Sapa Town
Trip Start
Dec 28, 2007
1
16
27
Trip End
Dec 01, 2008
Sapa,
Vietnam
Thursday, March 13, 2008
We arrived in Lao Cai (the nearest train station to Sapa) at 6:00 in the morning, very tired and groggy. We were driven in a big smelly bus to our hotel, checked in partially, and went on a "trek" which was actually a walk on a paved path through Cat Cat village, where Hmong hilltribe people live. The village and scenery were interesting, but we were very disappointed and amazed to see that a Japanese company was building a 5 star hotel right in the middle of the hilltribe village. At the bottom of our trek, we came to beautiful Cat Cat falls. We rested for a few minutes while our guide smoked what he claimed to be tobacco out of a bamboo waterpipe. We crossed the river and hiked back into town. The whole walk took about 3 hours. After a long nap, we headed out for a nice dinner in town and then hung out at a cool English Pub
30 KG of Rice
. The second day we did a longer "trek" which started down a road, onto a trail, and through rice fields and villages for about 5 hours. At our hotel, we were greated by many Hmong girls trying to hawk their wares. Mom made the mistake of talking to one of them, which resulted in the woman shadowing mom the whole way down to her village (several hours) and then culminated in a hard sell of handicrafts. This seems to be the typical sales routine for the villagers, they get a motorbike ride up to the town in the morning and then follow tourists down offering various services such as umbrellas, walking sticks, a helping hand in difficult portions of the trail and then a hard sell of goods when the tourists arrive at their village, Lao Chai. Lao Chai was pretty, right on the river. We lunched there, checked out some of the handicraft shops, walked to another village, and then caught a bus back to Sapa.
It was very cold at night (we had been warned), but the day time temps the first two days were quite pleasant. We had to pay $3 per night to get a portable heater in our very dodgy hotel. We do not recommend the Royal Hotel in Sapa.
Day three of our Sapa tour was to be a trip to the market in Bac Ha
Andrea on the shortcut
. When Andrew and Andrea learned this was a four hour drive on a bumpy bus to Bac Ha and then 2 back to Lao Cai, they bailed from the plan. Mom, Jack, Nancy and John all went, and much to their dismay, they rode a bus for three hours in pouring rain to find out the road had been closed by a landslide (it has been pouring rain since the night before). Their guide Hui took them to the train station where they waited 9 hours for the train to leave. Andrea and Andrew hung out in Sapa, had a nice lunch, and took a scary 1 hour van ride from Sapa to Lao Cai and caught up with our fellow travelers. The 4 Bac Ha'ers weren't happy but their spirits quickly rebounded when the train left. We again took the VIP train back to Hanoi, which was very comfortable. We arrived in Hanoi at 5:00 am, very confused and tired. We had some coffee, came back to the land of the living, and meandered around until our 3:00 pm flight left for Hoi An. Much of our morning in Hanoi involved Jack negotiatiating a good price on 20 old war propaganda art posters, which were lovely. 
