Happy Water in Sapa

The next leg of our journey involves catching a bus leaving Hanoi and traveling North to Sapa, a town in the mountains surrounded by smaller villages and rice terraces. We bought tickets for the bus from our hostel in Hanoi, and they said we would be picked up just out front. This ended up being half true.

Praise be the C A B L E S

Before I dive into this story, I'd like to share an introduction to what has become my favorite recurring side quest (so far) on this trip. While walking around in Hanoi, I quickly started noticing the unique ways that cables are arranged. The way cables bundle together and traverse their environment gives off a feeling of iteration, habitation, and complexity that feels like a fitting metaphor for the city! I'm naturally drawn to the cables and had started taking pictures of some of my favorite scenes involving cables. At the end of the first day walking around the city, I posted my favorite cables picture of the day on my Instagram story and got a good reaction, so I decided to keep it up! After some more thinking about these photos, I decided it would be a fun way to introduce each day of the trip in these blog posts (at least for now). Since I already made a post blog about Hanoi, here are those first photos of cables!

Friday, March 28

This morning we didn't have the luxury of sleeping in because we had to catch a bus going North to Sapa, a town in the mountains surrounded by villages filled with rice terraces. We bought tickets for the bus from the hostel in Hanoi, and they said we would be picked up just out front. This ended up being half true.

We were told to be in the lobby by 6:30, so we woke up at 5:30 to finish packing and make some instant coffee in the room. We got down to the lobby around 6:10 to check out and wait for the bus. We met Turkish Byron from Germany who was also getting on the Sapa bus. As we are waiting, I go across the street and grab a pastry from a shop. Three small cakes in a box with crispy looking orange flakes on the top. The cakes are sweet, but not too sweet, with a kind of custard on the top. The flaky bits I think are some kind of dried and shredded seafood, maybe shrimp or some kind of fish. The balance of sweet and salty is tasty. After having a similar treat later in the trip, I now think this mystery ingredient was some kind of "meat floss".

A little after 6:30 a Vietnamese man bursts into the lobby, exchanges what seems like not enough words with the guy at the front desk and begins urgently beckoning us out the door. The front desk guy nods and we follow the man onto the street, where he immediately runs ahead of us. We follow him around a corner and up a different street while he stays consistently 30 meters ahead of us. Finally we get to a big greyhound bus and he urges us onto the bus without opening the bag storage at the bottom of the bus, so quickly that we don't even have time to take off our packs. He starts driving as we're walking up the stairs into the bus and we fight our way to some open seats, with Kaila & I each falling backpack first into some open rows. We're confused what's going on at this point, but figure the bus just must not be full enough to require us to put our bags in the storage underneath.

We make a couple more stops, urgently picking up some more travelers at each one, the last of which is a pair of women, one of which the driver motions to spin around at the door then continues to pull up by their backpack before she's able to slide out of the straps after a little bit of yelling and a lot of wiggling. The backpacks are set right next to the driver as the women go back into the bus. We drive a bit longer, then stop again and the bus driver says "Sapa" and motions off the bus, and it slowly becomes clear that he's asking everyone going to Sapa to get onto the street. Eventually he gets out himself and some of us follow, then most or maybe all of us (not sure if there was anybody left on the bus) join another group of waiting people on the street, probably about 40 of us total.

5 or 10 minutes pass then a different Vietnamese man appears and starts calling names and directing people to a waiting bus. The group gets down to 30 or so people and he calls the rest of us across the street and another bus arrives. Now they open the storage under the bus and names are called and people file into the bus, which is the sleeper bus! As we file in, the driver asks us to take off our shoes and hands us plastic bags to put them in. Then we go back to find seats!

The seats are very cool, arranged on the left, center, and right side of the bus, stacked on one on top of the other and in a reclined position. I was in the top bunk of one of these seats, as I shared in a photo in the last blog post.

Especially compared to the chaos of getting onto the bus, the bus ride to Sapa is relatively uneventful. It takes about six hours to get there with two breaks at rest stops. When we arrive in Sapa, it's sunny and hot. We start a 10 minutes walk to the office of a tour company called Sapa Sisters, to check about a tour that we booked. This particular tour company ended providing a great experience, so I would definitely recommend booking with them if you ever do something similar. Sapa Sisters is the only trekking company in Sapa owned and operated by Hmong women, so it felt nice to give them our business. Hmong people are now a minority ethnic group in Vietnam and make up 1.45% of the population of Vietnam. They have lived in this part of the country for a very long time and have their own language that predates the Vietnamese and Chinese languages. We booked a three day and two night trekking tour to see the rice terraces, villages, and some of the surrounding forests, which would start the following day. We give them the details about where we plan to stay that night to be picked up in the morning, then we make a plan for the three day trek, pack up our day packs with what we need for the next few days, and leave the rest of our things in our big packs in the baggage storage room of the Sapa Sisters office.

In Sapa and some of the more rural parts of Vietnam, it's popular to book rooms in "homestays", which essentially means you book a room in a home that a family also lives in, though it's usually more of a hostel type arrangement, but perhaps a bit more personal/home-y. We would be staying in a homestay that night (called Eco Hills Homestay), then a couple more homestays organized by the tour company the next two nights.

We have some dinner in town (some curry that was just okay) before going to our first homestay in a village called Te Van 20 minutes outside Sapa proper. We take a Grab ride share there and quickly left the main town (Sapa Town as referred to by the locals), transistioning from tall hotels with sidewalks in front of brightly lit shops to smaller shops with unlit signs to unpaved road hardly wider than a single car with houses now right on the road. Farther more and there is more space between the houses, with fences and walls along the road enclosing chickens and farmland. Eventually the driver stops and says he can't go farther as the road has become sufficiently narrow that only motorbikes can pass.

