Day 1

14/4/11

After another incident of the oversized chimp (he was too big for the sleeper carriage) we arrived in Lao Cai train station where we were met buy our guide Zan. An hour later we arrived in Sapa where we prepared for our trek by essentially eating a lot. After a few hours exploring the village we set off with Zan. The first obstacle was the black Mong ladies who ware traditional dress (not just for the tourists) who like to sell tourist things. The common entry conversation is “you buy from me” to which we shake our head. This is followed by “why not.” The ladies generally hunt in packs of 5-12 and are quite persistent. If you do actually buy something from one of them the others lock onto you like a homing beacon enquiring as to whether “you buy from me” and if the answer is no then “that’s not fair you buy from me” As you can imagine we were glad to shake off the ladies but we had to walk 1km before they stopped following!

Once we got out into the countryside we were greeted with thousands of rice terraces in various shades of green and brown. Large numbers of water buffalo either sat in the rice paddies or ploughed them. Even though it was misty the views were beautiful. We stopped at a local school to meet the children who were decidedly un-interested in us and extremely dirty. This was in contrast to India where children loved to wave and say high and were all beautifully clean and well turned out.

After 3 hours of walking it was lunch followed by a quick nap for me in the sun. Well these sedate travelers are not used to all this walking! After lunch we set off through the hills and woods crossing more rice fields before arriving at the home stay. We both felt fine, our back and legs did not hurt only time would tell if we would survive this.

The home stay was essentially someone’s home with some additional sleeping areas- mattresses on floors with mosquito nets above us. Two Dutch people also turned up at the home stay. We got talking over dinner and innocently asked how thy met. Well they met in a very Dutch way if you ask me… naked in a sauna. Despite this they were rather nice and we spent the evening eating lots of nice food drinking rice wine and relaxing. The porters who were traveling with the Dutch couple (we carried our own stuff!) enjoyed rice wine by the half pint mug and consequently got rather pissed but never the less were very jolly.

We went to bed at 8.30 pm as maybe we were more tired than we had expected.