Sapa

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Hello,

I'm attaching a ton of photo's from a place in north Vietnam called Sapa. Its an overnight train ride away from the main city Hanoi, and is absolutely mental. When you get off the train in a town called Loukai (or something), you get a bus ride up into the mountain town of Sapa, which takes you through one of the sections of mountains where the vietnamese grow their rice (and they make a lot of rice). The problem is to make rice the ground needs to be level so the water can stay in the fields and help it grow, and vietnam is not known for many flat places. So instead, to use the hilly land most effeciently, farmers have cut away into the side of the mountains and hills to make a series of huge steps that are basically like mini thin fields going from top to bottom, which can be a couple of miles or something. This, although being a huge ball ache for the farmers is absolutely amazing to look at and is good fun to walk around cos there are plenty of waterfalls, which can be swam under and lots of jungles and stuff to walk through whilst checking out the big steps. Hope this is making sense, but if not just have a look at the pictures.

Very quickly, on our last day we were walking down the road talking, and came across a snake sitting in the middle of the road, but we had no idea whether it was venomous or not, so kind of just screamed and stood there for a few seconds. On the other side of the road there were a couple of locals who did exactly the same thing, but didn't just stand there. Whilst one of the locals was panicking, the other, an old man just jumped into a bush, pulled out a massive stick and fully wholloped this snake on the head repeatedly, then got the end of the stick and jabbed it into the snakes head and then crushed it! He then finished and just launched it into the bush! It was a pretty gruesome ordeal but if the locals were reacting that badly then it shows that it wasn't a friendly snake, and we were pretty lucky that they were there. We did reckon as this was going on that the guy may have worked for the tourist company and had planted the snake and stick just before we got there so he could save our lives and demand for some vietnamese dong after. But have a look at the photos, one of the girls there was pretty quick with the old camera.

Will update soon
xx

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