On Saturday, we got ready to head off up North to Sapa to trek in the hills. This was something I'd heard was great however we were feeling a bit unmotivated and worn out and so were almost talking ourselves out of it. But then we decided to pull ourselves together and to do it in a way that felt more fun we booked ourselves on a trip to get up there. This meant that we paid a little more money but for that we got the whole thing arranged, lifts instead of local buses (which other people had again been ripped off on) and it meant we did it as part of a group. Best decision ever.
Getting the overnight train to Sapa was a wholly more enjoyable experience than overnight buses. We were escorted to our carriage by the man from Orient Express and in it were four beds fully equipped with pillows and duvets. We shared our carriage with two German lawyers who we'd met briefly in the Ocean Tours office earlier that evening and the four of us chatted through the eve until falling asleep eventually about 11.30pm and sleeping solidly until we pulled in at Lau Cai train station, the end of the line, at 5.30am.
Lau Cai train station was really manic even at that time in the morning and so we were really glad to see someone holding a card with our name on it and to be ushered onto a bus for the hour drive south west over the hills to Sapa town. To give an indication of how far north we now were Lau Cai is only 3km from the Chinese border! And the scenery up there was amazing. The drive to Sapa was stunning, and hair raising, as the heights we were climbing were significant. Rob snoozed and missed the views but I took them all in and started to really look forward to getting out and walking through it all. Postcard pictures of Sapa are always bright and green however I had been warned that this is very rare and normally you get misty vistas such as this.
Because we'd booked a trip we got the privilege of being dropped at a hotel in Sapa where we were given breakfast and a room where we could have a shower and little lie down. We even had a 40 min snooze which was lovely. Then we met up with Laura and Julia who we would be spending the next couple of days with and soon enough met Mao our guide too.
Mao (pronounced Ma - well by us lot anyway) was an excellent guide. She was from a Sapa village, of which there are about 50 in the area. All the hill tribe villagers in this area of the country have quite a distinct culture including a different language and very traditional clothing. I was surprised to see that this wasn't just being worn out in the hills or just for the tourists benefit but by most local people, including Mao.
As our walk got underway we had a gang of local ladies who came along with us. They escort all the walking groups back out to the villages in hope that we will in turn then choose to buy our souvenirs from them rather than someone else. Apparently the other motive is to learn English but all the same you couldn't help feeling a little awkward when they made conversation with you and you knew you weren't going to want to buy anything later on.
But we made our peace with it and got on with enjoying the walk and the stunning scenery. Our route took us mainly downhill as Sapa town is perched up high. We crossed rivers on rickety suspension bridges...
Wove around paddy field after paddy field...
And tried not to bother the local wildlife...
After about 3 hours walking we arrived at a little wooden hut on the hillside where we took shelter from the rain that was starting to fall and had steaming bowls of delicious noodle soup. It was really cold as soon as we stopped walking and we layered up and realised that the evening was likely to be a chilly one.
After lunch we stopped going downhill and instead had to climb. It was all getting a little soggier and slippier but also more and more beautiful.
After lunch, Rob and I got chatting to Mao and had some conversations that got us thinking. In Sapa you couldn't help but notice that groups of tourists were being shipped in by the bus load to come and trek in Sapa to explore the hilltribe villages. We were interested to know her view on the matter. She is very positive and diplomatic, however was also honest about some of the effects - both direct and indirect. Her main bugbear was the number of new roads that were being built by the government using money made by tourism. These roads were improving access routes through to China but also gave access into the villages. This is having severely damaging effects as it had lead to lots of recent cases of human trafficking, mainly of 14 - 18 year old girls who are forced into the sex trade.
In Mao's village two young girls recently disappeared, believed to have been taken to China. But also a number of children had started to go missing as they were being used as drug mules to smuggle opium grown in the hills, and there were many more cases from other villages in the area. The stories she told us were really sad and you could see that local life in the hills was getting invaded and disrupted in terrible ways and you couldn't help but guilty.
It brought home again the niggling knowledge that people's desire to visit "authentic" and "untouched" places takes its toll, and barging in to get our perfect "kodac" moment changes places forever. Of course the problem is much wider than us visiting to walk in the hills, it is an effect of a much bigger story of modernisation in Vietnam and a case of local people taking the brunt. But still it felt important to accept the part we play. We appreciated Mao's honesty on the matter and were glad to have had a chance to get to understand some of the real issues affecting the villages from someone who understood and appreciated both sides of the story.
Time flew by during our discussion on ethical travel and before we knew it (in fact a couple of hours more walking later) Mao suddenly announced that the village we had reached was the one where we were going to stay in overnight. In some of the villages families have set themselves up to offer homestays to travelers. You do genuinely stay in the house with them but they had quite a big house so to accommodate us. The four of us chose to stay upstairs under the rafters.
