hanoi: 2 more separate rooms. This one had less size and was more cramped since our hotel was small, but we also got free breakfast and were extremely close to the major attractions. The view was pretty good, and we didn’t have to walk far in order to get to some important places in the city. There also was a gym in the hotel, but going there it looked more like a basement with a few old pieces of gym equipment.
Sapa: Only one hotel room officially, but this was easily the biggest hotel room out of all of them, rivaled only by the Bangkok room. This thing was extremely spacious and had beds way bigger than I needed- the view was probably amazing, although the clouds ruined it most of the time and I can’t find any good pictures of the view on my phone… on top of an amazing room was that this hotel probably had the biggest variety of entertainment options. There was a pool, a gym, a “corpse room” (scratch that actually), a huge restaurant, a lobby, a pool table, a gift shop, and a kids zone.
And for Ha Long Bay…
This room was pretty spacious, although not as spacious as the Sapa hotel room we had earlier. There were huge windows that gave extremely amazing views of the city.
They even had one of these huge windows in the bathroom that made up an entire wall, but luckily it was curtained. That night, while I was showering, I kept opening up the curtain, not enough for my body to be shown, but enough to see the view. I seriously regret not taking a picture of that. You could see cars moving through their business from far away, and sooooooo many buildings.
The bathroom also had a notable feature that the shower didn’t have any of the walls you’d normally have in America. This is pretty normal in the country, although the place did feel a lot more… exposed without the walls. The toilet got really wet as well every time I took a shower.
“Well, I mean,” Casey said as we entered the hotel room. “It could be a bit better. Like, just a bit better, you know? Like, a bit better.” Apparently he’d gotten used to having those massive rooms we were in.
The hotel also had a pretty good variety of entertainment, all up at the top floor (I think it was Floor 25). The top floor included a lounge, some TVs, a pool with people constantly playing inside, and a bunch of chairs for those who wanted to hang around the pool. We weren’t gonna go into the pool just yet, because on another floor, Floor 9, there was a Kids’ Zone, which Casey immediately took an interest in. As soon as we went inside, we saw a little girl playing at the Kids Zone alone, and Casey took it upon himself to make sure she wasn’t alone. Casey immediately found a basketball hoop that was about three feet tall and began shooting in it (He’s into basketball) and as the girl saw it, she started dunking into the basket as well. Casey, upon seeing this, clapped and made a face that I can’t describe to save my life. MAN, that was hella entertaining. We spent the rest of the night hanging out with Mia and Koia at the lounge, although I don’t entirely remember what crazy things we did at the time.
After a while, we went back up to the hotel room to get a rest before our next day of exploring Ha Long Bay as well as the area around it. As we went up the elevator, some more people entered. Me and Casey were alone without parents in that elevator, and so Casey took another chance.
“I’m from Nigeria!” He shouted to everyone on the elevator. No response. “Are y’all from Nigeria?” Everyone seemed to be trying not to listen to him. The elevator door opened, and they all left – as the door to the elevator was closing behind them, he called after the family, “Come visit me in Nigeria sometime, alright?”
Anyway, we went to bed and prepared ourselves for Ha Long Bay. This was probably the last day of any real travel, so savor it: VN2023 will be ending very soon…