It’s exactly like walking

After the success of our trip to Cat Ba Island, we decided to continue our enjoyment of the outdoor activities available in Vietnam with some trekking in the Sapa region. We caught the bus / boat combo back to Hanoi, and settled into our cabin on the overnight train up to Lao Cai. We had booked a 3 day trekking trip with a company called Sapa Sisters, and through them we had arranged a minibus transfer post-train from Lao Cai up to Sapa town itself. As a good friend of ours once quipped, “If you’re not sure what trekking is, it’s exactly like walking”.

We had breakfast in their HQ (a hotel in Sapa) and met our guide. She introduced herself as Pay (pronounced a bit like pie), and showed us a basic map of the area. She detailed a 3 day itinerary which sounded ok, although day 3 only included an hour walk before transferring back to Sapa town. Then she said “you see many tourists”. This wasn’t our country escape we were hoping for! Luckily there were alternatives, and when I started to look disinterested she said ‘or’… and detailed a route on the other half of the map, visiting some villages which weren’t marked (she had to draw them on in pen), and she said the walking was ‘hard’, and the final day included a 4 hour walk. That sounded like better value for money, although we had reservations about whether when a guide who treks for a living says ‘hard’ they might actually mean ‘muscle-searingly brutal’. While her English was great for the job she had to do, it didn’t really stretch to a detailed inquisition about the meaning of ‘hard’ so it was with some uncertainty about our fitness for the task that we opted for no-tourists, hard trekking.

We set off at a nice pace along a pleasant track, and couldn’t believe how quickly we were out of the town and walking along the side of a nice river gorge. Pay was quite an informative guide, telling us about her Hmong culture and the medicinal uses of various plants we found along the way. At several points along the way, we were offered options on the route, to choose ‘more concrete’, ‘more flat’, ‘more up’, ‘longer’, or ‘shorter’ and since we hadn’t collapsed yet, we kept choosing the harder / longer option which I think earned us some respect from Pay. She did promise us that Day 2 was harder and longer than day 1, and that day 3 was ‘mostly up’.

Pay demonstrated some useful skills, grabbing a sturdy bamboo stalk and trimming down any bits sticking out with her knife and later, with a borrowed machete from our lunch restaurant, hacking off the thicker sharp bits to make an excellent trekking pole which Mel used all 3 days. She also had some less useful, but amusing skills, showing us at least twice how to make a toy horse from a grass stalk. I doubt I’ll be able to reproduce it though.

The scenery in northern Vietnam was beautiful, a combination of jungle smothered hillsides, river canyons (which left me pondering whether good whitewater kayaking exists here?), local farmland with rice paddy fields but also growing a huge range of vegetables which Pay pointed out, sometimes asking for help with the English translation, so we saw spinach, peaches, cauliflower, ‘green cauliflower’ (broccoli), choko (not a veg I was familiar with until now!), carrots, and probably some others that I’ve forgotten. The locals seem to have a mix of farming for themselves and farming to sell at market. We also quite regularly saw animals being farmed in villages, and an abundance of pigs which we were told were being fattened up for a big hog-roast at Chinese New Year.

We stayed our first night in a homestay (a basic guesthouse with shared bedrooms) and ate a meal of steamed rice, vegetables, chicken, spring rolls, and fried tofu and pork prepared by the host. We were joined by two other tourists who both were trekking with Sapa Sisters guides, and we all ate together with the host family. One of the tourists was American and had struck up quite the rapport with his guide. She had at one stage asked what he had in his heavy backpack, and he flippantly replied “a baby”. From then on he had been nicknamed ‘Baby America’ and this continued and caught on with the other guides round the table. There was an insistence that we share in their homemade rice wine (lovingly translated as ‘happy water’) as well as an amount of pressure to eat and be sure that we were adequately fed and happy with the food. Baby America felt this pressure the strongest, and the three guides poured him cup after cup of rice wine and it felt like only a matter of time before they were force-feeding him spring rolls. He took this in excellent spirit and responded in a very witty manner, and kept us amused for the evening!

We were given another chance to change our minds about the hard trek (perhaps we had looked like day 1 was too tough?) but we had enjoyed day 1, so we set off with our newfound friends (one nursing a bit of a rice-wine hangover) up a steep valley side and more trekking through rice paddy fields, over small streams, down steep muddy banks, and along dirt tracks kept us very happy. Just before lunch we said goodbye to Baby America, who was only doing a 2 day trek, and continued downhill towards the river which was to be our lunch spot.

There were no available shops or restaurants on day 2, so Pay had bought some take-away tubs from the village we had stayed in, and as we sat down to eat lunch at an idyllic location on a rock in the middle of a steep creek (not quite enough water for kayaking!) she distributed the tubs of sticky-rice with pork and fried onions but no chopsticks. She had forgotten chopsticks!

Never fear, there is nothing a Hmong woman cannot improvise when armed with a knife, and Pay grabbed some bamboo from the riverside, and went to work. Within a few seconds we had some hand-carved improvised chopsticks. Suitably impressed, we tucked in!

After a reasonably long day of walking (we were warned!) we arrived at another small village and another homestay. Again we had a meal of rice, spinach, fried meats, vegetables, spring rolls and home-brew rice wine which tasted stronger this time, and without Baby America, the pressure fell on me to keep up with the drinking and to try and stuff as many spring rolls into me as possible. Luckily we were pretty hungry, and managed to refuse enough cups of rice wine that we stayed reasonably sober without offending our hosts!

Bamboo Forest

Mel and Pay

A kayaker can dream

Rice paddy

Sunshine breaks through

Another day dawned and another trek began, it was just over 3 hours of almost exclusively uphill, but on good quality ground (a dirt track) and took us reasonably close to the Chinese border although it was a bit too foggy to see much from the top of the hills. It was enjoyable, and we strolled into our destination town at around 12:30pm, just in time for some noodles for lunch from a local restaurant, followed by a taxi back to Sapa town. After being reunited with our bags, we said goodbye to Pay, grabbed a quick shower, and then journeyed back to Hanoi on the overnight train, then straight out to the airport to also say a fond goodbye to Vietnam and head to Luang Prabang in Laos!