Sapa

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SAPA

After a not too bad sleep on the overnight sleeper train, we arrived an hour and a half late (6:30am!) in Lao Cai train station. A minibus was waiting to take us to our hotel in Sapa, and the 1.5 hour journey went by pretty quickly as we dozed to catch up on some sleep. As we pulled up to the entrance of the hotel, there were about 30 girls/women from the black hmong tribe all waiting to greet us. They were all chatting to us as we made our way to the hotel door.When we got to the front desk, we were told we couldn’t check into our rooms till 11, and that we would be going on a 3 hour trek to Cat Cat village. We were put in groups of about 6, and our tour guide, Sue (one of the hmong tribe!), came to take us on our trek. Sue was 17, married and 5 months pregnant, but she still trekked the whole distance with us which was pretty impressive! All the way down to the village we were followed by about 8 of the girls/women. The younger girls were all asking us questions like, where are you from? how old are you? Do you have any brothers or sisters? etc etc, all in amazingly good English, which they aren’t taught in school, but pick up from the tourists! They were also making us little horses made out of grass which was pretty cool. The views all the way were amazing, even though it was a bit foggy/misty at points! After we neared the turnoff to the village the girls all said they couldn’t go any further with us, and then tried selling us little things like necklaces, bracelets, bags etc. Laura bought a little bracelet from one of them, which prompted the rest of them to say "you buy from me now?!". After managing to drag Laura away from the rest of them we walked down into the village. We were shown a typical house of where they live and were shown how the make some of their clothes and how they dye them etc.

It was pretty cool seeing it all, although it looked like it was purpose built for us tourists! After wandering through the village a bit more the path made its way down into the valley where there was a waterfall. A few snaps later and we were off again walking along the river back to a road which led us on a 40 minute up hill slog back to the hotel. We then checked into our room and had a nice lunch. Because we were still a bit tired we chilled out in the room for a while before heading out in the afternoon to explore Sapa some more. Sapa is a fairly small town, so we just went for a wander round the market places and had a quick nose in some shops. The weather by now had turned really foggy....we could hardly see a few feet in front of us, so we decided to head back to the hotel and get an early night!

The next day we were up bright and early. We had some breakfast then had to check out of our room by 9am. We left our big bags behind reception and met up with our group and Sue again for our second day of trekking. We set off about 9:30 (with our little tribe in-tow!) and headed for another village....this time about 2.5 hours away. We passed some incredible scenery on the way....lots of rice terraces, forests, waterfalls...all of which should be on our flickr site either now or sometime soon! A few hundred meters away from the village we had to cross a river. As we all had boots/shoes on, we were helped across the river by the local tribe, who all had flip flop type shoes on. It’s a bit weird being helped across a river by a 70 year old tribeswoman! Anyway, they got their reward a few minutes later as we entered their village they started asking us if we wanted to buy some stuff off them again....this time we were feeling like we kind of owed them for them helping us a few minutes ago....I think they were using some weird tribe mind tricks to make us feel bad....so a few more goods were added to our bags, then we sat down for some lunch!

As we were eating lunch, the weather took a turn for the worse. First it started getting dark, then came the drizzle, and just as we were ready to head off to see a village of another tribe (the red Dao tribe!) it started to pour down. Out came our coats for the first time since we started traveling, however they were no match for the Sapa climate, as we got completely SOAKED. The roads/paths were walking down slowly turned into little streams then pretty much rivers. Luckily we were only walking for about another 1.5 hours before we came across our minibus which was waiting to take us back to the hotel. The drive back was pretty interesting, as the little waterfalls we had passed walking down were now gushing torrents that had flooded and were flowing all over the road. We went through about 3 of these torrents, and it was like driving through a river!

Back at the hotel we got cleaned up and changed into some dry clothes and quickly had a bite to eat before our bus came to take us back to Lao Cai for our train back to Hanoi. We got to Lao Cai about 6:50, however our train didn’t leave till 9:50, so we had some time to kill. Unfortunately Lao Cai is a bit of a hole.....not really anything to do, so we had a drink and planned what we were going to do in the next few days. We boarded the train about 9:30, and were fast asleep not too much later! There was an interesting 10 minutes in the middle of the night where two stow-aways had got into our cabin after 10 minutes of trying to open the door from the outside. After they sat on the bed of an old Vietnamese women on the bottom bunk, and obviously weren’t the train ticket people that was originally thought, Laura hoofed them from our cabin (while I slept blissfully unaware of anything going on up on the middle bunk) and we slept all the way back to Hanoi!

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