Trekking in Sapa

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  Sapa, Vietnam
Thursday, July 3, 2008

So after getting back from Halong bay, we had four hours to kill in Hanoi before taking the night train to Sapa in Northern Vietnam.  We had a sleeper train with 4 beds in a cabin, and once again we were surprised by the cleanliness and the resemblance to what we were promised :). So we arrived early morning in Sapa , around 4"30 am, where the hotel van was there to bring us to the hotel.  We checked in and had a few hours to rest again before going to walk around the city.  THere were tons of little girls dressed in their traditional outfit in front of our hotel!  It was so cute.  One of them was our guide for the next 3 days. So on the first day, we walked to a village where they showed us how to make the color for their clothes and also some waterfall.  It was really nice and we could see all hte rice paddies in the mountains.  Sapa was really nice as it was cooler than the rest of Vietnam.  The rest of the afternoon was free to walk around the city.  We were surrounded by women and girls from the village to try to get us to buy their handicrafts.  The next morning we started our trek to Ta Van village where we stayed one night in a family there.  The walk was awesome through the rice paddies and we were lucky because it was so sunny outside.  THis trek is very touristic tho so we were tons of foreigners walking the path and about 13 staying at the family 'house  which was pretty much a hotel.  It was still pretty fun and went to swim in the river where sean saw a snake...ugh!  The next morning we walked some more and were brought back to Sapa by Jeep. 

We were supposed to take the night train back to Hanoi to catch a bus to Laos from there but we had heard that it was now possible to cross the border in the North part of Vietnam to go directly to Luang Prabang, the city where we wanted to go first in Laos. So we looked into it and it looked legit so we gave our train tickets to our guide adn her cousin as she had never left her village and Sapa.  I think she was quite happy!  So the bus to Laos was only available on Wednesday so we decided to stay an extra day in Sapa because we liked it so much. We switched hotel to go to a cheaper one as our 3'day tour had just ended.  WE found a 7$ room really close.  We went to get food and then came back to the hotel to find 3 cocroaches running around our room coming out of the wall. We were truly disgusted and asked to owner to change room.  At first, she refused, but then as we packed our bags and were going to leave, she gave us a better room for the same price.  We looked at it and it seemed fine, so we stayed taht ngiht.  The next day, we prepared our trip to Laos by buying our bus ticket, changing our money to American for Visa, and other stuff like taht.  Then we walked to the top of the moutain in Sapa to have a gorgeous view of the whole city.  We had our last meal in Sapa with a hot pot taht was probably the best meal we had had so far in the trip.  We bought a few souvenirs and then went back to our new hotel (we had changed due to the cocroaches) and got ready to leave the next morning.


Next entry for our trip to Laos!

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