dam!
The first three days of our road trip were pretty but uneventful - so much so that I needlessly started to worry we'd have no stories to bore people with upon returning - though we did stumble across a pretty massive hydroelectric dam in Na Hang, the small town where we stayed in on our third night.
We knew nothing about the dam at the time, though the presence of eerie ghost trees in the reservoir suggested it must have been fairly new:
Back home, we learned the dam - finished in 2008 and apparently the second largest hydroelectric plant in northern Vietnam - destroyed much of what was once the Na Hang nature reserve. You can read more about that here (though this article was written before the construction started).
The only other thing that happened in Na Hang was that the police showed up at our hotel at 11 pm and demanded to speak to us. We were just about to go to bed, and were a bit freaked out by the hotel lady banging open our door in a panic, but Iain went downstairs to find several bored cops scrutinizing our passports and, after some confusion about the distinctions between Scotland/the UK/Great Britain, they seemed satisfied and left. Crisis averted.
