BootsnAll Travel Network



Sapa

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Tuesday October 1-3, 2002
Took the narrow gauge train to Lao Cai on the Chinese border and then traveled an hour by 4-wheel drive over a torturously slow single lane dirt road to the cool mountain town of Sapa. Spent a couple nights overlooking incredibly beautiful terraced rice paddies carved in perfect symetrical half circles up the mountain ridges. At the market I had a bowl of chicken noodle soup for lunch but forgot to ask the price first…the first rule…and paid 30,000 dong for a bowl that goes for 5000 dong in Hanoi. (I’m a rich tourist) Declined the trek into the minority villages where very charming laughing girls and women bat their pretty eyes at you while asking astronomically expensive prices 10-20 times the value for their handmade aluminum jewelry.

The pony-tailed fellow sitting next to me in the internet cafe was from San Francisco…had worked the Green Turtle hippy bus that runs (or used to run) from SF to Seattle and back…eating yogurt and granola in Eugene just south of Salem for a few years before he joined a non governmental organization and is now teaching English to tribal women in an ethnic minority village 15 miles in the mountains from Sapa. I love internet cafes!



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