Day 30 Wednesday June 3, 2009

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Day 30 Wednesday June 3, 2009

Oh the mountains are beautiful outside of our window!!! You can't see the top of them for the clouds, it is so cool!
Took a tour of more villages today both walking and riding in an SUV, it was too rainy to do anything else. We went over Tram Tom pass to get to the 1st village of Loi Chan, we walked through tons of mud and muck but it was worth it to see the locals. The 2nd village was the Black Thai were the some of the older ladies have black teetch from eating so many beetlenuts over the years. Next we went to a local restaurant for a Vietnamese lunch. After lunch we went to visit the flower mound village and went through some of their homes most of which are wooden single rooms with curtained secitons for the bedrooms. Some of them had a kitchen that was separated by a wall. When I say kitchen, I'm talking about a fire in the middle of the floor with cooking pots on it and maybe a table and some chairs. There were some people that had TV's and stereos, but that and beds were the only items of furniture in the whole house. Everyone was friendly and seemed well off. The farming villages are very fortunate to have plenty of water from the mountains, good crops, and good livestock to sustain them. They make their own clothes so there is really not much they need to buy. The guidebook said Sapa is coldest place in Vietnam and Lao Chai at the bottom of the mountain was the hottest. I don't know about that...The highest mountain in Vietnam is fanispan mountain that is 3,143 meters (10,309 feet). Once back in Sapa we bartered for a North Face rain jacket since Camden forgot his. They were trying to sell it to us for $110 US dollars and I laughed at them. I told them I paid less than that for mine on sale in the US and it was real!!!! I told them we would pay $45 and no more, they kept trying to get us to pay $90 and we walked away. Sure enough they came running after us and sold it to us for $45. We still overpaid but they had us, it was backpacking country (most of the backpacker stuff was expensive) and it was constantly raining. It is a nice jacket though.

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