Advertisement
Published: April 9th 2009
Edit Blog Post
Dogs heads, Village badgering and a rolling fog bank straight out of a Stephen King book…. Welcome to Sapa!
Our second back-to-back tour and man are we feeling it. After another horror of a train and scary bus trip up a mountain we came to Sapa- a place so stunningly beautiful it blows your mind.
When we rocked up at 6am in the bus, there were local Village women (who live in the surrounding valley but who work exclusively selling home-made souvenirs) fogging up the windows- just waiting to get to know us! It’s all fun at first- but you soon realise the technique- they get to know your name and where you are from and hunt you down the rest of your stay. The constant badgering of locals is the only minor drawback of this stunning place- but you take it with a grain of salt as you realise, like the Hill Tribes of Thailand; what you buy goes directly to the families who made it. They badger hard because they have to but after a few days of being stalked it does get a little tough.
Sapa is on the top of a mountain in the
basin of a great Village filled valley. During the day it’s a cool warm (I know a weird mixture)- it will thunderstorm in the afternoon, clear and then the dusk disappears in the thickest dry mist you can imagine. Suddenly you are in ‘Ole England- just waiting for Jack the Ripper to jump out at you.
The food markets are an eye opener here. Yep, there is plenty of dogs and smashed open cows and kids holding kitchen knives here. We only drew the line at decapitated dogs heads boiling in broth- our little domesticated western minds, full of memories of our pets back home- simply couldn’t take that dose of Vietnamese culture.
We did a tour into the valley with a personal guide who showed us her village. The sun peeked out behind the clouds and shone semi-biblical shafts of light over the scene- WOW… Jian ground some rice- we watched a blacksmith, walked across some treacherous bridges and laughed with the local kids at a waterfall. Sapa is stunning. I can’t describe it. The view is the highlight of our trip so far. On our way back from the tour our guide stopped us at a
roadside bar, which looked like something straight out of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre- with a plethora of stuffed animals and bone sculptures. We drank our tea and fled!
We said our goodbyes in style- in the dark, as a gigantic Thunderstorm blanked out the town for hours on end… which was where Jian and I made our fatal mistake… We ate food that obviously (although we didn’t put two and two together then) had been cooked hours before and was somehow kept lukewarm until our eating. Jian felt the rumblings in his stomach first… my own thunderstorm would come later. And boy… was there lightning.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.179s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 12; qc: 58; dbt: 0.1403s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
Emma
non-member comment
Yuckkk the animal pics are freaking me out! Sapa does look lovely though