For breakfast, on a rainy Monday morning, I ordered a croissant with scrambled eggs, while Alice had a croissant with bacon and cheese. Hers came with bacon and cheese, while mine came with an omelette.
An omelette can be cut up and put inside a croissant, and in combination with one of them gunpowder Vietnamese coffees, and a nice wedge of butter, the effects are quite pleasant.
There was rumour of renting a bus to go and see another traditional village and the nearby silver waterfall, but that was a bit expensive so instead we decided on the other option; walk over to Cat Ca village. It’s a short walk from Sapa and comes well recommended. We had to check out first, which meant leaving our bags once again in the dodgy, damp, paint-smeling luggage room downstairs, but you pays your money and takes your chances.
To get to Cat Ca you go up the main road, turn left into the market, and then keep going that way, along a fairly decent road, which is well-serviced by swarms of motorbike riders offering tourists lifts to or from or back to Sapa or the village or anywhere, really.
And they are all No. 1.
‘Hello, motorbike ride?’
‘No thanks, we’ll walk.’
Yes, motorobike ride, you remember me maybe later, Hokio No. 1.’
Hokio, who was No. 1, had drawn his name on the back of his helmet, as had they all to make it easier for tourists to remember which bike rider they said they would get a ride with, only Hokio had drawn in on like it was a ‘Nokia’ logo. Priceless.
On the way down the foggy road you have to buy a ticket to enter the historical or cultural area or whatever it is, but the entry gate is actually a fair way down the road. If you don’t know that you could easily arrive at the entry gate without a ticket, and have to walk (or even pay for a motorbike ride) 1km or so back up to the ticket office. But we were warned, and had no such problem. Eventually at the bottom of the windy road, after you get through the gate, there is a little bridge across the river, and then you walk along for a while next to the water, which tumbles through a series of waterfalls large and small, surrounded by bamboo.
The last is the best by far.
And it has a little viewing platform sticking out near the fall, where people stand and look miniature while you take pictures of them looking miniature from the wooden bridge leading back over the river.
After that the hill starts. I’m not sure how many steps there were but a lot would probably cover it. We were halfway through the traditional culturally preserved village before we even realised where we were, because it’s really just some huts along the edge of the track with naked kids running around out front, and roosters dodging off the path when you approach. In the rice fields lining the track, several buffaloes were sloping around, burying themselves halfway in the mud, receiving large needles from the crafty farmer who snuck up with the implement behind his back, and after they were finished that – trying to make more buffaloes.
We didn’t know it but the trail we were walking along, after going through the village, actually joined back up to the road we had walked down, so we were thinking about turning back to have another look at the waterfall, but instead decided to walk down the road again, and find the restaurant we had spied on the first lap. Like most places in Vietnam it wasn’t really a restaurant so much as a pergola that serves food, but it was good food: egg, noodle and choy sum broth, with a cup of tea each, for 40,000 VND. And with the added entertainment of watching all the purple-clad old and young men stop for a break and drink some rice wine out of water bottles, it was good times all around.
What was even funnier was when the woman serving us went to fetch another bottle of rice wine for one of the resting motorbike riders. In the corner of the pergola was a large plastic tub, probably 10L or more, which in a Western country would be full of water, but which in this instance was full of rice wine. It was to heavy for the old lady to lift, so she got a tube and siphoned it out, and passed the bottle to another happy customer.
We walked back up the hill, aiming to go back down through the village and visit the waterfall again. Having finished the loop we weren’t supposed to go back through again, but the gaggle of motorbike riders and ticket collectors waiting around the gate to the trail didn’t seem to care. Oddly enough all of those bike riders were No. 1 as well.
‘You get ride from me, later. Ten is No. 1.’
He proudly displayed the back of his helmet, marked Ten.
‘But how can Ten be No. 1.? I said. They all had a giggle, but they’ve likely heard that one before.
By the time we walked back down to the fall, listened to the surprisingly awful music coming at top volume out of the hall where they were holding a cultural performance of some kind, sweated our way back up through the village, the buffaloes, and the gate, and started the walk back up to town, it was nearly 3.15pm. We had to check out (and get our bags from the dodgy luggage room) at 5pm, so we got a bit of a move on and were surprised to find ourselves back in the market at Sapa as early as ten-to-four.
We had washing to pick up from the shop across the road from our Royal Sapa Hotel, but preferred to wander over to the other part of town, past where we had gone for Hot Pot and to the little lake in the middle of town. And that part of town is a pretty nice part of town; very few ‘salespeople’ and wider streets, etc.
Our ‘Will the DVDs read properly?’ problem was solved by Tuan, whose laptop we borrowed for ten minutes to copy the necessary wedding-related pictures off the DVDs which had stopped working in our computer. So we piled into the 30-seat bus to Lao Cai, on the way up the main street picking up about 4 other tourists, and commenced a surprisingly dizzying ride down the hill. Maybe it was because the large bus was rolling side to side a lot as we went round corners, or maybe it was something else, but everyone was feeling more than a bit giddy when we got off the bus about 45 minutes later. With our feet on solid ground again we went to the upstairs part of a cafe near the train station for dinner, which was largely full of other tourists. Good cheap food, though.
On the train we all went to bed as soon as we could, having been warned we could be getting off at Hanoi as early as 4.30am.
Greg
