Sapa is a lovely town in the mountains in northwestern Vietnam. These mountains form the beginning of the Himalayan range, and are home to some of the minority tribal people of Vietnam. There are many minority villages near Sapa, and we took a 2 day trekking tour of a few villages. 

We started off in Hanoi and took an overnight train to Sapa, and we got lucky and had an entire 4 bed cabin to ourselves on the way there. The ride to Sapa is exactly 8 hours, and we didn’t exactly fall asleep right away, and the train workers wake everyone up an hour before arrival, and well, we were trying to sleep on a train that kept stopping and starting, so we didn’t sleep that great. But we were excited to be in Sapa and out of the city, so we fed off of that energy to get our day started. From the train we took an hour minibus ride from the train station in Lao Cai to Sapa, where we were ushered to a hotel for breakfast and lots of coffee. 

Around 9:30 we met our Hmong guide and fellow hikers and headed through town to start the hike. We spend maybe 30 minutes walking through Sapa then headed off the road to the first rice terraces. It was cold and raining off and on, and other groups headed out before us, so the trail was quite muddy and slippery.  

 

Luckily there were a few local women helping people along the trail, who were amazing at walking along these slippery hills – one even had a baby on her back as she was walking through the slippery mud! And we could barely stay on our feet! 

We had several hours of walking through mud before we got to the first small village and had our first taste of the locals trying to sell us stuff – the children came running out trying to get us to buy bracelets. Apparently the Hmong people grow hemp and make clothing and textiles out of it, by dying the fabric themselves with indigo etc. While this sounds great, we did not see any of this happening on our tour, which I would expect they would want to show off to foreigners – heck I would love to see some handmaking of textiles! I love fabric! Which makes me wonder if they just sell us crap that is made in China.. But I digress. 

We hiked around 10km before lunch – after going down the muddy slopes of the rice terraces, we went up and down them again and eventually over a bridge to a larger village that had a restaurant where we ate lunch. Before we went to lunch, we realized the real reason why the villagers were walking with us, helping us through the muddy spots – they wanted to sell us their goods. I have to admit, they had a pretty good tactic – help us through the rough spots by offering their hands to hold through the really slippery parts while getting to know us along the way, then break out their wares before they left us for lunch. They didn’t even have that much good stuff! They wear lots of really colorful clothes but most of the stuff they wanted to sell us was dull and dark colors, and mostly stupid little purses. I ended up buying one of the bright headscarves since this woman did help me through the difficult parts (we didn’t have trekking poles like we usually would for hiking on a trail like this), but then her friend kept trying to sell me stuff too – “you buy from her, you have to buy from me too! Best deal for you!” I definitely did not take their hands the next day! 

  
  
  
  
  
  
I took a lot of pictures of the rice terraces. It is hard to convey the magnitude of such large hillsides covered in these man made terraces. Unfortunately it wasn’t sunny while we were there, which would have probably made for better pictures, but it was still amazing to see.

   
  

After lunch we walked another hour to the village our home stay was located in, Ta Van. We met the other group of travellers that were also staying in the home stay with us, and had some mulled wine at a village bar before our appetizer of French fries and dinner, which was more rice, chicken, and veggies. 

(Totally borrowed these next 3 photos from another traveler, as I definitely didn’t think about taking photos of the home stay)

  
  
After dinner we hung around with our new friends and celebrated the eve of Thom’s birthday with them, drinking “happy water” – homemade rice wine and telling jokes.

  
After a lovely but cold night’s sleep at the home stay, we donned our wet and muddy shoes for 6km more trekking. 

  
We all decided we wanted to do the harder route, as the easy one was just walking along the road, which sounded too easy for a trekking tour. This day was just as muddy and slippery as the last, with slightly more up and downhill. It was basically like walking on wet clay.

  
  
We went through a bamboo forest.   

  
 And saw a waterfall.  
 
   

  
  
   
 
  
Poking stuff with sticks.

We finished the hike around lunchtime and had pho for lunch before our shuttle back to Sapa. 

Once we got back to Sapa around 2pm, we were supposed to have time to shower and clean up, then have a few hours to walk around own, which we were looking forward to since we wanted to shop for handicrafts for some gifts we need to get. Unfortunately, and coincidentally right after we turned in our evaluation form of the hike, they ran out of towels for the showers, and told us we had to get on the 1 hour long minibus back to the town the train station was in at 4:30, for a 9:30 train! They said there was going to be a ‘lot of traffic’ because of the lunar new year (a lot of traffic in a tiny mountain town, yeah right) but it seemed like the tour guide’s boss just wanted to go home early as she shared the minibus with us. 

Not only did that not leave us much time to go around Sapa, but it made us miss dinner, which we had to get as take away instead. The dinner took at least 30 minutes to make, the menu was half the size as regular dinner, and our dinner was such shitty sandwiches that it was basically not even worth making them. So we grumpily got on the minibus to wait 4 hours at the train station, when our minibus stopped working and the driver had to light a fire under the bus to defrost the fuel lines – we had to convince him to let us off the bus before he lit a fire under it! Somehow this made the bus run again but it was not exactly a conventional repair method.

  
We took the overnight bus back to Hanoi and hoped to talk to the guy who booked the tour about the troubles we had at the end, but he forgot to pick us up from the train station, and by the time we got to his hotel to get our bags we were too mad and tired to deal with it anymore. We did have a lovely time on the tour, unfortunately a not so amazing end to an otherwise fun couple of days. O well, traveling isn’t always easy!