Sapa

On Thursday, we somehow overcame our hesitation to leave the Nam Hai and boarded our flight to Hanoi. Saying goodbye to this amazing resort could only be described as a heroic undertaking.

The flight from Danang to Hanoi was about an hour long, and when we arrived in Hanoi the weather looked miserable. It was cold and rainy, a far cry from the sunny warmth of Hoi An. We scouted the taxi stand for a Mai Linh cab, literally swatting away the pesky independent guys that try to rip you off. Hanoi airport is famous for these jerks.

Our hotel in Sapa had arranged our overnight train tickets, and we were to pick them up at a designated cafe in Hanoi. When we arrived, there was already another couple there, waiting for the same service for the same train to the same hotel. It made us more confident about the whole adventure. Viet arrived with our tickets in due time, and we sat around chatting with him about life in Hanoi for about an hour before we had to leave for the train station. A weird guy to say the least, but we would have been toast without Viet - he joined us in the cab and even deposited us in our seats. Matt and I had decided to splurge for a 2-berth carriage, this being our honeymoon and all. Plus, we were signed up for a hike the next day and were hoping to get some sleep.

The train was surprisingly a smooth ride - and a pretty surreal experience, but that could be attributed in part to my Benadryl-fueled hallucinations. Unfortunately we couldn't see much of the country from the window since it was so dark, which was just as well so that we could get some sleep. We arrived in Lao Cai at 5:30 am. The sun was not up yet, which made finding the guy that was to take us up to the mountains of Sapa even more difficult. Again, lots of gringos getting off the train.

Lao Cai is 2km from the border with China, and Sapa is the town up the mountain. Sapa is famous in Viet Nam for its traditional hill tribes, which have not changed their centuries old way of life. The mountains of Sapa are steeped rice paddies, and it is the only place in Viet Nam that actually gets snow. The rice grown here is eaten here and not ever sold, b/c unlike the Mekong, Sapa only has one rice crop per year. Life here is tough. Sapa opened up its doors to the first tourists about 8 years ago, and tourism has really grown tremendously in the past 2 years, with most tourists coming from Australia. The biggest draw is trekking and seeing how the hill tribes live. If you time it just right, you can even get sunny, warm, clear skies. We, however, did not.

After being blindly shoved into a white van filled with other gringos, we drove the 45 ear-popping minutes up the mountain. When we arrived at our hotel, I was surprised to see that the proprietor that I had been emailing with was actually a gringo too. Pete is from Australia, and he opened up the Sapa Rooms Boutique about a year ago. This man can aptly be described as a saint - to the people of Sapa, he offers good-paying jobs, either working in the hotel or giving his guests tours, and good training, including transfers to work in the café in Hanoi. To his guests, he takes care of every last detail.

When we arrived we were fed then shown to our rooms, where we changed for our first hike. We were ill-prepared for the cold, so our solution was pretty Dutch in nature -wear all of your clothes at once. The Aussie couple decided to join us for our hike, so the four of us plus our local guide headed into the mountains to the Red Dzao village of Taphin. This hike was relatively easy, mainly just walking up a new government road. The views were beautiful, though would probably have been more so if we could see more than 15 feet in front of us - the fog was really heavy. We stopped for lunch at a tiny shanty cafe, where our tour guide made us a phó lunch. Then, for the highlight of our trip, we went to the Taphin "spa". In Taphin it is popular to take these steaming hot baths with medicinal herbs throw in for good measure. I will describe it as rustic...it was fairly cartoonish in that we had to climb into these big wooden kegs, in water that was just past its boiling. We felt like Bugs Bunny after Yosemite Sam got his hands on him. I wouldn't have been surprised if someone came in and threw chopped carrots in there with us.

The bath really hit the spot though - after drudging in the cold mud it did feel healing, in a way. We were all so relaxed after our baths that we were practically worshipping Pete for having arranged a jeep for our trip back to the hotel. After some dinner and glasses of red wine, we were totally ready to hit the hay stack.

