Valley deep, spirits high
We left
Hanoi on the 6.30am train to Sapa. Lots of travellers seem to prefer the overnight sleeper train but we thought we'd rather spend the ten-hour journey seeing some countryside and mixing with the locals on the day train. Plus it was a third of the price. The journey's soundtrack is provided by the men in the carriage and their incessant hawking up and spitting out of phlegm. Entertainment comes in the form of a never-ending barrage of women who board the train at each stop (sometimes through the window) selling steamed rice, crumbly bread, boiled egg, gnarly fruit and corn on the cob. What a local pays for these items is very much different to what a tourist is charged. Even the official snack trolley guy invents a whole new price structure when approaching a Westerner. With all that food coming aboard, the floor of the train 
looks like a compost by the end of the journey - complete with cockroaches. Another minor annoyance is that Vietnamese people don't seem to have got the hang of mobile phones. Nearly everyone has one, of course, but they have them on full volume speakerphone so that you can hear whoever is calling very clearly and very loudly. In response to this, the person receiving the call shouts so loudly that they could be heard back home even without the phone. It's not a relaxing journey.
Sapa itself is a great place. Being up in the mountains, it was much cooler than the rest
of Vietnam has been and has an almost Alpine feel to it - you can even buy tartiflette in some restaurants. The area around Sapa is famous for being home to several different village tribes, each with a different language, different customs and different traditional dress. The main two tribes are the Black H'Mong and the Red Zao (helpfully, H'mong wear black hats and the Zao wear red head 
scarves). Women 
from these tribes roam the streets of Sapa waiting to pounce on the tourists and pester them into buying their bags, scarves and jewellery. You have to be very good at saying no or haggling.
We hired a motorbike and rode up into the mountains looking for a local attraction called the Silver Waterfall. En route we were stopped by a policeman who demanded my driving licence and
ownership papers for the bike. Of course, it being a hire bike, I didn't have ownership papers and for this misdemeanour I was told I must pay a 100,000 dong fine. I pretended I didn't understand and asked him to show me the ticket he was writing. As he lifted the book of pre-printed 100,000 dong tickets, I spotted a book of 50,000 dong tickets underneath. "What are they?" I asked. "Not for you!" he replied. Haggling with the village women had given me all the practice I needed to batter him down and I got away with just paying the 50,000 dong. He even posed for a photograph afterwards.
After vis
iting the waterfall we were a little bit peckish and so we stopped at one of the roadsi
de stalls for a bite to eat. Choice was a little limited but I was drawn to one offering in particular - a little bird, on a stick, which the lady barbecued in front of me. It was actually very nice. We asked her what this bird on a stick was called and she told us it was "chim." Later, back at our hostel, we Googled "chim" only to find out it is Vietnamese for "bird". That's that cleared up then.
Most Vietnamese are genuinely friendly and generous people and this was never
so apparent
as on the Saturday night in Sapa. We were wandering around with Jeff, an Aussie guy we'd met earlier, when we noticed a crowd of people gathered round a large bonfire in the main square. In the middle of the crowd were a group of guys getting drunk and dancing to music blaring from a car stereo. Upon spotting us, they grabbed us by the arms and dragged us into the inner circle. It turned out to be someone's birthday and they were apparently very pleased that we were there. We were offered food (more barbecued creatures on sticks) and shots of rice wine which we had to down on a worryingly regular basis. We were challenged to smoke tobacco from a large bamboo
bong and congra
tulated with cheers when we did so without being sick. People wanted their pictures taken with us, wanted to shake our hands and some of them even wanted us to dance with them - we felt like minor celebrities. That may have just been the rice wine going to our heads though.
Th
e
next day we, and our hangovers, went on a two-day
trek
into the hills to see the tribal villages. We walked through the rice terraces, over rickety bridges, past water buffalo and into properly rural Vietnam. We had an overnight stay in one of the villages at a nice little wooden house on a hill
side. We helped
our host, Tien, prepare dinner (I peeled bamboo shoots and Claire rolled spring rolls) and then afterwards he produced some local "treats" for us to try. Out came a bottle of rice wine and a large bamboo bong...
