To The Far Stretches Of Sapa

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There are few options for travel to Sapa, a far northern Vietnamese town famous for its people and trekking routes through mountains of terraced rice fields. The fastest and most efficient way is the overnight train from Hanoi which arrives in Lao Cai on the Chinese border early in the morning. It’s still a long way to Sapa, but it isn’t too difficult to hitch a ride from the station if you’re travelling alone.

The Sinh Cafe, with locations of varying standards scattered throughout Hanoi’s Old Quarter, offer a vast menu of small, all-inclusive tours such as the one I booked, a three day tour to Sapa. Too simple. Although I can’t deny having a few concerns about the whole situation, starting after the 45-minute delayed pickup from my hotel to Hanoi Railway station – my unfamiliarity of the Vietnamese interpretation of time, perhaps. But the last thing I wanted was to be stuck on a train in outer-Asia with my credit-card number donated to some con-artist extraordinaire back in Hanoi.

Sapa is famous for its people and trekking routes through mountains of terraced rice fields.

An overexcited party of Hmong women congregated outside the Summit Hotel entrance resembling four-year-olds at their first Wiggles concert. My concerns immediately shifted from the disappointingly dull weather conditions to how I would ever make it inside the hotel in one piece.

The Hmong women dress traditionally (excluding the gumboots) purely to preserve their culture, not to impress tourists or fulfil some marketing deal with the local tourism authority. The jacket is the most striking item, dark blue with bands of intricate design and colour around the sleeves, waist and collar. But for me, being a softy for bold bright colours no matter how much they disagree, their  head-dresses took first place. And despite my insistent prodding for  deeper inspiration or symbolical meaning to the patterns, to my discontent, they’re added for decorative purposes only.

Signs of an organised tour returned when I was approach by a Hmong in the hotel reception with information for the two treks to nearby villages, ranging between one and four hours from Sapa.

Walking passed the ticket seller and through the official entry gates to Cat Cat village, I observed with an inward grin a billboard of the Cat Cat Tourism Area Regulations and how all visitors should, according to the second point, ‘execute introduction of seller ticket’. A real life example of something that’s been lost in translation. I cant even begin to imagine what the translator could possibly have been thinking, and compared with the very correct and flowing English spoken by the Hmong, who exactly was this ‘translator’?