Vietnam – Sapa and mountain air

The overnight train to Sapa, as it turns out, doesn’t actually go to Sapa. It goes to a town called Lao Cai which is about an hour away from Sapa. Once we dragged our bedraggled selves off the train, we then had to come out and barter with minivan drivers for the trip up to Sapa. Luckily, the first driver to come up to us actually gave us the real price, so we followed him to his van where three other travelers joined us. Unfortunately, these vans only move when they’ve shoved in as many people as they possibly can and the driver couldn’t muster up the proper sardines in a can number to leave. We sat in the minivan, tired, trying to keep our eyes open, for the next forty minutes until the next overnight train pulled into the station. Not a great way to begin the trip. 

Once we were properly full, we set off on yet another very windy minivan ride. These rides really do throw you for a loop and it doesn’t really matter how tired you are. There’s no sleeping. The view was really beautiful, though, greens and golds from the terraced rice fields; sun coming down through the clouds throwing a golden morning light on the scenery. That helped the morning trip go by easier.  

In Sapa, we wandered around until we could get a good wi-fi signal to find directions to the Sapa Cozy Hotel, a guesthouse that gets consistently good reviews. While we were looking this up, we got approached by quite a few hill tribe ladies. “Hello. Where you from? You go trekking?” This would be a pretty regular approach that we’d get nearly every five minutes while we were in Sapa. One we learned to ignore, which we didn’t feel good about because it seems rude, but they were pretty annoying. That first day one lady followed us around town. She’d pop up every half hour or so. “You buy from me? Earring? Comb? Bracelet?” Towards the end of the day it was, “You know me long time. You buy from me.” To which I had to laugh. That’s the strategy, follow you until they wear you down and you give in. But I don’t really give in. She didn’t have success. There were other ladies who would get the negative headshake from us and they’d reply in a mimicking, “No thank you,” which was pretty funny. One lady even responded with a, “Ohhhhhhhh, no talky talky,” which was pretty hilarious. And, funniest of all, the old, old ladies would come up to Marcus and offer in a low voice, “Hashish.” After which, every time, he would say, “What is she doing, old lady? She should be at home playing with her grandkids!!” 

Anyway, back to arrival morning. After shaking off the acquired entourage, we found a map of our hotel and proceeded in that direction only to discover that it wasn’t there. We found wi-fi again, looked up the address again and found that it was on the other side of the lake. Boo. Heavy packs weighing down as usual, we trekked around the lake and found our hotel. We were shown to a big, airy room with white sheets and comforter that was quite clean. Heaven! I’m starting to adore and prefer these places with the white sheets and comforter covers, even though it’s pretty impractical in the traveller world. We showered up and crashed in bed for a much-needed nap. We were thoroughly exhausted from the overnight trip and my heavy bag was really starting to piss me off. We decided we couldn’t do two more overnight trips in a row to get back to Hanoi and then on to Hoi An. In fact, we decided to skip Hoi An entirely. Couldn’t think about wandering around another city. When we were awake enough, we hopped online and booked plane tickets to Nha Trang, the Vietnamese resort town. A beautiful luxury! Even if it did require another overnight trip to Hanoi… 

After booking our ticket we wandered through town, I bought some great ballet slippers made out of some of the cool hill tribe cloth, and we discovered yet an even more awesome dimension to the Vietnamese coffee—wonderful Vietnamese coffee filters. 

And, quickly after discovering these newfangled wonders, proceeded to buy two for our own use back home. Seriously, I am a sucker for their coffee (if you hadn’t gathered that yet—I mean, I only bring up the coffee multiple times in every single blog entry). 

We also had dinner at this fabulous restaurant called The Hill Station which serves H’mong dishes using locally sourced ingredients from the area and from their own organic farms. We also found out later that they employ a fully H’mong staff, providing skills and livelihood to people from a mostly agrarian background. The food was fantastic—ash-cooked sweet potatoes, pork belly (using meat from wild boar), sticky rice with lemongrass and ginger dipping sauce,  garlic stir-fried susu (which, as it turns out, is choko), and samplers of the rice and corn wine. It was delicious and the décor of the restaurant was fantastic. We felt completely spoiled and walked out having spent less than $15 for a meal that in Sydney would have been at least five times the price. They also do cooking classes teaching five H’mong dishes after which you get a great five-course lunch. For $29. I couldn’t resist, so we did it a few days later! 

