Sapa

Ok so I left Hanoi at 9pm to take a train ride to Sapa, I would be arriving 6am the following night which meant a night sleeping on the train, the beds were fine though the train a bit noisy, I met Neils from Holland and Rudy from Belgium and Ben from Israel and had a good old chat before settling in a top bunk. Arriving at the train station was hectic but fairly well organised and were taken by mini bus up the mountains of Sapa to the Sapa Royal Hotel. Many of the people here wear the much more traditional Vietnamese clothing and are recognised by the difference in their attire, such as colour and how they wear it. I had breakfast at the hotel, I had noodle soup and we met our tour guides and in my group was Rudy from the train, Gui from Canada and Lucy from Slovakia and Wang who lived in Belgium but has Vietnamese background, who were great to talk with and had lots of great advice (being older and more experienced) We walked down the fabulous mountains for about two hours meeting a lot of the locals along the way. We visited four different villages and were completly swamped by people wanting us to buy their stuff, at first it was young children who are so poor they have to sell their stuff rather than go to school. It was OK at first but soon got very tiring, I consider myself fairly patient but even this was testing my patience. They just wont take no for an answer and when you tell them you've already bought, its "buy more, you buy from me" or you say "no thank you" they say "yes thankyou". Perhaps the most remarkable thing is they speak better English than most people in the city, also many of them demand you give them money if you want to take a picture. After lunch we continued on to where we would be staying that night, it was a traditional looking house with an outside toilet and cold shower. We were sleeping on matress on the floor and they honestly werent too bad. My group had a fabulous dinner prepared for us and was more of the food that I was expecting in Vietnam, compared to the boring things that we were served in Halong Bay.
The next morning we had pancakes and banana with Chocolate syrup for breakfast and continued walking, the different types of villages and the tidbits our guides informed us of along the way made it enjoyable, the whole walk was not as much a challenge as Cham in Halong but much longer and you get very hungry. Its amazing that the locals climb up these huge mountains all day long because it is exhausting! After lunch we visited our last two villages before coming back up to Sapa Royal for a free afternoon. It was so nice to have a hot shower but I was actually suprised how much I enjoyed the whole experience, I could definetly do this trek again, or maybe something similar in the different country. Sapa was an eye opener to the different types of poverty in Vietnam and was quite ehxhilerating.
Tonight I will have dinner at the Hotel before I board the train back to Hanoi at 9.15pm for my last day in Vietnam, in Hanoi. Maybe I will finally get some postcards out.
xoxo Emily