Sa Pa

A full cyclo ride to the train station with Marte, myself and our bags all piled into one. The train was full but the soft sleeper, while providing no head room to sit up in was comfortable and I slept a lot of the journey. We got a nice enough hotel and bargained hard. Before we even got in though we were accosted by women selling us stuff. They were all dressed in their traditional Hmong clothes and looked great.

There is a market in SaPa from Saturday midday to Sunday midday. This happens in the market place that appears to be there all week but just gets packed out on a weekend when the nearby towns appear to empty as everyone pours in to the market. I bought a necklace, ear-rings and a piece of cotton fabric! All quite light - honest! (Yes it is myself I am trying to convince!) They are very friendly but also very persistent sellers! "Why you no buy from me?" was the high pitched attack over and over again! Having one already only brought on more recrminations of why you had bought from someone else and since you had one you must need two!

The first day Marte and I walked down to Cat Cat village. It is down all the way, which makes it up all the way back, but it was a very pleasant walk. The whole area is higher up in the hills and so as well as nice views and terraced paddy fields there were good walks. The next day we paid for a guide to take us trekking. The otherstaht were meant to go never came so it ended up just the two of us with a 15 year old Hmong girl as our guide. She was a typical teenager and we had a lot of fun with her. The sky was clear, the views were nice and the walk very pleasant and fairly easy. We went through a couple of villages and could see that the traditional costumes worn by the women and men in the market were not just for the tourists as they wore them in the fields, tending the pigs and just sitting around.

The morning we left it was raining. The 7.30 am bus arrived at 8.00 and then proceeded to drive around the town for an hour waiting until it was more than full before heading to Lao Cai where we were trying to make a 10.10 train! The time when you would have been happy with a fast driver we had a very slow one who didn't appear to be able to go above 20mph. They said we would arrive at 10.15 but it was okay because the train didn't go until 10.20. We didn't have tickets yet and resigned ourselves to not making it but got to the station, ran, didn't queue and made it on to the train which pulled off a couple minutes later at 10.25am!! Close. The train was packed and we had to be a bit mean and keep our hard seats to ourselves, but it seems some people don't pay for a seat but just for a ride to an interim station and so they were squished many to a seat. It was only men with bad vibes that asked to share however, and we were in for a 10 hour journey so we followed the Vietnamese couple opposite and refused (feeling a little rude - but not too bad as the guys sat and stared, made lewd comments and laughed, and blew smoke our way). The train gradually emptied and we had a nice time with the people opposite us who had a one year old daughter with them. I held her for a while. They had no English but were friendly. The train finally arrived back in Hanoi 10 hours later. There had been some nice scenery in the rain. It reminded me a little of Ireland where the rain can bring out some beautiful deep greens in the landscape, though the sun is great.