Despite being exhausted that first day, we booked in a two-day trek with a homestay for the next day. At 9:30 the next morning we got picked up, driven down the hill…then kicked out of the van to join a different group. We proceeded to walk back up the hill…then down, down, down. It wasn’t a strenuous trek, the first day being eight km and the second day six. We were even less impressed that the first two km were walking on the road! To make matters worse, our guide was useless, pointing out some tourist bungalows and explaining that the two crops grown here were rice and corn. Mm hmm. Thanks. We would ask what other crops were. He didn’t know. Although the tour booking offices pride themselves on small groups, all of the groups are walking together. If you wanted to do the trek on your own, all you’d have to do is rendezvous at the top of the trek at 9:30 and follow the stream of trekkers going down the hill. Except that you have to pay to get into the villages. Can you believe that? They actually make you pay to walk through the villages. Of course it was already included in our trekking fee, but still. Principle of the matter. Over and over again, we get angry over the principle of the matter. Seems to do a lot of good. J 

Aside from our completely uninformative guide, the H’mong ladies who had followed us around up in Sapa walk down with you. A few will imprint on you at the top of the hill. Make you their tourist. They hike all the way down to the first village alongside you in the hopes that you’ll pay them for walking with you. Again, that was an ineffective strategy. Doesn’t seem productive to pay people for providing a service that you don’t actually want. In fact, during a particularly steep part of the trek down they stayed next to me the entire way. In one respect, this could be considered really sweet, but I don’t like having people around me, right behind me, who may slip and knock me down in an already slippery situation. They wouldn’t walk in front of me even when I tried to wave them onward. And I was so frustrated that I started going too fast and slipped myself. My own anger and frustration got the best of me. But these ladies are like pesky little flies! They ask the same questions over and over again and there’s only so many times I can respond before it tries the nerves.  

I was beginning to question whether we should just head back at the end of the day, skip the homestay and day two. It was not great. But after we stopped for lunch (and the ladies and their kids—who should have been at school—thoroughly harassed and tried  to get you to buy things from them), it calmed down. The ladies disappeared back into their villages and we got to see the real villagers. At the moment, the rice fields around Sapa are in harvest mode so we got to watch the farmers and see just how much work actually goes into a rice harvest. First there’s the cutting of the rice stalks, which is done with a big curved knife, cutter bent over for hours at a time. Next they lay piles of the rice stalks in the sun to dry for a few days. Once they’re dry, the stalks are beat heftily and repeatedly against slats of wood to release the individual pieces of rice from the stalks. The rice is then spread out to dry out in the sun for another few days. Once they’re sufficiently dry, they’re run through a machine (thank god, at least one machinated process) to shuck the pieces of rice from their individual little husks. It’s a lot of freakin work, I have to say, and this is only one stage of the rice growing process. I have a newfound appreciation for rice and am quite surprised that it’s so cheap considering the amount of labor that goes into its production. These villagers are so strong, we saw one thin willowy man carrying a huge wooden rice beating box on his shoulder using only one hand to balance it. That thing would crush me, and there he went carrying it who knows how far back home.  

And, despite our original guide’s ignorance of other crops, there was food growing everywhere. Banana trees littering the rice fields; sweet potatoes growing behind people’s houses; pumpkins growing on roofs (pumpkins on the roof!); zucchinis hanging down from vines wrapped around the power lines; giant pear and pomelo trees; and there was plenty that I’m sure I couldn’t identify with my limited agricultural eyeballing knowledge. There were also indigo fields which get used for the cloth dye for the traditional clothing and costumes of the different hill tribe groups. The villages we went through were mainly populated by Black H’mong (these are the unfortunately annoying ladies up in town and the ones who come walking down with the trekkers) and Red Dzao. We didn’t speak to a single Red Dzao person, and it makes me think they’re much more productive than those pandering to the tourists. J The people down in the villages were doing stuff and it was quite a pleasure to be able to watch them go about their daily lives. Friendly, smiling and saying hello here and there, but taking care of business.  

Our guide passed us off to another guide to take us on to our homestay. Homestay is an awfully strong word for what the accommodation was, though. It was actually a big house split into two parts—one part to house travelers, with beds downstairs and upstairs, and one part for the village family with the kitchen and I assume other beds (though we weren’t really invited into this part of the house and so didn’t go in). Someone later told us that these homestay lodges are actually an unhappy example of how the Vietnamese take advantage of the hill tribe minorities. Turns out the land most of these lodges are built on was bought by the Vietnamese for a really low price when the Vietnamese became aware that roads were going to be built in these areas. Then once the roads were built, they rented the land and lodges back to villagers for a much higher price. Business is business, I suppose, but it’s a shitty way to take advantage of villagers who already have next to nothing. 

