Sapa

I only spent one day in Hanoi when I got there and spent most of the time organizing a trip to Halong Bay and Sapa. I planned to stay in the city and explore some of its museums after these trips.

I arrived in Sapa at the nice an early time of 6am after taking the night train from Hanoi to Lao Cai and a minibus up to Sapa. My first thought of Sapa when I got outside of the bus was that it was damn cold. Although it was probably about 10 or 15 degrees outside it felt freezing compared to the rest of Vietnam so when I checked into a hotel the first thing that I did was put on some long pants and a long sleeved shirt.

When I got all settled into my hotel I walked to the front desk to find out what treks I could do around Sapa for that day and they informed me that they had a 15km guided trek to 3 nearby ethnic villages. It sounded pretty good to so I signed up. After boarding the bus to drive to the start of the trek I found out that it was only going to be about a 6km walk along unpaved roads so not as interesting as I had hoped for. The short walk was still fairly good as we did see many ethnic people, mostly H'mong people, but they were all trying to sell pillowcases, wallets and whistles so they got a bit annoying after a while. After the walk through the villages we returned to the hotel where I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening relaxing and playing some games with local H'mong girls who were acting as tourist guides.

On the second morning I joined a group of people who were walking down to Cat Cat village, another nearby ethnic village. This walk was fairly short and there weren't too many people out in the village, however, there was a nice set of waterfalls but that was about the only highlight. In the afternoon I climbed up Ham Rong mountain, the short mountain in Sapa. From here there were some nice views of the surrounding mountains and the village of Sapa, as well as some flower gardens that had been planted for the tourists.

When getting back from Ham Rong mountain I bumped into some people that I met in Hoi An and decided to join them for a real trek up Fansipan, the highest mountain in Vietnam. The trek left the next morning and the plan was to hike for about 7 hours to a camp from where we would summit the mountian the next morning and return back to Sapa in the afternoon, in time for me to make the train back to Hanoi.

The climb started out from a high moutain pass (elevation 1700 meters) and from there we spent the morning hiking through the beautiful forest with the sun shining thinking that it was going to be a great trip. However, shortly after lunch when the major elevation gain started the fog started to come in and thus blocked any views that we would have had. The climb itself was also extremely hard as it seemed to only go straight up (very steep and I wouldn't have minded some switchbacks) and while going up we had to climb over some fair size rocks and through lots of mud making everything wet and slippery. All in all it was not an easy climb and to make matters worse it was still fairly warm and very humid so I was always drenched in sweat.

The camp on the mountain was cozy place as there were about 30 people sleeping in it but all that it contained was some bamboo beds and sleeping bags. Needless to say the night was pretty uncomforable and also became quite chilly up on the mountain and I was glad for morning to come. However the food for dinner that the porters brought up was fabulous as there were several dishes of different kinds of meat, tofu, potatoes, rice and vegetables.

The next day found the clouds no thinner so it appeared that we would be summiting and unable to see anything. This proved to be true as about an hour and half after leaving the camp we reached the summit (3143 meters) and couldn't see further than 30 feet. So at least we made it but we couldn't see anything. The rest of the day was spent climbing/sliding back down the mountain in the mist with a short lunch break back at camp. When we reached the bottem I think we were all glad that it was over as this was one of the toughest climbs that I have ever done, I think.

Back in Sapa I had enough time to grab a nice shower before heading back to Lao Cai to catch my night train back to Hanoi.

Unfortuneatly it's taking forever to upload pictures from this computer and I have a bus to catch in 10 mins so I'll hopefully upload the pictures tomorrow.