Sapa (May 31 - June 4, 2006)

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Sapa is between Hanoi and the Chinese border. It is a popular tourist destination because of its mountain location, cool climate and hill tribes. Many people buy packages (which usually include hill tribe treks of varying lengths) to Sapa from Hanoi. Because we had plenty of time, we decided not to book an organized tour to Sapa and instead to head there on our own and book any packages from there if we found something we liked. Night trains appear to be the only real option to Sapa (there may be day trains and buses but no one talks about them and they’re hard to obtain information on) and so on Tuesday we took the night train to Lo Cai. The bus left Sapa at 10 pm and arrived at 6:30 am in Lo Cai which was about an hour later than scheduled. We had a sleeper car (a small room with 2 sets of bunkbeds) which we shared with two brothers from London who were both in their early 20s. We slept better than we did on the night train from Bangkok to Chiang Mai but it still wasn’t great sleep.

We had booked a hotel recommended in our guidebook and so a mini-bus (i.e. van) was there waiting for us with our name on a placard. The ride took two hours to Sapa and our bus was filled with six other travelers, 3 Vietnamese men working the mini-bus and the wife and child of one of the men. Along the way to Sapa we stopped at a shrine store (yes your guess is correct - a store where you can buy a shrine for your home) so that one of the men could buy a new shrine. We then dropped off the man and his family (and their new shrine) before continuing on the road to Sapa. The ride was cramped and Amy’s legs were pressed into a cooler of fish which did not make us thrilled for all of the personal stops. As if that wasn’t bad enough the music we enjoyed on the ride consisted of songs with simple English and witty lyrics like “Don’t Kill the Earth” performed by someone sounding like an Abba cover band. On a positive note, the scenery along the way to Sapa was beautiful with terraced rice paddies, buffalo and other animals being shepherded by the locals and lots of hill tribe people in their colorful outfits. The mountains, however, were completely obscured by thick clouds.

We arrived at our hotel around 8:30 am. The problem with the night train is that you arrive in Sapa as early as 6:30 am but people don’t check out of their hotel rooms until noon so you are forced to kill time in the early morning when all you really want to do is shower and nap. The woman at the hotel offered to give us a room until ours was ready but made it sound like our room would be ready in an hour. We didn’t want to borrow a room if we didn’t end up liking our room and wanted to change hotels. So instead we went up to have breakfast on a patio overlooking the mountains. The scenery would have been amazing if we could have seen past the clouds but they were so thick we could barely see in front of us.

After breakfast, we checked a couple of the hotels across the street because we were hoping to find a room that we liked that was available immediately but nothing had a fireplace like we were hoping to be able to use in Sapa. We killed a little time walking around the market and looking at the hotel’s tour information. At 11 am the woman at the hotel finally showed us to our room which was nothing spectacular but had a fireplace. We just wanted to shower and rest. We laid down for a few minutes, after hanging up our laundry from Hanoi (which was returned to us by our Hanoi hotel very late and damp) to hopefully air out, before Amy decided to shower. Not only was the water in the shower freezing (in a climate where that is not as enjoyable as it might have been in Saigon or anywhere else so far on our trip for that matter) but after jumping in and out of the shower, we realized there were no towels or toilet paper. We decided to pack up and went to the front desk to pay them for our coffee which we had while waiting for the room as well as give them a little dong for our very short time in the room.

We walked across town and looked at both the Mountain View (where Phil and Colleen, our Kiwi friends, were staying) and the Royal. After looking at both of their $15 rooms, Amy decided Mountain View’s “expensive” room was the better of the two and so we ran upstairs to shower and enjoy the end of Dude Where’s My Car? After showering we decided to go to Baguette and Chocolate which was recommended by our guide book and was actually very good. Along the way we ran into our Canadian friends from the Halong Bay cruise and chatted with them for a few minutes. We ended up at Baguette and Chocolate for over 3 hours, relaxing with them and enjoying macaroni and cheese (hard to get in these parts) and French desserts.

Around 5:30 pm we parted ways and walked around town for a little while, past the lake, before heading back to check our email. While checking our email, we ran into Phil and Colleen who wanted to know if we had any interest in any of the tours that the Mountain View was offering. We had a beer with them while deciding if we wanted to join one of the two tours that they had booked but ultimately decided that we needed more time to think. We left them and went off to the Red Dragon, a pub, for sausage and mash and chips. After dinner, we realized it was somehow 9 pm and we had never found the time to nap so we decided that we were too tired to do the tour the next day with Colleen and Phil. We ended the night watching our recently downloaded episodes of Lost and Scrubs and Amy didn’t even make it through Scrubs.

We spent four more days and three more nights in Sapa. Sapa is a very small town and it does not take long to explore the entire town by foot. We discovered that if you do not go on a hill tribe trek, there is not a lot to do in Sapa. We were not eager to do a hill tribe trek even though it had been recommended by the two Australian women on our Halong Bay cruise because we had not been overly impressed with our trek in Thailand.

