At 6am (no christ no no not that again please let us sleep) we had to get off the train not at Sapa but at Lao Cai, which is a little way down the road from Sapa, and is also the end of the railway line in that direction.
We had our alarm clocks set for 5.30am but the train staff did not know this and felt the most helpful thing they could do would be to play some loud, scratchy, speakers a the edge of their treble range music, to wake everyone up. I don’t know what it was; I don’t want to know what it was, for it also sound like a skipping CD, that it, it was loud, intermittent, and awful.
People back home will by this stage be making small tragic violin motions; oh it must be awful adventuring around on the trains in Vietnam…. tra-la-la let’s put uup a memorial…
So I will save you further griping.
At the station in Lao Cai we were greeted by basically everyone in town, all eager to ask us if we needed a bus ride or had our hotel organised. Somebody said that for the tourist operators it must look basically like a meat market, all fresh off the train. Get the ones with the camera bags first. Or something like that. We got into a minivan with some other people from other countries and trundled out off the tarmac road onto a mixed tarmac/mud/construction site/small landslip road that went up into the hills, and around each corner, it just went further and further up.
And the driver changed down gears as we wound between cliff face and sheer drop into palms and bamboo and stepped rice-terrace hillsides, and a very persistent foggy mist. A real one this time, not the ‘fog’ of Shanghai. Then the driver took us through Sapa, up another hill, and down the entrance way of a hotel that was not the hotel anyone on the bus was going to.
‘Aren’t we all going to the Royal?’ a lady in the front seat piped, as those front-seat people are bound to do eventually.
Vague nods from a tired vanload.
Well, where’s this? If he’s not taking us there I’ll have my ticket back.’
The door of the van opened. A nice lady with a clipboard asked whether anyone wanted to stay at this hotel, whether we just wanted to get out and have a look at the rooms, please sir just have a look, need a hotel room? That type of thing.
An American behind us spoke for everyone when he said,
‘No, we already have a hotel booked, but thank you kindly.’
The driver, who for some reason thought he might be about to unload some bags off the bus, then got back into the van, backed up the slippery slope, did a three point turn with about zero metres to spare on each side while a motorbike coming down the hill waited, and then we drove back into town and pulled up in front of the Royal Sapa Hotel.
Where we could not check in. Of course we couldn’t, it was 8am, and most of the guests wouldn’t yet be awake let alone checked out. Why the hell should they be? I wouldn’t be.
So we went for breakfast up the main road a hundred metres or so, where I began to feel awake again after a liberal application of black coffee, and thoroughly enjoyed my pancakes with lime juice and sugar, while Alice tucked convincingly into a ham and cheese omelette. And a vanilla and cinnamon milkshake. On the walls they had hung various printed pictures of people and places around Sapa, some good and others really superb. Cue the technical debate about whether a picture that big could have come from a 35mm film camera, and can you see the little cross-hatch squares from too much resampling, and so on.
Anyway. Really nice pictures.
We were asked by the hotel to come back at 11.30 and see if there were any rooms available, so on Tuan’s recommendation we had a look around the food and clothing markets set up at the high end of the main street, on the left and right side of the road. Food on the left. Whatnot on the right, leading from the main grassy square down an alley, from whence steps took us back down to the main street. In the time it took me to go into a shop (a tarpaulin) and get stung on the price of a pair of clean white socks, a very dense fog settled in, over, and around everything.
Visibility: 50m.
New socks: priceless.
We had seen in various places shops advertising that they could provide wireless internet, so we figured on exploring Sapa after we came back from the rice terraces, and went back to the hotel at 9.30am to fetch our computer (and power cord) from a backpack. Our plans were dramatically realigned when the nice lady behind the desk said that there was a room available now and would we like it?
‘Is it a double bed room?’
‘All same. One single, one double bed.’
And that is how room 308, and a warm shower, became ours. Alice went to sleep for a bit and I began writing more journals.
At 11.30am, I went downstairs to find Tuan, Adam and Catherine and tell them that we had already managed to check-in, and they should not wait for us. And then a very strange thing happened. Out the large window, in the stairwell between floors three and two, I could see the main street and on the other side of our end of the main street I clearly observed a person looking very much like June, in her short sleeve black wick-sweat-away hiking shirt, walking up the stairs of a hotel. A hotel across the road from ours.
Eh?
The road, I should add, is about 2 metres wide. I wasn’t sure if my eyes were playing tricks until I also clearly observed, in the light of day, Andy and Katie walking up those same steps into the same Mountain View Hotel. So I walked on down, explained what-and-how to our current group, and walked over to surprise our previous group. And surprised they were.
‘Where’s Alice?’
‘Upstairs asleep. If we hadn’t checked-in early, and then come back down to explain, I probably wouldn’t have seen you.’
Turns out they were returning from Sapa after their trek through the rice terraces, and would be leaving town tonight on the 6pm train. The very same thing we would be doing in two days time. They would go through Ha Noi, and out to Ha Long bay and Cat Ba Island, while we trekked through mud and worse. We knew we would arrive back in Hanoi on the same day, and when you look at it that way, we were bound to meet in the middle. I made a plan to meet in one hour for lunch, seeing as they were all checking in and wanted to clean up, and went back upstairs to share the good news.
For lunch we walked a total of 8m up the hill to an Italian restaurant, and had a good minestrone, and a great time catching up on news and happenings. The horror stories from the trek through the rice terraces were not what we needed to hear.
‘It’s the World’s longest mud slide.’
‘Don’t wear anything you don’t want to throw out.’
‘I’m going to buy a new backpack after this because my other one is too muddy to clean.’
‘One of those little ladies that try to sell you things literally saved my life. I was about to go over the edge.’
‘Oh no but it’s fun, you’ll have a great time, you just have to slide down every hill on your bot.’
Yep. Sounds great.
Job done, we resolved to catch up again in Ha Noi, instructed each other to enjoy the coming days, and we went back up to room 308 and spent most of the remaining afternoon watching the rain trickle over everything, and wrote more travel journals. Downstairs, in the WiFi reception zone, we posted everything and sorted pictures in as much as possible before meeting Tuan for dinner at 6.30pm. Up the main road, right-turn up the steps that lead to the back of the market, past the park and along another tree-bordered street, we went into the upstairs part of a restaurant for a Hot Pot.
They bring out a single ceramic electric element, with a deep wide pot on top full of stock, herbs, and some carrots and other similar vegetables. They bring you bowls of chilli, lime, salt, soy sauce, tofu, quail eggs, packet noodles and a bowl to eat out of. They bring you an absolute mountain of choy sum, cabbage, and other vaguely identifiable local green vegetables. You keep feeding the greens in, chuck in some tofu or noodles when you feel like it, and it boils away and makes just about the tastiest concoction you can imagine.
We were full. I’m talking about Christmas-lunch full. And we’d only eaten half of ours. If even. And it was great value for the price, and we anticipated needing every bit of that energy tomorrow morning.
Greg
