Sorry for the Group Email

The morning before we went to Sapa we did something very special.

We had cereal.

We’d had cereal once before on the trip, nearly moving ourselves to tears with a bowl of Corn Flakes at Big John’s Hostel in Bangkok. But this time we bought our cereal ourselves (Frosties, for detail nuts), along with a litre of UHT milk. We ate from squishy bowls in our hotel room. It was a tiny slice of home (I love) Frosties) and, buoyed with our self-catering success, we made sandwiches in the hotel room. Who would have thought that you could get a tin of tuna with mayonnaise pre-mixed into it?

We booked our trip to Sapa, in north Vietnam, from the same man we’d booked our trip to Halung Bay. He was a smiling kind of chap with a curious lisping, clipped way of speaking English. But he’d delivered Halung Bay for $110, and for just shy of $200, we got Sapa as well. Those curious and in the region should give TNK travel a spin.

Sapa is a collection of small, ethnic-minority villages set in a backdrop of stunning, mist-shrouded valleys. It takes about 16 hours to reach by bus, but we took the sleeper train, which whittles the journey down to about eight hours. We arrived in Lao Cai, just 2km from the Chinese border, at four in the morning. We staggered obediently to the bus, and were whisked 36km to Sapa itself. Our journey took in mountains and valleys; some of the peaks poked triumphantly through the early morning mist. At times, we drove through the mist ourselves, unable to see more than a few feet in front of the bus.

It’s at times like these that I like to close my eyes and sleep.

Sapa is gorgeous. It sits in the shadow of the 3,000 meter-high Mount Fansipan, Vietnam’s tallest peak. (As with many places in Asia, there are a variety of ways to spell “Fansipan”. I’ve picked one and stuck with it.)

The people that live there rely almost entirely on tourism now, and there was a constant throng of brightly-dressed Hmong people outside our hotel. This rather got me down. Not the fact that there were people selling things: they were selling handmade, traditional crafts (I choose to take it on trust that they weren’t peddling machine-made, Chinese-produced tat), and the money that tourists ensures that the people who live in Sapa aren’t driven to destroy the indigenous cultures of the area by moving to employment-rich cities. Instead, the manner of the Hmong approach to selling was rather depressing. We had countless conversations about where we were from, whether we were married, and whether we had any children, all of which led up to the inevitable question: “you buy something from my shop?”

It’s impossible to simply say “yes” to this. What if the woman in question had a shop that sold nothing but Bentleys? And if not, you couldn’t possibly buy something from every shop. If you did, you’d simply end up with a lifetime’s supply of hair-bands, scrunchies and friendship bracelets. But, once you gave a lukewarm response, your new friend would disperse to a more promising-looking crowd, and five minutes later, someone else would come up and befriend you. Eventually, exhausted from our 4am start and the 40 degree heat, I gave up, and began giving monosyllabic (and I suspect nonsensical) answers. Worse still were the people who tried to charge tourists for taking photographs of them, which struck me as deeply cynical, and probably only results in wounded pride for people who would otherwise take home incredibly striking pictures of a genuinely amazing-looking people.

By the second day my humour was recovered a little, and we packed our overnight bags and embarked for a 12km hike. It was 36 degrees. The vistas were incredible, and I’m pretty sure I took some pictures, but mostly I remember sweating an awful lot. My shirt darkened and my eyes stung from the salt. My bag became heavier and heavier. Worse, most of what was in my bag was unnecessary. The night before had seen utterly torrential rain – the heaviest we’d seen since Laos. Accordingly, I’d packed a waterproof jacket and trousers. The rain had turned much of the path into a slippery nightmare, but there would be no repeat of the downpour.

Our bed that night was in a homestay. This is a bit of a euphemism in Vietnam (and SE Asia as a whole, I think). The name conjures up images of a stay with a family in a small, rickety old building; the reality is more of a small B&B with a family home attached. My scepticism didn’t last. We ate like kings and drank 40p Tiger beer. We made friends with Steve and Sue, a pair of Californians on their way to Danang to volunteer in an amputee hospital, and Roni and Adam, Israelis who wanted to push the dogged souvenir sellers in the waterfalls as much as I did.

Always nice to have common ground.

Dave spent the journey to Sapa listening to the PC Pro podcast. I never claimed to have renounced my geek tendencies. The best bit? An impromptu discussion over whether cotton wool would increase your chances in the event of being run over by a bus. Find it here.More pictures, as ever, in the Vietnam set on Flickr.

Honesty box

Yes, I know the standfirst for the Hoa Lo story mentions the cereal thing, while this story actually, y’know, has it. The editing process is a bitch.