We spent our homestay with bunch of other travelers who turned out to be good company. There was an Israeli family, the mom and dad around my parents’ age and their 20-something year old daughter who had been in Vietnam because the dad had taught a few university geology courses in Saigon; two different groups of Spanish travelers, with three or four girls from the Canary Islands (who I got to practice my Spanish with); and a couple from New Zealand who export frozen sheep embryos for a living. Random. 

We all went down to the stream for a bit of a swim, then came back for dinner with good company and a bit of “happy water” (rice wine), then we turned in early. In the morning we were blessed with a bit more sunshine than we got the day before and got to see the rice fields in the wonderful morning light. It was calm, quiet and inexplicably joyous to be out of the city. They catered to the western delights and cooked pancakes for breakfast, after which we set off for our light hike for the day.  

All in all, it was a nice walk out of the city and delightful to get a small glimpse into the lives of the people living in these small villages on the other side of the world.

After getting back to town and getting a good scrub on, we had a walk, grabbed dinner, and slept. The next day we rented a motorbike and took it outside Sapa to see the countryside and waterfalls outside the city. We passed the Silver Falls. And went to the slightly less touristy Love Waterfall. Golden Stream! Ha! 

On our way back from the waterfall, we stopped at one of the hotels on the hillside to grab an iced coffee and ended up having an educational conversation with the hotel manager. He’s an English guy who’s lived in Vietnam for the last 15 years and in Sapa for the last few years. He and his Vietnamese wife are quite passionate about improving the lives of the villagers in the area and he told us about a number of projects and ways they’ve gotten involved in the city. He told us about a school for the hill tribe children that they’d raised money for from different embassies. Once they had enough, the Vietnamese government told them they had to move the school and instead teach Vietnamese children. Not hill tribe children. Deflated, they pulled the plug on the project. He also told us about a few failed development projects in the area—development workers showing the villagers about family planning through condom use, demonstrating such usage on bananas. Of course fertility rates didn’t decrease and they found that the villagers were doing just what the workers had shown them—putting condoms on bananas before having sex (is that for real or an urban myth all over the world?). He also told us about a 15 year potato growing project to see which potatoes grow best in the area. Apparently takes 15 years. We saw potatoes once in Sapa. There was also the hospital that failed because of lack of roads to access services and also electricity failures. NGOs pass through the area, doing a project here and there, not following up, not keeping any sort of regular presence. They’re doomed to fail with this kind of inconsistent approach. 

He told us that at the hotel they were trying to think of more sustainable and unique tour opportunities. Educating tourists about the handicraft products and showing them how much work and time goes into production. Cooking classes where the tourists pay for the food, the locals take them to their home and show them how to prepare traditional dishes. All the leftover food would stay in the home, providing the families with a few more nutritious meals (during certain parts of the year they’ll subsist on rice and vegetables, eating meat only once every three or so weeks). They were also connecting with different families in the villages, trying to make sure they get medical help when needed. There was also a heavy rain that caused a mudslide a few weeks before we got to Sapa, killing 15 villagers. One lady lost her son and daughter, which would cause a major loss in livelihood since together they tended the rice crops. Another child lost both his parents and would now be raised by his grandmother. Who knows how she’d be able to afford it, so they said they were going to try to support the family and come up with some sort of lasting solution to that problem. They seem to get really involved in the community and it was inspiring to see. It was easily the most informative conversation we’d had about development, tourism and its impacts that we’ve had on the whole trip.  

The next day we went back to The Hill Station for our cooking class. We weren't given a cookbook or recipes, but I took pictures along the way and I'll record what we can remember a bit later. But it was five courses of wonderful, everyone was super friendly, and I couldn't recommend the restaurant, their food, and staff highly enough.

 

After rolling out of our extensive food experience, we wiled away a few hours reading until we left to catch the night train back to Hanoi. We ended up sharing our compartment with two women who looked like they were ladies of the night and who stole our complimentary bottles of water. I clutched my travel pack very tightly that night.

 

We arrived back to Hanoi around 5am, again got lost trying to navigate around that damn train station (my fault this time--completely misjudged which side we came out of the station) and walked a good 3km out of our way. With packs. Again. When we finally found a decent coffee shop that was open a few hours later, we hunkered in. Got coffees. Waited an hour. Ordered breakfast. Used their Wi-Fi for another two hours. And after yet further wander and coffee, we caught the airport shuttle, made friends with two nice travelers on the way to the airport, and waited another few hours for our flight. Then after boarding the plane, we waited another hour for a VIP seat mix-up to be sorted out, then Marcus endured two hours of child seat kicking. Traveling can be extra special some days.

 

But we made it to Nha Trang. Hello beach.