We weren't the only trekkers who arrived to spend the night there and over the evening we got to know the other groups. We all had dinner together, an amazing spread of about four different dishes (not what the family would have been eating if we weren't there but it was hard to turn it down as we were really hungry after our walking that day). Plus it was freezing so warm food was very welcome. As soon as we had stopped walking we'd cooled down and then as the sun went down it got colder and colder. By the end of dinner I had on 7 layers and a sleeping bag and everyone else was dressed similarly.
We had a great night together and after dinner Mao brought out the rice wine and we played drinking games with chopsticks and rice wine. Mao's gorgeous son also arrived as he had been visiting someone nearby and missed his mum and so Mao let him join us for the walk the next day. This is Mao and Sam her son.
Mao told us that Sam had recently broke his leg. We asked how, and she said "the school fell on him". At first we thought this must be lost in translation but no, the local school did actually fall down, breaking his leg and killing her husband's sister. Understandably, Sam is now afraid of schools! But fortunately his leg had healed well and he was going to do the walk with us the next day!
Rob managed to get knocked out of the chopstick game pretty early and so instead spent the rest of the evening building imaginative balancing creations with Sam out of cards, chopsticks and beer bottles.
It felt about midnight when we went off to bed but actually it was about 9pm and then I slept through until 8am. All night it was rainy and stormy and so it felt very fun and cozy up under the rafters listening to the storm. Gladly we were provided with a big warm blanket and so I slept snugly all night.
In the morning we were presented with pancakes for breakfast (another very non-traditional hilltribe meal that we thoroughly enjoyed). And then we got our trekking underway. As we were all getting on so well the guides had obviously decided it would be fun to walk as one big group so about 15 of us plus guides and local lady followers trekked off together.
Because of the rain the night before the going that morning was very very slippy and at one point our path was along an edge of a paddy. It was almost like walking a tight rope with a mud bath on one side and a few meters drop the other. It was fun to do but even funner to watch the others tackling it.
Again the scenery was stunning and it was a bit more varied that day as we reached near the top of some of the hills. It was pretty hard going at times as the ground was wet, uneven and often steep. Mao's son Sam showed us up from beginning to end scampering around in his wellies watching us sip and slide about.
Rob and I did well though and didn't fall once. We really really enjoyed the walk, the company and getting to explore the place. It was so good to be out of the city.
Sadly at midday our trek was over and when the others stopped for lunch (Laura and Julia were doing a three day trip) we walked on a bit further until we met a road and were picked up from here to head back to hotel. We were sad to leave everyone but were also pretty knackered and glad for a sit down and some lunch. That afternoon we should have been visiting some waterfalls but as it was the "dry" season apparently they weren't worth the visit at the moment. Instead we were told we could walk to another village, an hour there and an hour back. In the end we decided not to do it as our legs ached and it felt a little like a filler activity to walk back and forth, plus it was starting to rain and I wanted to explore Sapa itself.
So after lunch and a shower (and a naughty little sit down watching telly for a bit) we walked up into town and had a poke about and resisted buying souvenirs. The mist really set in that afternoon giving the town a very atmospheric appearance. It was as cold as ever too so we had a cosy coffee before heading back to the hotel for our 4.30 lift to the station (as we realised the 6pm shuttle wouldn't get us there in time for our 7.30 train).
At 5.30pm our lift finally arrived and by this point Rob was pacing and exasperated. We did still have time to get our train but not time left to have dinner first and an hour late is pretty late. We relaxed on the journey to Lai Cau though, looked at the view for a final time and chatted over everything we'd learnt over the last couple of days.
It was dark when we arrived at the station so we headed straight in to exchange our travel vouchers for tickets at the Orient Express office just as we had in Hanoi. But could we find the office..? No we couldn't, and we weren't the only ones. The vouchers had a map to the office on them which was round the corner but when we looked there it didn't exist and it wasn't anywhere to be seen in the vicinity. Eventually some other stressed westerners in the same situation said there was a lady over the road taking people's vouchers and who seemed to be reappearing with tickets.
So against our better judgment we decided to go and chance this. To be fair she did come back with tickets after about 15 mins anxious waiting, however they were for 8.15pm instead of 7.30pm and were for a completely different carriage and bunks. By this point though it was nearly 7.30pm and we had no choice but to hope for the best. They looked genuine but I knew that it it didn't work out we wouldn't have much of a leg to stand on after just handing our vouchers over to a random lady on a dark conrner. So it was fingers crossed that we'd be give a nice bunk on the 8.15pm as she promised us we would.
And we were, so all was well that ended well. In fact this train was even nicer than the first, we had nice room mates and we were all asleep by 9.30pm! Before getting on the train Rob and I had even managed to buy some bread and out of date laughing cow cheese (the only thing ever on sale here) to snack on for dinner and so we didn't even have to go to sleep hungry.
The train arrived at 5.30 (although we were awoken at 4am for some reason). We walked along the empty streets to the lake where we watched the locals stretching and doing Tai Chi in the early morning light. We then bumped into Tim and Lisa who we'd met at the homestay and so the four of us had coffee overlooking the lake and compared stories for a couple of hours until we could go to collect our bags and check into guesthouses. It was a lovely end to an excellent trip.
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