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Day 7: Sapa We arrive in Lao Cai at 5am and a guide meets us at the train station. We have a 1 hr. drive from Lao Cai to Sapa, on a misty winding mountain road. The morning mist is so thick we can only see a few meters in front of the van, but the driver is so familiar with the road, it's a smooth ride.
Above, the view from our hotel. After we have breakfast and a chance to shower, we meet our guide Quy who will take us on a hike through the rice paddies and villages. We walk through a black H'mong village, one of the ethnic groups that live in the moutains. It's past the harvest season, so the village is quiet and there's not much activity in the fields. We see lots of cute piglets and a funny group of ducks who don't seem to know where they're going.
Along the path, some boys emerge from the field and Quy stops to have a chat with them. They've just been in some nearby caves and have captured a bat. They're going to take it home, clean and cook it for a little snack.
We finish our hike by mid-afternoon as it starts getting misty again. We stop by our hotel and then head out on our own to explore the town.
At the market, lots of black H'mong women sell various textiles. I buy a basic drawstring skirt with a mix of fabrics and embroidery. They are known for their indigo dying techniques creating rich blue fabrics. Quy warns us if we buy anything, to keep it sealed in a plastic bag away from our other clothes or everything will turn blue. When I get home, even with a salt wash in an attempt to fix the colours, I go through several rinses with the water and my fingers turning blue. I finally get to a stage where I'm semi-confident I can wear the skirt without dying my legs.
Sapa
is filled with outdoor equipment stores carrying "North Face".
Even though legitimate North Face products are manufactured in Vietnam,
these stores are filled with rip-offs from China.
A misty walk back to our hotel after dinner, careful to avoid alien abduction.
It's cooler in Sapa as we're higher in the mountains so our hotel mattresses are equipped with an electric heat pad. However, the area of heat seems to run diagonally on my bed. It's quite cosy at first, but the night turns into rolling between the tropic and arctic zones.
© Amy Lee 2013
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