We spent most of our time relaxing and exploring the town. We also spent a good amount of time with our Canadian friends getting to know them better. They stayed at a very nice hotel outside of the town center and hosted us for a happy hour complete with Oreos and some of Roger’s other favorite treats. They are a really interesting and fun couple who have traveled a lot (and were traveling for 6 months during this trip) and we are hoping to visit them some time in Quebec.

We may be one of the few travelers who did not care for Sapa. We may have liked it more if we had done an overnight hill trek because without the hill trek we were underwhelmed by what Sapa offered. Besides the western food served by Bread & Chocolate which was great, the food in Sapa was the worst we had encountered in Vietnam. We’re not sure how long tourism has been popular here but based on the accessibility of hotel rooms in conjunction with train times, the food quality, and the lack of an ATM in town it seems like it might be relatively new. As the town is lovely and appears to be booming we hope that will improve. Although our hotel seemed very nice at first we ended up feeling like it was just ok because the room had some bugs, the shower was not great, the internet rarely worked and the staff was not super helpful. Having said all that, we suspect that it’s still one of the best hotels in the area.

We have become more cynical the longer we have been traveling and so the hill tribe attraction to Sapa turned us off a bit. The small town is covered with hill tribe women and girls decked out in their traditional outfits trying to sell jewelry, clothes and scarves. The requests to buy something are non-stop and hard to avoid as might be possible in bigger cities after leaving the tourist areas. These women spend all day in town selling goods (we even saw a hill tribe girl working at an internet café) and so we suspect that it’s unlikely that they still live the way that they traditionally did. We definitely got the feeling that the outfits were for the benefit of the tourists and pictured that these hill tribe women couldn’t wait to get home at night to slip into a pair of jeans and enjoy a Coke. But perhaps we’re just getting too jaded.

After we turned down their goods, most of the hill tribe women would offer Roger marijuana first and then opium. So not only is Roger’s new beard causing him to be “randomly” searched at airports but it must also make him look like a big druggie dropout.

We spent a decent amount of time observing a really creepy guy maybe in his late 30s who appeared to be taking the motto “soak up local culture” a little too seriously. We’re not really sure whether this is an entertaining lowlight or perhaps a creepy highlight but we know it’s something that our Canadian friends independently noticed as well. He spent his days around town hanging out with gaggles of hill tribe girls. We’re not sure how long he had been in Sapa hanging out with them but he was dressed in a hill tribe shirt and pants and would spend all day doing whatever they did - sewing, weaving, whatever. It was like a trainwreck and we couldn’t not look. We can just imagine him describing his experience to his friends and condemning the rest of the travelers for not becoming one with the hill tribe people.

Notwithstanding all of the things we did not like about Sapa we loved the scenery. The scenery in Sapa is beautiful with the mixture of mountains and terraced rice paddies. Periodically over our stay the scenery was obscured by thick fog but Roger was still able to take hundreds of pictures off our balcony. In order to see more of the scenery we decided to do a tour and narrowed it down to two options. One was an overnight trip where you stayed with a family and worked with them. This one sounded really interesting and we liked the thought of working in the rice fields and learning how people lived their lives. Ultimately though we weren’t really interested in an overnight trip and as interesting as this option sounded we wondered if we were cut out for a full day in the rice fields. It definitely might be one of those experiences that sounds cool but is really only fun for 10 minutes. We know the farmers in Vietnam have much more difficult lives than we have so maybe we don’t need to experience it first-hand. Instead of the working tour, we decided to do a tour by car during which we would visit three different hill tribe villages.

For our tour we had a guide, a driver and a woman in her late teens/early 20s who was along supposedly to learn the driving route or to practice English but because she rarely spoke to us we suspect she was a love interest of one of the guys. The bumpy drive in the rustic jeep on the mountain roads was not something Amy enjoyed at all but we really enjoyed our time in the villages. Unfortunately we did not take any notes about our visits and now we cannot remember if we visited a Thai village or a Lao village but we know we visited a Black Hmong village and a Green Hmong village. The Hmong villages are called black or green because of the clothes they wear. Our guide walked us through the villages and we were able to meet a few people and observe how they live. Two of the villages were less than two miles apart but completely different in every regard - clothing, homes, and farms. In the last village, we felt like the Pied Piper because as we made our way around the village more and more kids kept joining along to follow us. We enjoyed our day and were surprised by how friendly all of the people we visited were because of our interaction (or lack thereof) with the hill tribes in Thailand.

Our last day in Sapa was anticlimactic and was spent on the computer researching our trip to Australia which we had spent very little time on before leaving the US. We also found time for one last trip to Bread & Chocolate. We took the Sunday night train back to Hanoi and shared our cabin with a friendly couple from Scotland.

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