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Early morning fog
This is on the drive to our hotel at 5.30am We left the chaos of Hanoi for the mountains of Northwest Vietnam. Sapa, also known as the ‘Queen of the Mountains’, was formed in 1922 as a former hill station and is located near the Chinese border. We took an overnight sleeper train to reach Sapa which left Hanoi at 9pm and arrived near Sapa at 5am. The sleeper was reasonably pleasant. We shared our 4-bunk cabin with a friendly older couple from Australia who were great company - we talked for a few hours shared a few beers and hit the hay. Kat woke up with about 5 huge bites on her bottom - gotta love the bed bugs on trains!
We have a routine now when we arrive early morning to have breakfast and then nap for a few hours. So after checking into our hotel we dug into a delicious breakfast at a nearby café. Our hotel, The Mountain View, was ok for the $20 price tag - the rooms were a bit musty but we had a balcony with views overlooking the valley. Up until now we hadn’t seen much of the view as the fog doesn’t burn off until mid-morning but when we did it
was amazing. We were on top of a hill surrounded by green rice fields, flowing rivers and majestic hills. Sapa is a very special place.
Part of the charm of Sapa are the H’mong and Dzao people that live in the surrounding villages. You can see from some of the photos their unique outfits. The ladies, young and old, hike or motorbike everyday into Sapa to try to sell their handmade jewelry, clothes, blankets etc. At first it is pretty annoying as you cant walk down the street without a group of them approaching you at every corner, but after spending more time with a group of local women we learned how much time goes into painstakingly hand making all these items.
We were eating lunch at tourist favorite, Baguettes and Chocolate, when we were approached by two H’mong women. At first we were hesitant to engage in too much conversation as it usually led to having ladies natter at you for the remainder of your meal trying to get you to buy things. However these women had exceptionally good English and a manner about them that we quite engaging. We had soon agreed that they would pick
us up at our hotel the next morning and we would hike 15kms to their village where we could see how they lived and they would make us lunch in their home. After we promised about 10 times that we would be there the next morning and they even made us pinky swear (English translation - a childhood promise where you have to lock pinkies with the person you’re making an ‘unbreakable’ promise with) this was very amusing to Ed.
The next morning came early and we started our walk - us and 20 other tourists who had been picked up by other villager women, it was quite a site. We only realized then how small these women are - Ed was a good foot taller than the women. We walked and talked and learned more about their culture and their ways of life. Most women were engaged to be married around 15 to a fellow villager, and were having babies and keeping house by their late teens. How it appeared to us was that the women were trained how to make clothes, jewelry etc. and then began walking to Sapa at a young age to learn how to
sell them to tourists. You see females aged from 5 to 80 selling items to tourists - it made us think wow that’s a lot of repetitive work and a lot of lifetime effort to make items, travel to Sapa daily in hopes of selling a few items.
We arrived at one of the lady’s homes after a few hour hike and it was something you see in a movie. It was a 3-room ‘house’ - kitchen, eating/cooking area, and a separate room for the parents and some of the young kids to sleep. It was clean and very basic, none of the creature comforts we’re used to in the west (see photos). After a delicious lunch we hung out around the house for a while, Ed decided he needed a nap and took the eldest son’s bed beside the cooking area for a little sleep. This left Kat open for the kill from the women to surround her to buy some things - we had originally thought we would give them some money for showing us around all day as we don’t really need any more things, but they were having none of it and soon a circle
was formed around Kat with jewelry, clothes and linens all around her. Eventually Kat gave each women 150,000 dong ($8) for a small piece of jewelry each. They were happy and we could go back to having fun and away from ‘business’.
We opted to not walk all the way back to Sapa so we hitched rides on the back of one of the women’s husband’s and his friend’s bikes - it was a beautiful drive back. The next day we saw a slightly different side of Sapa as we saw how must tourism has changed this once sleepy town. We were up at a later hour and came outside to bus loads of people and dozens of motorcycles with men on them asking if we wanted rides and hords of local women waiting outside the entrances of hotels for tourists to approach. It took away a piece of the charm for us as this town now very clearly has tourism as its main source of income and the locals swarm anyone who can provide it.
We found a great pub called The Red Dragon run by an English man who provided us with lots of good food
and great inexpensive wine. We spent about 3 hours there on our last afternoon because the power had gone out in the whole village and we were kicked out of our hotel so we needed some place to hangout - lots of burgers and beers were had that afternoon. We were trying to find things to do to do to kill the time so we thought why don’t we get Ed a shave? We found a local salon that looked to do a shave and Ed settled into the chair while Kat read - it was only 30 minutes in when Ed wasn’t done that Kat realized there was a problem. The woman shaving Ed, who didn’t speak English, (having spent 15 mins cutting off some of the hair of his beard with a blunt pair of scissors) was doing so without any shaving foam or anything with a blunt razor while going against the grain - by the time he stood up his face was red, she had missed loads of bits and he was madder than hell as he had tried to communicate how much it hurt quite a few times. He then explained to the woman he
would only be paying 50% of the cost while the entire salon of women listened on - she looked at him, took his money and walked away! We needed to get some beers in this boy STAT for both his and Kat’s sake and The Red Dragon took care of that!
We took the night train back to Hanoi and decided to splurge on a $40/night hotel, which basically gets you a nice breakfast and decent clean rooms that don’t smell! We had to plan the next leg of our journey down south - next stop Hue - the capital of Nguyen emperors filled with temples, tombs, palaces and pagodas.
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