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If Sapa is the phantom presence you can never quite grasp, one whose impending absence haunts you even as you sit in the soft, quaint majesty of it's powerful mountains and sprawling valleys, then what hope is there for those of us who have come and left - can such longing ever be quenched? or will there always be a sense of emptiness for that which once was and may never be again. But that is now, sitting over the glistening lake at the entrance to the city, a lake which strangely enough we had been so busy that we had heretofore yet to acknowledge it's noble existence, now being only hours until our departure - our entrance five days earlier was much less triumphant, no great trumpeteers to mark our entrance as our somber parade made it's way in the dawn hours to the hypnotic mountain town. The sleeper bus from Hanoi had been fair enough - we were told the absolute cheapest tickets from Hanoi were $15 at the bus station, but how much hassle and harassment might we encounter while trying to get a fair price on the way out to buy tickets, then back to Hanoi, and
then back there again on the day of our departure? We squared up and settled for the $20 tickets with free pick-up from our hotel the sweet young mother at the desk arranged for us so then as luck would have it 45 odd minutes after our pick-up time we were racing through the streets of Hanoi in a pre-paid taxi with our hearts damn near clinging to our tonsils as we knew full well how much the clyde at the bus stopped probably cared if we made it or not, but low and behold there it was and we tore onboard, together with two young girls from England who must have had the same tickets and the four of us perched across the top row in the very back of the bus as luck would have it and sprawled out as best we could. Seeking to help usher in the onset of sleep I had put down a few 'fresh beer' aka bia hoi - local beer kegs which get stacked on the side of the road daily and with no preservatives has a 24 hour shelf life, patrons drink the 20 cent glasses on plastic stools and eat
fresh snacks from the back alley kitchens, elbow to elbow as this part of the world would have it - and also a few cans of Hanoi Beer in the lobby and then a few for the road. Alas, a vulgar nightmare, a sick twist of fate, plans foiled by the sleeper bus with no toilet - but surely the driver, who as luck would have it doesn't speak a lick of English, will stop for a toilet right? Well four plus hours into the trip as I feel the slow ache of deteriorating kidneys, the girls now wailing up a storm, I got up and tried in vain to have the driver stop the bus, he didn't understand, my Vietnamese a joke when it comes to comprehend his rapping, and so I sat right down on the stair next to him and watched the unforgivably windy road unfold in-front of us as we bawled past massive trucks on up-hill corners that didn't look wide enough for the bus to navigate solo, a fascinating game really where the two foes, the taker and the overtaken to be exchange a cacophony of horns while also using signals to warn whether the
pass can be completed without a head-on collision. And then out of nowhere came the thing that Tara and I abhor most about being associated with other tourists - something in the brain of the young blonde English girl, all too accustomed perhaps to customer service with a big duplicitous smile, snapped and there she comes bursting out of her seat, furiously balling up the aisle and she outright demands to know 'what the hell is going on up here,' maniacally I tell you! I shrug my shoulders a bit non chalant for her liking perhaps and she proceeds to position herself inches from the bus drivers face, screaming in English which he of course doesn't understand, and after a few minutes of deathly silence from the hapless oaf her shoulders drop in defeat and she returns to her seat - I'll admit, I had a little chuckle in spite of it all. Within 20 minutes the bus, after four and a half hours, finally screeched to a wonderous halt at a roadside stand and we booked for the toilets, mind you.
Even after the piss stop sleep is no easy task on this wretch of a bus, hell
if you don't lay on your back even staying stationary is a shell game, but I notched a few hours of sleep here and there, starting an album on my i-pod, drifting off around song four and waking up to the silence, smiling to myself that I had notched a wink or two of sleep. When I finally hit a deep reverie of blissful sleep around four am or some such nonsense it was a time of great contentment but surely it was to be short lived since five am brought a stop at a place that clearly wasn't Sapa (it turned out to be Lao Cai) but everyone, all of the luggage including a motorbike which was shoved in among the travel bags, was ordered off the bus and when we asked if this was Sapa they repeated Sapa in hopes it would get us off the bus. Now the fury that lay dormant in the tourist girls from England burst out like none other and they both threw themselves in front of the poor man whose misfortune it was to be stationed at the desk, demanding to know what was going on, flailing arms and snapping fingers like
some crazed ancient ritual right there in the man's face with their eyes bulging psychotic - one Vietnamese tourist glanced over at Tara and I then looked at the girls and shook his head - we lowered our heads and apologized meekly, fearing that we too had taken part in the drama, responsible by association, perhaps, for our fellow foreigners. Finally, the same man could feign his lack of comprehension no more and he informed them that we were getting back on the same bus in just a moment.