The next morning we put on all of our clothes again for another hike - this one would involve a homestay in the village of Tavan with a local guide from the Black H'moung tribe. This time it was just Matt and I and our guide - plus a slew of tribe women that followed us all the way to our lunch spot so that they could persuade us to buy things from them. They apparently get word of gringos in the hotels that are planning treks and wait outside the hotel for them to head out. Literally these women waited out front for hours before we got our act together and before our tour guide showed up. Pete told us that these women will chance their whole day on making just one sale, and once they get the money for their embroidered products they head immediately to the market to buy vegetables for their family. We did not mind this entourage of women - aged 13 to 54 - one bit, especially since they helped me through some very slippery slopes during our trek. I may still be at the bottom of some mountain in Sapa if it wasn't for them. So we did our duty and bought something small and silly from each other them. As a thanks, the youngest one gave me a friendship bracelet.

After a lunch spot at a busy café filled to the brim with trekking gringos, we ended up at our homestay very early. Too early. We were there at 2:30, freezing our buns off with literally nothing to do. Luckily, Pete had told us to bring a deck of cards, so we started playing. Our tour guide eventually joined. The homestay was a bit of a jip, in that it wasn't really someone's home. It was, but the part where the guests stayed was separate from where the family stayed, and there was literally room for 20 guests. But it was cold - very, very cold. Most of the night we spent huddled by the fire, watching the flames smoke a big pig face hanging over it that was left over from the Tet festivities. Dinner was a greasy, splendid feast - aside from the fact that we ate it in a concrete room with one long flurouescent bulb, huddled in cold over our tiny bowls, sitting in tiny plastic stools, watching a Chinese soap opera in the dark with the family (a father, daughter and grandmother - the mother was spending a few days in the town passing out invitations for the older son's upcoming nuptials) and our tour guide. They were watching this soap opera so intently, it was such a bizarre scene. Apparently this is very typical in Viet Nam, and this particular soap opera is on every day at 6. In some ways, Sapa is so American...

The family didn't speak English, so the homestay was not as enlightening as we had hoped - it would have been nice to chat with them about life in Sapa. In the evening another tour guide we had met on the way came over to play cards and drink rice wine with us. Her guest was a miserable German girl who hated everything and just wanted to sleep. Everything shuts down very early here - in fact, there is a sign as you enter the town warning against noise after 10pm. It also warns against foreigners kissing in front of the locals. Our tour guides told us that kids usually get drunk as a way of entertaining themselves in Sapa, and these girls were ADDICTED to their cell phones - texting and calling friends, playing music on it, you name it. Their English was very impressive, even more so since they learned it just from speaking with tourists. At one point, one of the tour guides took Matt's cell phone and started reading his text messages. We were too impressed with her abilities to be annoyed by it.

We somehow made it through the night. We piled on 3 blankets and snuggled up on one tiny bed. If it wasn't for the rooster singing on the other side of the concrete wall starting at 2am, it would have been a decent nights sleep. We awoke around 7, piled on jackets and headed to the outhouse to brush our teeth, then met the family for breakfast - banana pancakes for the gringos, leftover dinner for the locals. Then we jetted off on a trek that was very challenging. We were drudging along the walls of the steeped rice patties, narrow as a balance beam, and slippery and wet. At one point I thought that it wasn't a matter of if I would fall, but when. But somehow I managed to stay upright. We crossed over some fantastic places, including walking over a dried up waterfall (dried up b/c it was the dry season). The whole time we were trekking I was not happy with my situation - I much prefer to sip cocktails on a beach somewhere - but it was really a fantastic feeling when you finish.

As we walked back into town, we passed the big market and saw some icky things for sale - like dog. Apparently though, dog meat is no cheaper than regular meat. So it's not a matter of poverty, they like the way dogs taste. So they eat them. This is more of a northern Viet Nam thing, but even there the people are divided on whether it is delicious or horrific.

We took the overnight train back to Hanoi that night. I remember whilst in the shuttle going down the mountain (which was playing a kareoke CD, by the way, the kind with the vocals very low) seeing a tribe girl sneaking off into a crevace on the face of a mountain, and wanting to see where she was going off to. Sapa treks really are addictive.

Overall Sapa was a major highlight of our trip - even though while we were there it was quite miserable. I had a bit of a cold that I contracted on the flight to Hanoi, which was only made worse by the drastic change in temperature, it was foggy and cold and wet, the shower at the hotel was never really that hot, and we were trekking over some treacherous tracks. But in the end, it was one of our most incredible and memorable experiences from this trip. Somehow seeing Sapa in this light made its poverty even more devastating. Somehow these people can survive.

By the time we reached Hanoi, we were seasoned travelers of this great land of Viet Nam. Or so we thought.