The night train that Jason and I took along with Fred and Steph took us up to a small city in the north of Vietnam called Lao Cai, only 3 km from the Chinese border. We only stayed in Lao Cai long enough to find a mini bus to take us the other hour to Sapa. Sapa is a beautiful little mountain town that most tourists travel to to do some treking and see the indigenous people. And that's just what we did.
After quickly finding a place to stay (cheap! $6/night for the room. But you get what you pay for...) and a bite to eat, we headed out to do some treking around some nearby villages.
The landscape around Sapa is amazingly beautiful, it's east to see what draws so many tourists there. We slowly wandered through the green valley, through countless rice paddies, past grazing water buffalo and around feeding piglets and chicks. The local farmers and tribal people were incredibly friendly. The children watched us with curiousity and waved and yelled "hellogoodbye" until they could no longer see us.
After meandering around for about 4 hours we decided to make our way back toward Sapa. To get to the road that would lead us there, we had to cut back across the valley and up a mountain of about 500 meters. When we were almost to the top we came to a vertical dirt wall where farmers were digging out the mountainside. As we were about to climb up the footholes in the wall, we watched as a little boy of about 9 ran down the wall as fast as he could without missing a step. We slowly made our way up the wall as the locals all watched and laughed at how slowly and carefully we climbed.
We finally made it to the top and were lucky to get picked up by a tour van full of French tourists (who we would see many times again over our weekend) on theiir way back to town.
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