The City In The Clouds

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Nestled high in the mountains in Northern Vietnam, not far from the Chinese border, lies Sapa, an otherworldly town surrounded by rice paddies, hill tribes and a crazy marketplace selling cooked dog head. The H’Mong minority hill tribe people, their hands stained blue from dye, make desperate attempts to sell you handmade jewellery, scarfs, hats and clothes. Normally I hate being followed by sellers, and I know they were only talking to me because they wanted me to buy something, but I loved hearing about their lives, and was happy to even make a purchase from them (awesome silver earrings - sweet!) They are so friendly, happy to talk about how they live, how many kids they have, what their village is like. It was so fascinating, and their English was near flawless!

Getting to Sapa turned out to be an absolute nightmare. We tried to book train or bus tickets by ourselves but were consistently told that they were sold out. Instead what happens is the tour operators around Hanoi basically have a monopoly on all tickets, which means you can only get to Sapa through a tour operator. We booked a 3 night tour which included 2 nights on an overnight train and 2 days trekking. That evening we arrived for our overnight train we were told that the train was actually sold out and we would have to take an overnight bus instead. Boy were we angry. The bus had slightly reclining seats, lack of leg space and until midnight played a shoot-em tv show set at the highest volume. So it’s safe to say I didn’t sleep that night, made all the more worse considering we had a trek first thing that morning. Luckily it was mostly downhill as we made our way to Cat Cat Village, learned how rice is made (as in the process from rice paddy to on your plate), how marijuana grows all across the fields of Sapa and used for hemp clothing products and what the process for getting married in the H’Mong tribe is. Later I committed one of the worst Buddhism spiritual crimes by patting a kid on his head. I got told off by multiple people and felt so bad! It was simply an innocent pat on the head, but got into so much trouble. Oops. After seeing an average waterfall we started to make our way back up the mountain towards town. When I saw how far away the top actually was I hitched a ride on a motorbike up the mountain. I’m so lazy!

The following day a 7 hour trek was planned, and I pulled out due to my clearly apparent poor fitness level and possible hint of laziness, and decided instead to hire a motorbike and head to the elusive Silver Waterfall. Rachael also pulled out of the trek because the weather was bad, so she joined me on my adventure. It was pissing down with rain on the way to the waterfall, and I think the rain made the falls even more spectacular. It was the most amazing waterfall I have ever seen. It was extremely high, and so dangerous, we couldn’t believe we were still allowed (heck, even encouraged) to climb halfway up the falls and cross the dubious looking bridge! Had this been in Australia, people wouldn’t be allowed to go within a one mile radius of the falls!! Knowing all this, we still climbed up the waterfall and crossed the bridge! We later headed to another minority hill tribe, this time the Dao people. The rain had cleared and we got amazing views of the rice paddies, and saw kids happily riding water buffalo. I love this place!

After our awesome motorbike adventure we had a lunch of hot chocolate and burgers with some Americans we had just met. One of them asked me what I did back home, and after telling her I worked at a bookstore she quickly told me see was studying in hopes of setting up a Junior Peace Corps program. What a way to make me feel inadequate!

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