The Road to Sapa

We arrived in Sapa this morning after a relatively comfortable train ride.  We cruised around on a motorcycle here and have seen some of the beautiful scenery.  We booked a trekking tour and get to do a home stay in an off the beaten track area! We are pretty excited for tomorrow and had a wonderful but exhausting day today.

Oct 16 – Hanoi & Train to Lao Cai

Well I didn't sleep in as much as I had hoped too but still slept better/more than I had in a few days. I spent the morning updating my blog and got to Skype Mom and Dad. We took full advantage of the hostels internet even though we had checked out. We were able to leave our bags in storage at the hostel while we headed out for the day. We grabbed some lunch and then went to the Temple of Literature. It was pretty although fairly overrun with tourists. There was quite a lot of noise from the traffic around the temple so it wasn't all that peaceful. We were going to check out the Army Museum but it was closing in about 30min so we'll go after our Sapa trip. We picked up “hop on, hop off” bus tickets so when we return from Sapa we can go directly to Hue. We had the brilliant idea to go directly to the bus station to check prices but we couldn't find the bus station. We settled for buying our tickets from the hostel. We bought a 6 stop ticket for about $50. By this time we were fairly foot sore so we were lazy and ate at the hostel. Luckily it was still 2-4-1 beer time. We lounged around a bit till it was time to go to the train station. We didn't feel like walking so we hired a motorcycle taxi. It was pretty cool. My bag was in front of the drive, I was between him and Beau with the little pack and Beau was on the back with his bag on. It was kind of thrilling weaving through the traffic. We had middle bunks on the train but the baggage storage was right at the foot of the top bunks. We were a little leery of that so we kept our bags on the bunks. The train wasn't as nice as the Chinese trains but we had more head room than we did on the top bunks.

Bell in Temple of Literature

Drum in Temple of Literature

Oct 17 – Sapa

Beau and I were under the assumption that our train arrived in Lao Cai around 6:15 so when the train stopped at that time we thought it was time to go. We had grabbed our stuff but the train started moving!! We raced to the door but it turns out we still had another 2hrs before we reached Lao Cai. I guess we could have had another 2hrs of sleep. I actually slept well on this train, maybe it was the rocking motion. We for real arrived in Lao Cai and were bombarded by guys trying to get us on their minibuses to Sapa. Of course the prices were outrageous. They wanted 100,000d per person, the books said it should be about 25,000d. We ended up paying 40,000d so $2. The road was very twisty, turny and steep. It was around an hour to Sapa. We arrived, looked at a couple of hotels and checked into one. We asked around at a few places about trekking and homestays. One looked particularly interesting, it followed a different route that not many tourist took. We would be meeting up with a guy already on the trek but it would cost $40 each, the easier tourist ones were only $25. We decided to think on it for the day. We rented a motorcycle to cruise around the area and check out some places. It was only $7 with gas. Sapa has some beautiful scenery. The mountains reminded me a little of home. It was pretty foggy though. We started by trying to find the village of Ta Phin but somehow missed the turn and were confused about where to go so we headed back to Sapa. We got better directions but instead set off to find Thac Bac, the Silver Waterfall, near the top of Tram Thom Pass. The water fall was very beautiful and impressive. The biking was a lot of fun. Fortunately the roads aren't too busy so we didn't have to do too much dodging. From there we headed back towards Sapa and on to Ta Phin. We found the village this time and were flagged down by some women from the H'Mong tribe. They took us to the one woman's house. It was pretty sad. Very much a shanty home, more like a barn. Her one son also had deformed hands and feet. They then tried to sell us purses and wall hangings. We bought a purse mostly because we felt sorry for the conditions they live in. We continued on for a little ways and then decided to head back to Sapa. Back at our hotel we ran into Beau's kayaking buddy for Halong Bay (not a surprise since we shared a mini bus with him to Sapa). We talked to him about the home stay which he was very interested in. We went to book the trek and with Mike with us it was only $32 per person. I'm sure it'll be well worth the extra $7!

Rice terraces around Sapa

Thac Bac, The Silver Waterfall

In front of Thac Bac