Dan's Adventure

Beijing may have had snow, but it was nowhere near as cold as it was in Sapa. I had to buy gloves. The mountain village of Sapa is a tourist trap of the highest order, restaurants, hotels and travel agencies all waiting for your money whilst the streets are filled with motorbikes offering to taxi you about and woman and little girls from the nearby villages trying to sell their crafts. Its a bit of a circus really.

Sapa is popular for a reason, the surroundings are absolutely stunning. Rolling hills, rice terraces, farms and many villages populated by hill tribes. Travel agencies offer trekking tours of the area, but when it comes to walking I prefer to find my own way.

I ventured out alone, walked to one of the nearby villages, walked passed the oh so obvious houses set up for the tourists, and continued into the forest. For the rest of the afternoon I was on my own and managed to get pretty damn lost in the hills. A farmer herding goats, young boys cutting down and carrying piles of bamboo, old men fishing from the river and a couple of girls carrying baskets of fruit towards Sapa were the only people I saw until I finally reached another small village somewhere in the hills.

It took me a good couple of hours of following mud tracks, scrambling over rocks and negotiating rivers before I found the village, I now understood why the locals all wore wellies as my shoes and trousers were caked in mud. I had a lot of fun just wandering that afternoon, but I failed to think about my route back. Once I got to the river I tried to retrace my steps, but the part where I had previously jumped down and over some rocks was a bit more difficult to get back up. I fell in. For days afterwards I was reminded of my mistake, it was too cold for my shoes to dry out so I was squelching about in them for ages afterwards.

I had planned to spend several days in Sapa but the cold was just too much for me. I instead decided to spend just one night there and to be honest I’m glad thats all I stayed for. On the second day the cloud was lying very low making visibility incredibly poor, I walked for an hour out of Sapa, down the hill towards another village and saw nothing but cloud for most of the way. The poor visibility made the motorbike ride back up the hill pretty nerve racking, especially on the blind corners!