The driver isn't sure of the entrance to the homestay and neither are we as it isn't clear on Google Maps, so we try one of two roads that look like they could lead to potential entrances, up a hill and around some other houses and free roaming chickens.

Once we come to an unmarked gate that is held shut with some wrapped up wire, we suspect we have picked the wrong road. We can see some tables and chairs on a patio that look like they might belong to a dining area, so we decide to go through the gate. The tables are outside an open door leading to a wide room full of more tables. We enter apprehensively and see what appears to be a reception desk at the back of the room, which is when we see a sign welcoming us to the Eco Hills Homestay and are relieved for the first time to know that we aren't trespassing in someone's home!

The host is very nice! She tells us breakfast and coffee will be provided in the morning, then shows us to our room: a lovely little bungalow on a hillside. We settle into the room and retire for the night.

Saturday, 3-29

In the morning, we pack up our things then go back to the wide room and sit at one of the tables to have coffee and eggs for breakfast, with a baguette for me. We then take our stuff and leave out the front of the homestay, a concrete path that winds a few hundred meters to the road below, where we see a sign for the homestay only ten meters before the spot where our ride dropped us off the night before. Our guide, Pai, meets us here on foot, and we start our trek!

The first day we will hike up into the mountains above the village Te Van then loop back into the town to stay at a different homestay in Te Van. We start on the dirt motorbike road that narrows even more as we climb the mountain. Eventually we are on a trail that is only used by people and water buffalo. We see some rice terraces here, though the terraces on this side of the mountain have not been flooded for planting yet. After a couple hours, we get to the highest point of the trail we're following. As we start going down the other side of the mountain, we see our first flooded terraces! There is now a channel of flowing water along the trail that Pai tells us comes from snowmelt at the top of the mountain. The water branches into different flows as we start seeing more houses, and the flow is even shepherded into thin plastic pipes and routed off in different directions to supply the dispersed houses with drinking water.

After another hour of hiking through trails around rice terraces and houses and gardens (with fences keeping chickens and pigs and buffalos in place), we make it down to a different village called Lao Chai. The road is dirt again, but is wide enough to fit cars coming in two directions. We don't see many cars but there are more tourists. After seeing only one other group on the trails on the mountain, we now see many different groups being led by women wearing the colorful H'mong clothes. We have some lunch and coffee at a restaurant called Black Hmong Restaurant as some clouds roll in and brings down the visibility. After an hour of rest, we continue our trek, walking for another hour until we arrive to our next homestay back in Te Van, a place called Tinh Hong Homestay. We have some tea with our guide in the dining area of the homestay. It's a central room that has a few bed rooms branching off it. Then Pai shows us to our room which is another freestanding, casita type room outside the main building and around the back. We lounge & read for the two hours before dinner.

At 6:30 pm, we go back to the dining room for a group dinner with the other folks staying at the homestay. Jess and Ferg from Ireland, Nathan from Australia, Margo and Leonnie from France, Milly from England, and Gon from Thailand. We have a family style meal of rice, tofu, potatoes, pork, and pineapple. Our guides even shared with us some local rice wine which they called "happy water" and taught us how to count backwards in H'mong as an alternative to "cheers"! We had good conversation with our new friends for a few hours then headed back to room to sleep at 10:30 pm.

Sunday, 3-30

In the morning, we pack up our things once again since we'll stay at a different homestay the next night. As a group, we have breakfast consisting of crepes with banana, honey, chocolate sauce, and pineapple. Plenty of coffee as well. Today we join with Jess, Ferg, and Nathan and our guides take us through a bamboo forest and around some more rice terraces. We have lunch together in a village called Giang Ta Cha. We had another family-style spread for lunch that was pretty representative of the food so far in Sapa in a good way!

After lunch, we split off from Jess and Ferg and continue trekking with Pai, Nathan, and Nathan's guide. The rest of the day we mostly stay close to houses as we move between villages. Walking through the villages, you can start to get a feel for what life is like for the people that live in these valleys because so many of the pathways are right next to the places they live and work! It's also impressive to see the locals riding their motorbikes in these narrow and steep paths.

Eventually we part ways with Nathan and his guide before arriving at our homestay. We're the only people staying here tonight, but Pai tells us that we will be having another family style dinner with people from town. There are about 11 people joining us, and I ask if they are all family, but Pai says the owner invited them as a thank you because they were all helping with some work around their property today. The dinner consists of rice, pork, barbecued chicken, tofu, green beans, a pineapple/tomato/cucumber salad, and more happy water, this time from a gas can lol. We talk to Pai through dinner and also try for some back and forth with the other folks, but there is not much English spoken so we mostly observe. It becomes clear that their drinking may have started before dinner, especially as one man struggles to figure out how to record a video of us all on his phone. We try to entertain by trying to learn some H'mong words for the food on the table, and eventually go to bed around 8 pm.

Monday, 3-31

We're up early for breakfast, some more crepes (and noodle soup for Kaila). It's pretty rainy today and the visibility is even worse than at the end of yesterday, so we tell Pai that we'd like to go back to town early instead of trekking more today. The owner of the homestay is driving into Sapa Town anyway, so he gives us a ride back to the Sapa Sisters office. We grab our big packs and walk 10 minutes up the street to the Muong Hoa View Hotel, and they let us check in early. Kaila & I are both feeling sniffly, so we take it easy at the hotel until dinner time. Eventually when we feel brave enough to leave the hotel, we head just up the street to a restaurant called Good Morning View to get some delicious hot pot!

Thanks for reading!