This Is A Lake - A travel blog

Amazing news: it's sunny today! It happened! I saw the sun today for the first time since that one day in Versailles when we had a nice morning. When I opened the window today, instead of a solid white wall of fog I could actually see the entire valley sprawling in front of me. I dashed downstairs, had breakfast as quickly as possible -not difficult to do since it's so unappetizing- and went out for a walk before our trekking started. I wanted to see at least a glimpse of the town without the fog, and indeed today it was a lively and cheery mountain town instead of an eerie forest settlement. We met our guide at the hotel lobby at 9:30, and went on our way! She came escorted by a group of H'mong women, one with a baby on her back, and chatted merrily with them while we followed them as best we could. Our destinations were the towns of Lao Chai (not to be confused with Lao Cai, where the train station is) and Ta Van. If yesterday's trek was a very easy walk...

It's Sapa time! Sapa is a village in the northeast of Vietnam, known for its views of the valleys below and its proximity to the Fansipan, Vietnam's highest peak at just over 3,000 m. It's also very close to the hometowns of one of Vietnam's ethnic minorities, the Black H'mong (so called because they dye their clothes black). There's no direct route from Hanoi to Sapa; there are trains to Lao Cai, a town within one hour's drive of Sapa. The train ride takes a really long time, so what most people do is book an overnight train, which leaves Hanoi at around 21:45 and arrives in Lao Cai at around 05:30 the next morning, and that's what I did. I booked a packaged trip for this part of my holidays, because there are a lot of moving parts (trains, transport to and from stations to hotels, then trekking tours...) and I was just about done with booking the rest of the trip. So I'm booked for return-trio overnight trains, one hotel night, transport, and two g...

So, after the adventure of actually getting here, I  was dropped off at the Sapa Lodge hotel, which looks fine, and was given a fairly terrible breakfast while they processed my check-in. At around 9AM, our guide arrived and we left on our first tour. It was raining heavily outside -more than when I arrived- so I had my umbrella out and my rain poncho on. I thought my sneakers would be all right in the rain, and perhaps they might have been, but what I wasn't expecting were the torrential rivers pouring down every street, with no safe place to step on. There would be waves that splashed up to our ankles, so that our feet were fully soaked within minutes. (I had tried to get rainboats at a store but they didn't have my size...) It got better later on, but of course by then we already had puddles inside our shoes. The scenery really is beautiful. It speaks to the beauty of the place that I found some sights impressive even in the cold, rainy, foggy slosh of a walk th...