About an hour later we arrived in Sapa and before we could even get out of our seats the aisle of the bus was a mob scene of local hotel and guesthouse owners trying to drag us away - we fought through and had collected our things and our bearings when a kindly young English speaking local woman approached us with an offer we couldn't at least entertain, that offer being $8 double rooms with private bathroom, balcony and wifi and so we trudged up the hill, wearily and warily toward the Backpackers Hostel, a big blue building next to the school in an area we thought at the time
to be the central area of town and the room was big and looked nice enough and the wifi and hot water worked and so we said 'why not' surrendering our passports as is the law in a few small sections of Vietnam. Now, finally, we could have a hot shower and damn did I feel happy about getting the grease off of my face and a change of clothes and then off to explore the town and have a nice hot slow-drip coffee with a dollop of condensed milk. The warm water drew life into my blood amid the morning chill of the crisp mountain air and I was starting to feel just fine. I took the shampoo/conditioner combo to run through my hair and set it back down on the shelf just below the mirror, the bottle brushing the bottom corner of the mirror when CRASH, I heard the sound and felt the tearing of my flesh before I could rinse the suds out of my eyes to see what had transpired. The mirror, now revealing itself to have been simply resting on two screws, not at all fastened mind you, had come crashing down and not only
shattered on the floor, but if you could believe it breaking the sink in half on it's descent, half of which now laid shattered on the floor next to the broken mirror and my bloody ankle - and my heart absolutely sank with disbelief - 'you have got to be ________ kidding me!' Tara's jaw dropped when she saw the scene, we were starving, tired, we needed sustenance, relaxation, peace of mind - 'how much are they going to charge us for this' and I went out to find that the woman who had led us there had vanished and now not a soul seemed to be working here - the office deserted, the entire place in fact save for a cleaning lady who spoke no English and so I marched into town along the path we had come in hopes of finding the woman, furious, nervous, exhausted, bewildered - she was nowhere in sight. I returned and Tara had found her, the woman had resurfaced and reassured Tara everything was fine, worried only, she claimed, about my ankle which I then noticed had bled through the tissue and all over my khaki chinos which are the only long pants
I travel with or indeed own in this part of the world these days. What a relief we thought and they came and cleaned the room, and we waited for the English speaking woman to fall in as she had requested, hours it seemed, wild scenarios running through our mind about how much money they may try to extort from us, and they had our passports, did this town have police? But she had said she would take care of it right? Finally Tara went down to speak to her again and came back with distress seeping out every crevace of her being, the woman's story had changed, or at least our understanding of it had - of course we would have to pay for the damage, we broke it.
This was about it for me, who preaches keeping an even keel while traveling, never wanting to be the profane and angry entitled tourist, I stormed down and met the husband, who informed me that the total bill was 500,000 Vietnamese Dong - which thank the good spirits of these here mountains only translates to $25. It seemed fair, but Tara and I still felt wronged and I informed
him I would pay the bill, plus the price for a half day and that we would be leaving. The husband was visibly saddened and tried to explain himself, I looked over to his wife who had lead us there, bouncing their young child on her knee and she looked as though a great tragedy had befallen, the wind suddenly grasped from her sails, appearing in fact to be on the brink of tears. Suddenly a great wave of sorrow befell me, the whole office seemed engulfed, the husbands proud and earnest face - I struggled desperately to make myself feel better, to alleviate their sorrows, told them we weren't angry, that I appreciated that they picked up replacements at a fair price - no extortion scheme at play, but that we just felt nervous about staying somewhere that things broke so easily (I neglected to mention the shower head also separated from the hose as I rinsed myself from the disaster) - he handed back our passports, I thanked them, it was sad and strange - I still mourn for these people as I sit and write this today - the woman looked so sincere, woebegone about what had
happened to us, and her gentle young husband with that agreeable face, trying their best to make it in this world, to make their guests happy I knew, such a sad affair, something in that poor woman's eyes I tell you.
'We really need to turn our luck around' sighed Tara as we trudged down the street with newly repacked bags in tow, dodging the marauding droves of hotel salesmen, swindlers, hill tribe hawkers and motorcycle rentals in search of the original guesthouse we had been searching for - this being the Friendly Guesthouse and then a few of the hill-tribe women directed us down a road we hadn't yet seen and the town budded right before our eyes. Suddenly there was a covered traditional market with all kinds of tasty looking eats and beautiful modern buildings in the French colonial style with quaint cafes bursting plants and flowers from their shaded balconies, little bohemian corner bars with dollar beer specials and nestled right in the midst of it all was the Friendly Guesthouse and so we walked right in and asked to see the ten dollar room and the owner said 'why not?' And boy had our luck
ever changed as we walked into the picture of cleanliness and modernity so far as ten-dollar rooms are concerned with wifi, a big sparkling bathroom with the mirror actually Fastened to the wall I tell you, and a nice comfortable bed with mosquito-net, refrigerator, television, hot-water heater with a small tea pot, tea cups and a jar of fresh, free Vietnamese green tea all laid out with a simple charm. To top it all off we walked out our bedroom door onto our private balcony with a spectacular view of the streets below and the mountains towering above, where we perched and sipped on tea while chuckling at the siege warfare tactics of the hill-tribe women on the unsuspecting foreigners below. For $10 a night, our luck had really turned around and our spirits positively soared from there on.