SCOOTERS OF THE WEEK
Hanoi on the 6.30am train to Sapa. Lots of travellers seem to prefer the overnight sleeper train but we thought we'd rather spend the ten-hour journey seeing some countryside and mixing with the locals on the day train. Plus it was a third of the price. The journey's soundtrack is provided by the men in the carriage and their incessant hawking up and spitting out of phlegm. Entertainment comes in the form of a never-ending barrage of women who board the train at each stop (sometimes through the window) selling steamed rice, crumbly bread, boiled egg, gnarly fruit and corn on the cob. What a local pays for these items is very much different to what a tourist is charged. Even the official snack trolley guy invents a whole new price structure when approaching a Westerner. With all that food coming aboard, the floor of the train 
looks like a compost by the end of the journey - complete with cockroaches. Another minor annoyance is that Vietnamese people don't seem to have got the hang of mobile phones. Nearly everyone has one, of course, but they have them on full volume speakerphone so that you can hear whoever is calling very clearly and very loudly. In response to this, the person receiving the call shouts so loudly that they could be heard back home even without the phone. It's not a relaxing journey.Sapa itself is a great place. Being up in the mountains, it was much cooler than the rest
of Vietnam has been and has an almost Alpine feel to it - you can even buy tartiflette in some restaurants. The area around Sapa is famous for being home to several different village tribes, each with a different language, different customs and different traditional dress. The main two tribes are the Black H'Mong and the Red Zao (helpfully, H'mong wear black hats and the Zao wear red head 
scarves). Women 
from these tribes roam the streets of Sapa waiting to pounce on the tourists and pester them into buying their bags, scarves and jewellery. You have to be very good at saying no or haggling. We hired a motorbike and rode up into the mountains looking for a local attraction called the Silver Waterfall. En route we were stopped by a policeman who demanded my driving licence and
ownership papers for the bike. Of course, it being a hire bike, I didn't have ownership papers and for this misdemeanour I was told I must pay a 100,000 dong fine. I pretended I didn't understand and asked him to show me the ticket he was writing. As he lifted the book of pre-printed 100,000 dong tickets, I spotted a book of 50,000 dong tickets underneath. "What are they?" I asked. "Not for you!" he replied. Haggling with the village women had given me all the practice I needed to batter him down and I got away with just paying the 50,000 dong. He even posed for a photograph afterwards. After vis
iting the waterfall we were a little bit peckish and so we stopped at one of the roadsi
de stalls for a bite to eat. Choice was a little limited but I was drawn to one offering in particular - a little bird, on a stick, which the lady barbecued in front of me. It was actually very nice. We asked her what this bird on a stick was called and she told us it was "chim." Later, back at our hostel, we Googled "chim" only to find out it is Vietnamese for "bird". That's that cleared up then.Most Vietnamese are genuinely friendly and generous people and this was never
so apparent
as on the Saturday night in Sapa. We were wandering around with Jeff, an Aussie guy we'd met earlier, when we noticed a crowd of people gathered round a large bonfire in the main square. In the middle of the crowd were a group of guys getting drunk and dancing to music blaring from a car stereo. Upon spotting us, they grabbed us by the arms and dragged us into the inner circle. It turned out to be someone's birthday and they were apparently very pleased that we were there. We were offered food (more barbecued creatures on sticks) and shots of rice wine which we had to down on a worryingly regular basis. We were challenged to smoke tobacco from a large bamboo
bong and congra
tulated with cheers when we did so without being sick. People wanted their pictures taken with us, wanted to shake our hands and some of them even wanted us to dance with them - we felt like minor celebrities. That may have just been the rice wine going to our heads though.Th
e
next day we, and our hangovers, went on a two-daytrek
into the hills to see the tribal villages. We walked through the rice terraces, over rickety bridges, past water buffalo and into properly rural Vietnam. We had an overnight stay in one of the villages at a nice little wooden house on a hill
side. We helped
our host, Tien, prepare dinner (I peeled bamboo shoots and Claire rolled spring rolls) and then afterwards he produced some local "treats" for us to try. Out came a bottle of rice wine and a large bamboo bong...SCOOTERS OF THE WEEK
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