Camille’s Big Adventure

  The next morning, I headed out to Geelong where I would catch my ferry to Tasmania. I spent most of the day just kinda hanging out along the beach and take a little snooze in my car. I think the city is actually a decent sized city but everywhere I had paid park in and I just couldn’t be bothered to pay, and then have to move my car every hour so I ended up just going to the beach which was really lovely and spent most of the day hanging out before my late night ferry. I got fish and chips for dinner before heading over to the ferry around seven. The ferry itself doesn’t depart until 930 but I got there early so that I could just get on the boat and get my car loaded up on the boat and relax and get ready for the long cruise across the straight. The cruise ship I mean fairy, but really cruise ship was huge. It has 10 stories for four people and six for vehicles. The top three is where the people are large portion of them are rooms because you can rent a room for the 12 hour voyag...

  The next stop on my journey was my friends house in Kynton. I might Gabby when I worked in New Zealand and we became best friends and very close and yeah have kept in touch every sense so when I told her I was coming to Australia. She told me to let her know when I was in her area and it was really great. I caught up with her and another friend of hers who I met there as well named Alice and her partner Mimi and we just had a ton of fun hanging out and getting each other again after all these years, and yeah it was just generally really good. We had dinner at a really good Indian food place and sat in inflatable, hot tub and drink and enjoyed the first evening. My second day we got in the hot tub with our coffees first thing in the morning chatting and laughing before heading out on the town going for gander around the different cities in the area. This area is known to be a mountain range in Australia but it’s very flat for a mountain range and it’s quite funny to have them. Cal...

  After Melbourne , I headed out to the north west to Grampians national park. It’s such a interesting little mountainous area. It kind of just comes up out of nowhere. So for about two hours I drove through the eucalyptus, Savannah tape ecosystem, big widely spaced eucalyptus, trees with some no grasses that are going to seed pretty yellow and dry Very low, rolling hills. But then arriving at the Grampians, all of a sudden, you see in the distance, a large mountain range that seemed to come out of nowhere. The sparse eucalyptus canopy is traded for a dense eucalyptus canopy, but the tree is are quite different. You end up with their close space together a lot more variety and types the dominant now being this really shaggy bark eucalyptus tree in the lower elevation areas. That’s as opposed to the wider areas with which have this really smooth white bark on most of the trees in the savannas. Reaching the Grampians was such a nice rest after a month of being pretty busy. I decided ...

  Returning from vietnam, I went back to Melbourne and stayed with my friend Hope and her partner Scott. It was really lovely getting to stay with them. They are such a wonderful couple and have a lot of really cool friends and it was just a really great experience. One night we went to an indigenous music festival, which was really neat. Lots of contemporary indigenous artists were playing different music from some alternative contemporary to opera. It was really cool to hear the variety and the meaning behind it, and hear all of these indigenous women’s stories. Generally, it was just really enjoyable. I actually like Melbourne more than most any other city I’ve visited, especially that size. I think it might at least partially be the people I was with, but it’s got kind of a small hipster feel being quite a large city of. I think they said 5 million people. it was really easy to walk around the neighborhood where Hope lives and easy to catch trams trains and buses, which is gre...

  My final (non travel) day was in Hanoi again. It’s a pretty neat city if you can get over the horrible air quality. It’s got one of the worst air qualities in the world and I didn’t wear a mask while walking around in the morning and I ended up with a headache and feeling quite sick.   Hanoi has a really big cafe culture, the city has so many cafes tucked away in alleys and corners. As is common in Vietnam, you can find a lot of really cool places if you are brave and audacious enough to wander down small, dark, gray alleys and up sketchy looking stairways. Like walking through the wardrobe to Narnia you begin somewhere inauspicious (often grimy) and then suddenly you are in an immaculate cafe, often covered in plants, flowers, and/or books. The contrast is stark and never fails to feel a bit enchanting. My final day in Hanoi consisted mainly of me wandering streets and meandering into alleys and coffee shops and finding cute and different places. I’m going to miss Vietnam...

  After my arduous bus journey to Sapa where I spent an hour sitting on a bar stool on the bus cause they were out of seats, I finally made it. I booked myself a cute little bungalow and they arranged a taxi pick up from the bus, which I was grateful for because it was cold (low 50s) and raining and when you get off the bus there are a bunch of taxi drivers yelling at you to take their taxi. Luckily once I showed them I had one booked they helpfully found my driver for me. It’s wild how quickly they go from aggressively demanding you take their taxi to genuinely really helpful and kind. It’s a bit of a whiplash.   I got to bed and enjoyed some good rest, after a long bus ride and late night. The next day it was cold and rainy and all my clothes were being washed so I spent most of the day catching up on sleep. In the evening I braved the cold and fog for a wander around town which was cool, and really pretty. I was chilly, but glad I went out.  The following morning I...

The journey to Ha Giang was…. Unpleasant. From Ninh Binh I took a sleeper bus. They were 45 minutes late to pick me up, but luckily that wasn’t too stressful cause a bunch of other people were there waiting. Then I got on the bus which has 3 rows of bunk beds and 2 aisles. It’s very uncomfortable and I would not recommend it at all. I also didn’t know there is literally zero storage so I was holding my laptop and some clothes and snacks and stuff on my lap for the entire 7 hours. I finally arrived at Ha Giang at 4am… and nobody was there to let me in. The bus dropped me off on the side of the road 3 miles outside of town and told me I was in the right spot and to walk down the dark alley to my place. I began calling the tour company with my phone only at 20%, who were supposed to be waiting for me, since they booked my bus for me, but nobody answered. The alley had a large metal gate at the back and on either side were construction companies. I called and called with no answer and sent...