We grabbed a map and took a stroll down the road to the closest hill-tribe village, a pastoral little town called 'Cat Cat' which all of the real trekkers chide as a tourist trap and when we got to the gate and saw the entrance price had risen from 5,000 VND (about 25 cents) to 40,000 VND ($2) in just
over three years we might have been predisposed to agree but once we got inside and made it past the couple of cafes and restaurants catering to tourists - yeah they had those - and the fifteen or so local homes rigged up and converted now into tourist shopfronts, albeit tourist shops with dirty children running around with dolls that appeared picked from the trash and mothers bathing children in small roadside irrigation ditches with active rice paddies framing the narrow footpaths, we were soon out of the trap and a beautiful scene unfolded in front of us. At the top of the path one could see down the valley for miles, a mosaic of varying shades of green and yellow terraces in the most surreal patterns with small wooden huts dotting the landscape, all contained within the valley by the towering blue mountains which brought such fertility and abundance to the ethereal fields below, the great mother of those ancient valleys. Down the hill we came across beautiful waterfalls, with a walking bridge over the top, local children swimming and splashing in the water. One young man in traditional dress suddenly came bouncing across the rocks and through a
door with a unique music, a strange blend of styles which one would be hard-pressed to pigeon hole, and so we followed him inside to see a traditional Black Hmong dance performance for the dozen or so tourists who wandered through and then we went out and lounged under a tree with a reused plastic bottle full of rough village apple wine which ferments in a clear glass jar full of small apples for three years, or so says the villager who runs the makeshift stand, and I almost tried some local dried water-buffalo meat but it was a little out of our price range at $3 a chunk.
On the way up the hill we came across the most spectacular little family of roosters and mother hens, baby chicks, ducks and ducklings and small black pigs and a small striped cat who all lived on the side of the path clinging to the edge of a tremendous drop-off to the river valley below and we sat and enjoyed their company for awhile, the cat laying among the piglets which she seemed to have adopted, nuzzling their faces, bathing them and curling up among them. She even
had a strong affinity for the local hens and it was an absolutely marvelous farm scene that may as well have been a thousand years old so far as we could tell and with a mighty and mountainous bamboo forest - with vegetation so vast you couldn't make it a foot off the path - above us which we also took a splendid hike through. On the way out we overlooked the boundless patchwork of terraced hills, a buffalo crossing the suspension bridge before making his way up a massive staircase on his way to pasture - unassisted, and then we bought Tara a soda on the way out and of course she was immediately mobbed by a group of local children who she begrudgingly shared with.
By local standards the village may be a bit touristy, but for the short walk, magnificent views and ancient feel to much of the village who were we to complain and the round trip is about a 10 k walk up and down some serious hills so we weren't going to sit back and act like it was a walk in the old park either. In fact, it was the perfect little
Cafe Sua
Slow drip Vietnamese coffee with condensed milkintroduction to a place that we had only previously imagined in pictures - not even Northern Thailand compares in terms of the sheer ruggedness of the land here and the way that, outside the small tourist enclave of Sapa, life seems to continue on here as it has in this part of the world where semi-nomadic farmers continue to move freely between China, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand and Myanmar, frustrating those who live by the recent conceptualization that imaginary lines should dictate our way of life, allegiances and indeed our very existence. There is something very timeless here in these valleys, a secret that allows us to reach in and touch a fundamental component of our humanity, something that has evolved slowly but was lost quite suddenly - if you asked me to elaborate I don't know as I could, for it is something that you can feel much easier than force within the confines of language. On the way back we came across the friendliest and least insistent of the local hill-tribe women we had yet to meet, she introduced herself as Lily and held out, upside down, a small notebook with a half dozen testimonials of travelers who had
Tara
Tara with two local hill tribe girls, Yang and Sin trekked with her to her village, she smiled earnestly as she gave us the price of $20, which we mistook for $20 each and negotiated down to $15, before realizing with a bit of guilt that she meant $15 total for the both of us. We promised her that if the weather was fine the next day we would meet her at 8 am for a trek. The next morning we woke up to a bright blue day, the mountains crisp and clear and absent of a single cloud. We stepped out into the fresh morning air with the sun beaming down, awakening the sleepy town and there was Lily, seated on the side of the curb delicately tending to some knitting - an intricate little pattern on a small piece of black fabric.
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RENanDREW
Ren & Andrew
Aw!
What a gorgeous photo. I really enjoyed this blog on Sapa...it's a gorgeous part of Vietnam and we would love to go back there. Looking forward to reading more of your blogs :)