We decided to include Sapa on our Vietnam visit as we hadn’t been here before and many people had said it was interesting and as it was in the mountains it’s a bit different to the rest of Vietnam. Why not!
We’d initially planned to catch the night train (I love me some train travel!) but since Vietnam only reopened to tourists three months ago, the train is only running once a week, and not on the day we wanted. So we took a minibus… a “limousine” minibus, if you will, meaning there are 9 passengers instead of 12, giving us all a bit more elbow room. We were picked up from our hotel before breakfast and zoomed through the Hanoi traffic out of the city towards the Noi Bai – Lao Cai Expressway, stopping an hour in for a snack and bathroom break. FYI, the Lobster with Golden Salted Egg Sauce chippies were pretty good.
It was pretty smooth all the way to Lao Cai, where we stopped again for a break, and then took on the final section of road. Careful readers will have noticed Sapa is in the mountains, and if you know me (or have read this blog much) you’ll know I’m not terribly enamoured of heights, especially when driving near them. Suffice to say I was chomping down on ginger lollies from the first turn, and felt the dizzy aftereffects of carsickness on and off for the rest of the day. Pretty spectacular view when I could drag my eyes to the windows, though, so it was worth it!
Sapa on first impressions reminded me of Phuket… a place that had once been a nature-focused destination that became tourist-focused. Lots of blaring neon lights (every second shop seems to be a massage shop) and tour buses. Once we managed to go out for a walk, we noticed that there weren’t as many tourists as we first thought (in fact, we saw only two other Western tourists, and the Hmong street vendor who followed us for 500m down the road and then came to try to sell to us twice more as we wandered around town told us that the domestic tourists don’t buy any of the ethnic souvenirs, which is why she was following us!)
We stopped for long-awaited lunch at a small cafe, and then popped in to the Ca Phe Cong next door for another of their delicious coconut coffees, before more wandering around town and finishing off with a massage in one of the many establishments lining the streets.
Sapa is 1500m above sea level so it’s permanently in the clouds, and cooler than the surrounding lowlands. I’d chosen the hotel because it apparently had great views over the valley and mirroring mountains, but there was so much low cloud the whole time we were there we barely glimpsed past the next road until our final day!
After four days in hot Hanoi, it’s a novelty to be cold again, and the rain is chilly rather than the warm monsoon we saw in Hanoi. I wish I’d brought an extra pair of shoes though, as my sneakers are still painful on my first-night-getting-lost blisters, and my old Birkies are showing signs of succumbing to the ordeal of being waded through the floodwaters! I’m sure Hoi An will offer something up in the way of shoes though, in our next stop.
Our second day was going to be a venture on the funiculars and cable car up to Fansipan (I keep thinking of it as “fancypants”) but we decided to stay in town as it didn’t look like good weather for mountain views. We walked past the lake to the other side of town to find the markets, but we attracted another street vendor who despite our frequent protestations of not wanting to purchase any of her wares, accompanied us all the way through the markets and out the other side, putting a bit of a damper on our browsing. I don’t know whether to feel more annoyed or sad – that these vendors’ business relies on the absent international tourists so much that they will literally walk with us for kilometres to try to make a sale, but I don’t want to do what comes down to paying them to go away. And unfortunately, they aren’t selling shoes, so I’m not really in the market for any of their wares!
When we were planning our Sapa trip, we’d found that as well as the trekking side of tourism here (which isn’t really for us), there were also a few different cultural day trips like cooking classes, textile workshops etc focusing on the various groups who live in the area. Unfortunately almost all of these activities have gone by the wayside with the pandemic closures. I did locate a shop that arranges batik workshops though, which was a find!
The batik workshop took place in a little village about half an hour from Sapa, and it was arranged by the people at Indigo Cat handcrafts – it’s the proprietors’ mum, Meme I think? who takes the class, at her house. It was just the two of us (if you don’t count the grandkids, the buffalo nosing in for extra breakfast, the various dogs and cats, plus occasional trekkers who were heading past and stuck their heads in to see what was happening, including a Portuguese pair who had been on our bus from Hanoi.)
Meme doesn’t speak much English (but much more than we speak Vietnamese) so a lot of the instruction was demonstrate-copy. She showed us some tips with our technique, such as ensuring the tool is in the molten wax for long enough that the tool nib stays hot and the wax liquid, otherwise the wax beads onto the surface of the fabric rather than soaking in to act as a dye inhibitor.
With Meme’s help we ended up making designs that were much more intricate than we had expected. R’s was more curvy, plant-themed shapes, while mine was more angular and abstract. We didn’t have time to dye it with indigo, so Meme took care of that process and her daughter from the shop organised to have our finished cloth dropped off at the hotel.
In the mood for textiles, we browsed a couple of shops in town looking for laptop-sized pouches. We inadvertently collected our street vendor friends who were appalled that we were looking at other shops, but the ladies didn’t sell the kind of thing we were after. We ended up ordering custom bags from Hemp and Embroidery, near our hotel. They turned out beautifully!
We tried another couple of restaurants for local food, sampling Black Chicken at one, and locally grown green veg and mushrooms with shrimp at another.
On our last full day in Sapa we finally climbed the mountain! We soon realised that this is where everyone was — there were long queues of tourists everywhere, even in the whipping wind and icy mist, at the peak! We took the “easy” way – a funicular, then a cable car over the spectacular valleys (yes, scary!) and then a final funicular to get us close to the peak. With this help, my fitness app tells me we only had to climb 22 storeys today, to reach 3100m. It’s the only way I’ll ever get this high again!
We continue to be a novelty – a tour group half-adopted us in the cable car queue, practising their English and laughing at my fear of heights. One lady stopped me and patted at the skin on my arm, but I’m not sure if it was because of my pale skin, or that I’m curvy, or that I didn’t have a jumper on and we were headed to a mountain peak!
Leaving the cable car to climb up to the final funicular, we were blasted with icy winds, and we, like all the other people, dived into the souvenir shop to buy up big on disposable plastic raincoats. This was invaluable to cut the wind chill at the top!
We noticed on the way back down around midday, that the queues were now non-existent, and the wind buffeting the cable car around had also dropped. Advice for those taking this trip in the future: try going in the afternoon rather than the morning.
As the funicular station adjoined the massively ornate Hotel de la Coupole, we stopped in there for an early afternoon tea. Before we settled down to cakes and drinks at the Cacao patisserie, we had a wander around, poking our heads into the Absinthe bar (deeeeee-luxe!) and feeling too underdressed to do the same at the rooftop restaurant. The drinks at Cacao were good (I had a pomegranate spritz, a good change to the many lemon/lime juices I’ve had here). I had a couple of macarons, which looked perfect and the filling was deliciously creamy and tart, but the biscuits themselves were a bit granular and dry. R’s red velvet cake was more cream than cake — yummy!
Our last evening was spent finally trying the hotpot we’ve seen advertised everywhere. We had a great spot on a balcony overlooking the main street, watching the much-increased Friday night traffic. We threw pieces of beef, chicken, sturgeon and salmon into the pot along with mushrooms, leafy greens, tofu skin and corn, before pulling them out and gobbling them up. So good! What they say about the local salmon is true – it’s got great colour, tastes delicate and would make an awesome sashimi.
Two Weeks Away 