Sapa and Going Home

Sapa is a small town located in the far northwestern corner of Vietnam. From Hanoi, it's about an 11 hour drive by sleeper bus. To get to Sapa, you need to stop at the city of Lao Cai first, which is located right on the Vietnamese-Chinese border, and from there it's just an hour's drive to Sapa. The area around Sapa is inhabited by native hill tribes, who were there long before the French came in and founded the town. Five years ago, Sapa was not nearly the tourist hub it is today. Though still quite charming, there are over a hundred hotels in Sapa, and the many construction sites are a sure sign of things to come.
It was chilly when I stepped off the bus, and the fog was a double dose of pea soup. I had hardly gotten any sleep during the long and stuffy bus ride from Hanoi, so the early morning air was refreshing and rejuvenating.
Sapa is built high up in the mountains and overlooks a large valley. The topography makes for twisting and inclined streets, giving Sapa a dynamic layout. This can get difficult, however, when the fog gets so thick you can't see the other side of the street. After a long time walking around shrouded in mist a mystery as to the whereabouts of the hostel I was planning on staying at, I finally found it. The dorm was full, but for six dollars I got my own room that opened onto a balcony with what I was sure was going to be a breathtaking view of the valley once the fog cleared up a little.
After settling in, I hit the streets. The influence of the French is especially apparent in Sapa, with bakeries and baguette shops on every street. This is combined in a strange way with the ubiquitous presence of the local ethnic minorities who reside in various villages down in the valley and elsewhere. The main minority groups that are represented in Sapa are the Black Hmong and the Red Dzao. It wasn't long before the Hmong locals took their stabs at selling me colorful hand made clothes and bags, intricately woven and mainly dyed with indigo. Tourism has been an important source of income for many of the ethnic minorities around Sapa. Where they once trade with each other, many bring their goods to the markets to sell them cheap to tourists. Many of the locals, especially the younger ones, actually speak a fair amount of English.
After walking around and seeing the town for a bit, I booked a two day, one night trekking tour into the valley for the next day. In the afternoon, the fog had cleared up considerably, and I got my first glimpses into the valley below Sapa. I couldn't see completely across, but what I could see was breathtaking nonetheless. Sapa's iconic terraced rice paddies took up a good part of the sides of the hills. Throughout the years, the locals have built an impressive and massive system of paddies all around the valley area. It wasn't growing season for the rice, but in preparation all the paddies were flooded. Each paddy now reflected the white sky, making for a spectacular landscape feature.
After a cold night in my unheated room, I got up the next morning to meet with my tour and we headed down into the valley. The walk was not too difficult, and as we got to lower altitudes, the fog cleared up more, and we got a closer view of the rice terraces and bamboo forests. To keep the paddies filled with water, each paddy drains into the one below it and is filled by the one above it. Gravity does all the work, and only rarely is piping used. This immense, complex, and self sustained irrigation system is just one example of the cleverness and resourcefulness of the ethnic minorities. 
After lunch, we walked through a few villages and saw how the rice was separated from the husks, and how the intricate clothes of the locals were woven. I was the only one taking the two day tour, so a minibus then took the other four in my group back to town, and my guide and I headed onward to reach the home-stay we were staying at. The evening was spent relaxing on the patio, enjoying the view and getting to know the others who were also at the home-stay, although coming from different tours. Dinner was very nice, with all the usual Vietnamese fare of fried spring rolls, and rice and noodle dishes. People go to bed early in the villages, mainly because of the colder weather at night, so around 10 PM we headed off to bed, safely guarded by our mosquito netting and thick blankets.
After delicious pancakes for breakfast the next morning, my guide and I left to trek further into the valley, walking through many difficult and muddy paths along the way. After a brief stop at the top of a waterfall that provided and amazing view of the valley, we headed down to the larger village of Su Pan for lunch. After that it was a minibus back to Sapa. The trekking tour was amazing, and provided a must see look into the lives of the locals and the huge amount of work they put in to earn a living. 
The next day I recovered on sleep and caught up on laundry. I also signed up for a motorbiking tour with a couple of other people I met at my hostel. The tour, which left the next morning, went further outside of Sapa, and would eventually bring me to Lao Cai. Thankfully drivers were provided, which not only prevented us from falling off the steep drop offs on the side of the roads, but gave us time take in the scenery, which was slightly different from the valley below Sapa. Our first stop was at one of two waterfalls that comprised the tour. The first waterfall was just off the road, and attracted many tourists. Oddly enough, pretty much all these tourists were from Ho Chi Minh, and we were about the only foreigners there. It wasn't the rainy season, so the waterfall wasn't all that huge, but it was tall, and bounded down many levels of moss mos and fern covered rock. The next water fall we went to was reached by a decent hike into the hills. This waterfall was amongst a dense jungle, and there was no one else to be found except us and our guide. Maybe one hundred feet tall, this waterfall didn't have a huge flow either, but that suited the serene and private atmosphere of the clearing it pooled into. We then got back on the motorbikes and began the one hour ride to Lao Cai. Riding on a motorbike is an awesome way to travel around the region. The landscape looks quite different from place to place, and the views are to die for. 
There isn't much to do in Lao Cai, so my friends form Sapa and I walked to the Chinese border and through the market to kill time before their train and my bus left for Hanoi. Around 8 PM I boarded another sleeper bus back to Hanoi, and arrived at 5:30 in the morning and spent three hours walking around getting lost. Eventually I got to where I needed to and booked a bus to the airport to catch my flight back south.
So here I am back in Ho Chi Minh once more. I've got a bit of a cough and a cold, but the weather's warm and the people are just as friendly. Tomorrow will sadly be my last full day in Vietnam, but I'm positive it won't be my last trip here. There are so many places I left unexplored, and so many people I'd like to meet again. One month was perhaps enough as a tourist, but if you stop looking at everything through a camera lens and pull your head out of the guidebook, you'll realize a month only gives you the briefest glimpse into a fascinating culture that I think would take a lifetime to truly understand.
I hope you all have enjoyed hearing about my experiences as much as I've enjoyed sharing them. I'll post lots and lots of pictures on both Facebook and Flickr so everyone can see them. Hopefully they will inspire you to someday travel to Vietnam as well. It's a beautiful and incredibly safe country, with many happy and friendly people. As long as you've got a touch of common sense, you can avoid most of the scams and the pickpockets. I never had a problem with either. Though it can be difficult to get past the the sometimes aggressive sales tactics of the touts, the hard bargaining at the markets, the drug dealers and prostitutes in the major cities, and some of the more dubious taxi drivers, the majority of the people in Vietnam are very friendly and welcoming. If you think the war is a reason for an American to avoid Vietnam, it isn't. It's almost ancient history here, and people have moved on. I had an absolutely amazing time during my travels here, and I me so many awesome people along the way. 
Although it will be nice to head home in a couple days, back to consistently warm showers and drinking water out of the tap, it feels like my traveling has just begun, and I know before too long I'll set course once again out into the world. To finish, here's a quote from Mark Twain:


"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."


Until next time,
-Adam Holte
Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam