Sapa is a mountain-top town surrounded by small, ethnic minority villages and rice terraces. There is a pleasant fog that envelops the town, no matter the season, from early evening 'til mid-morning. It's really quite beautiful and the air smells wonderful and wet.The idea is that you can use Sapa as your base and from there trek amongst the villages and visit the local people. Maybe you could buy some hand-embroidered textiles or eat some charcoal grilled meats with villagers. Some hotels in Sapa offer homestays with a family in the villages. You pay $25 to stay a night with a Hmong or Dzao family. This is strange to me, i can't exactly pin point the reason, it just feels strange, yet interesting. Sapa itself is filled with shops, restaurants and hotels. There's also a nice market where many villagers sell their wares, and terrace garden vegetables. Many swarms of villagers ascend the town from the villages below to get to the tourists. It's rapidly becoming a tourist trap, so go now, go quickly and leave the place as much in tact as you can.
Ashley and i stayed at a cute, quaint hotel, above is the view from the balcony. We had a wood burning fire place, which proved to be a bit of a problem. i have become a master fire starter with much practice at friend's cabins and camping, thus i got the fire going and it burned all night. i have skills. But the flu was either blocked or very poorly designed because the smoke billowed in to our room so much that we actually had to open the windows to let it out, which kind of defeated the purpose of the fire: to keep us warm. But the room was still very charming. Indeed, the whole town was charming.
We had lunch at a French cafe and walked around the town. Lining every street were groups of women in traditional dress selling jewelry and textiles, hand dyed and hand embroidered. It was all gorgeous. We met three women as we wandered about. i'm used to being pursued by hustlers and peddlers, but these ladies took a different approach and it was very refreshing, to say the least. At first they just asked us questions, like how old we were, where we were from, did we have any siblings? They were so friendly, their English was really great, and we just chatted for 10 minutes. We told them we were planning to walk to the nearest village, Cat Cat, and they happily showed us the way and walked with us a good part of the way. One of the women was younger than the other two and she had a baby boy strapped to her back. He was the most adorable and happy baby i've ever seen. He never so much as made a cry the whole time we walked down the hill.
We took some photos with our new friends and we also bought some earrings and cushion covers from them. We tried to do it in a secluded area but were found out and ambushed by 15 women all clamoring for us to buy something from them. It was a little overwhelming, but also kind of funny to me. i couldn't have possibly purchased something from everyone, but i had made a promise with our friends and the earrings i bought are beautiful.
We said goodbye to our Black H'mong ladies and to get away from the horde we went into our hotel and took a nap. Ashley's haggling skills really shined on this occasion, if you need assistance in getting a low price talk to this girl, she got practically the same pillowcase that i did for 1/4 the price! The most interesting part about our visit for me was seeing so many different ethnic minorities in one place. Viet Nam has around 54 ethnic minorities and with a days hike you can find a good portion of them around Sapa. From Black and Flower H'mong to Dao, Tay and Giay, all have unique styles of dress and different languages from Vietnamese. It's amazing to see so much diversity in such a small place, especially when most westerners, and even locals, think of their culture as being so homogenized.
We spent the evening looking for a place to eat dinner and wandering the completely deserted streets at 7pm. Sapa gets a nightly dose of eery, misty rain therefore not many people venture out into the streets after dark, choosing instead to stay dry and not creeped out. But the villagers who are out on the street are there with a purpose: everyone of the people that came up to us offered their particular services quite blatantly, "Smokey, smokey- marijuana?" It was so out in the open and yet made me feel so dirty... needless to say we declined their repeated offers.
The next morning we took a swerving, muddy ride down to the border town of Lao Cai. And within hours we were back in the land from whence we came and that we missed greatly- China!
