ChinaTeacher

Yesterday we trekked to “Ta Van” village where we stayed the night.  It was a beautiful day with a nice breeze – perfect!  As we headed down the trail out of Sapa, many of the local villagers joined our group, to keep us company along the way.  

   

Actually, they are still trying to make us buy souvenirs and think that befriending us along the way will work (which it sometimes does!).  The area around Sapa is very mountainous, with stepped farmland as far as the eye can see.  The majority of farmland is used for growing rice, and vegetables, and grazing buffalo.  We stopped in several villages along the way, walked across a few bamboo bridges (almost needed my motion sickness pills!) and finally made it to Ta Van where we were greeting by the hosts of our homestay.  All 12 of us were to spend the night sleeping in the rafters of their home on thin mattresses covered with mosquito netting.
 
   

We spent most of the evening drinking beer and telling stories – our hosts sent someone out twice to find more beer!  The locals dropped by several times, making fruitless attempts to relinquish us of our hard-earned money!  After an incredible feast of Vietnamese spring rolls, stirfried veggies, tofu and tomato, sauteed cabbage, french fries, stirfried chicken in ginger (don’t know how they do it in such simple kitchens consisting of little more than a fire and a hotplate, no counterspace whatsoever!), out came the home-made RICE WINE!  Let the games begin!  Most everyone was conservative at first, taking just one shot and commenting about how terrible it smelt, but tossing it back anyway, just to be polite.  But, after a while, and many shots later, more bottles were brought out of this home-made devil’s brew!  Needless to say, rather than being the only person doing the ‘easy’ trek today, I was accompanied by several others, still holding their heads after last night!  We’ll spend the rest of the day here in Sapa, each person doing their own thing.  Some are taking naps, others are getting massages, shopping, dropping laundry off, and so on.  Tomorrow we leave Sapa for a place called Bac Ha to see their Sunday market – it’s supposed to be really something.  Then we’re off to Lao Cai where the overnight train will transport us back to Hanoi for our last full day of shopping, eating and sightseeing.  Sapa is a wonderful place to visit – I highly recommend it!

 

Tags: Travel

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 10th, 2007 at 1:03 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.