I'm on Sa Pa the world, looking down on creation
Trip Start
Feb 28, 2008
1
11
18
Trip End
Jul 06, 2008
Sapa,
Vietnam
Sunday, April 6, 2008
Once again, sorry for the backlog of blog entries but it's hard to keep on top of things when you are constantly high on Opium. That was a joke by the way Mum! I am currently on my fifth day of feeling well, which has been the most days in a couple of weeks. I am off on a 3 day hiking mission across Tiger Leaping Gorge in the morning (it is 5.43pm now) so I may not be able to do another blog for a few days. It depends whether they have internet in the middle of nowhere!
Apologies also for the dodgy blog title. I was running low on song lyrics that fitted in with the place where this blog is for!
Anyways...
Saturday 5th April
At Lao Cai station I was met by a guy holding a sign with Waller James written on it. I guess the guy at the City Gate Hotel must have gotten confused by my drivers license! He shepherded me onto a nearby bus which would take me to Sa Pa, which is 1800m above sea level I think. It took an hour to drive the 32km up the winding mountain roads. There were some beautiful views on the way up. I chatted to an old Thai dude and a nice Australian couple, Euan and I can't remember the woman's name (I think it began with a B). When we arrived at the Mountain View Hotel at 7am I was told that my trek started at 9am but my room wasn't ready yet as the people in it hadn't checked out yet. I went with the Aussies to eat breakfast on the terrace. When the mist cleared there were some amazing views of the mountains, villages and terraced rice fields below. As we were so high you could even see the tops of the clouds below us. At 8.30 I was told that my room was ready, so I had half an hour to sort myself out and be ready to go. My trekking group consisted of me and two Belgian girls, Anina and I can't remember the other one's name, and our weird looking little guide, a girl from the Hmong mountain village, Mai. For a girl that lived in a village that didn't even have one toilet, she had a wicked sense of humour and her English was really good! The trek was 15km and was constantly uphill and downhill, never flat, and took us through some of the isolated villages in the valleys (I have some amazing photos. I'll put them up when I find somewhere with a CD drive!). It was the most exercise that I had done in quite a while so my legs were screwed by the end of it! We got back mid-afternoon and I spent the rest of it chilling out on the restaurant terrace until I met the girls for dinner at 7. They went to bed at about 8.30, due to an early train back to Hanoi, leaving me to wander the town looking for some entertainment. That was when I realised that there was absolutely bugger all to do in Sa Pa other than trekking! I ended up buying a couple of beers from the shop and went to sit on my balcony listening to my iPod until I went to bed bored at 10.30pm!
Sunday 6th April
The checkout time for the hotel was 9am, and guess what??? I forgot to set an alarm and woke up exactly 9 with my stuff spread all over the room. After a frantic 10 minutes I rushed downstairs to put my bag in the storage room. I had a choice of two options for going to Kunming, China: get the bus at 5pm and arrive at 3am the next morning, or get the bus to Lao Cai, wait until the morning and get the 10.30am bus which arrived in Kunming at 8.30pm. I decided that I would rather not be wandering the streets at 3 in the morning after a 10 hour bus ride and decided on the latter of the two (This proved to be a mistake. Read the next blog!). I spent the morning sitting by the lake and in the afternoon I reached a stage of boredom so bad that I ended up waiting in a photo place for half an hour so they could put my photos from my camera onto a CD. I then pottered around the market for a couple of hours, being harrassed by everyone with a stall. Most of their English wasn't great so most of the time I would be greeted with "Oi (or a whistle)! Buy something". My minibus to Lao Cai left at 6pm and by the time I got to Lao Cai I had a bad stomach ache so I went to the first guesthouse I could find. After I had settled in all I wanted to do was to find an internet place with a CD drive so I could upload my photos. Do you think I could find anywhere with a working CD drive? NO! To make matters worse, none of the ATM's in the town accepted Maestro cards. The only one that did was 3km away! I decided to give up and go back to the room to find that the TV only had four channels. And they were all in Vietnamese! Great!!!
