The Wrong Time of Year in Sapa
Sapa, Vietnam
Sapa is 380km north of Hanoi and situated in the hills. This area contains Vietnam’s highest mountain. In the middle of winter, we found Hanoi chilly so it came as no surprise that Sapa was cold. However, I didn’t realise how wet it was. The whole point of a trip here was to get out and about in the hills and admire the amazing scenery, so we were due for three days of trekking, no matter how bad the weather.
We began on a muddy hillside road. To start with, our main concern was just not getting covered in mud as we are here for three days and don’t have many clothes to wear. So we trudged down the hill carefully. As Sapa is so high, it is often shrouded in mist and visibility was usually reduced to a few metres.
As we continued, the mud was ever present. It wasn’t raining, but it was cold and damp and had obviously been that way for a while. From time to time the mist cleared enough for us to see what a truly magnificent landscape this is. The hillsides are vast, high and wide and terraced from top to bottom. Each terrace contains a silvery pool of water within its grass-banked confines. Rows of terraces form enormous shiny staircases up the hillside. We gawped at the splendid sight on the few occasions when it was visible but mostly all we could see was the white fog.
Hiking through the mud
The mud wasn’t just messy. As the day wore on the trails became harder and harder to negotiate. At one point we were making our way along the edge of a terrace. On one side of us was a six inch deep pool of water, something we were keen not to fall into, and on the other was a five foot drop to another pool. In the summer I could see that this would be a great place to be. Without the mist, the view of the terraces on both sides of the valley would be very special. But for us, trying to balance on a narrow ledge of slippery mud, it was becoming an endurance test like something from I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here.
Taking a walking tour like this gets you further off the tourist trail than anything else we had done in Vietnam. We reached remote villages not readily accessible by road. Most were a collection of a few houses made of bamboo. They usually had small outbuildings for animals. There were little stalls for buffalo not much longer than the animals that were standing in them and stalls for pigs. These often contained a sleeping black mother pig under a pile of piglets. There was no paving in the villages so each was a mudbath. The people who lived in them were very different from other Vietnamese we had seen. They wore dark clothing died with natural colours that stained their skin. All had similar outfits consisting of a dark blue tunic embroidered with intricate green, red and white designs on bands on the arms. The men wore trousers and the women skirts.
Although the villages looked like they hadn’t changed in hundreds of years, the residents were obviously getting used to tourists. They must see people like us every day. Everywhere we go, we are followed by women selling us embroidered pillowcases, shirts and wristbands. You can’t blame them but it does spoil the feeling of being in the middle of nowhere.
As we trekked on into the afternoon, the going got tougher and tougher. Sometimes, climbing up the steep slopes there seemed no way we could make it. Thuc, our guide, had to tell us where to put our feet and help us over the difficult bits where there were no footholds. These trails would have been hard going in the dry but in the wet they were treacherous mudslides.
We fell over more than a few times. The worry was always that we would slide over the edge of the path and down the steep cliffs. I was soon caked in mud which did mean that we weren’t quite so bothered about going through the mudpatches. Which just left us with the worry about falling to our deaths.
We did kind of enjoy the walk. The danger gave us a sense that we were really achieving something and also made us forget about our aching muscles, Jo and I both being unused to this kind of prolonged physical activity. And the scenery continued to be spectacular. Whilst making our way through the terraces we could see what a feat of engineering they were. The water runs down the steps from the top terrace. When each level is full, it overflows through a pipe in the mud wall into the one below like a champagne fountain. Just keeping such a system maintained must be quite a job, and one that can’t be helped by a load of tourists walking along the walls and dislodging the soil.
When we neared the village where we were due to stay we were cold, covered in mud and tired. We were ready for a rest. But they had saved the most perilous bit to the end. We were at the top of a hill and the village was at the bottom. The way down was a steep mud covered path with few footholds. Over one side was a waterfall. It would be easy to slip over and with nothing much to hold onto, to be carried over the side of the cliff and into the waterfall, or just onto the rocks below. Again this would have been tricky when dry but in the wet it was just ludicrous. However, there wasn’t much of the day left and nowhere else to go so we had to get on with it.
There were times on the way down where I could see no way to go. At one point I slid down about four metres into a rock. Though I tried, I could not control my descent at all and picked up some speed before crashing into the rock. I had started crablike on my hands, but ended on my bum, with my trousers even more covered in mud than they had been before. There seemed nowhere to go from the rock. I just sat down and waited for someone to help but nobody came. After a few minutes I stepped carefully onto the mud and began inching my way down again.
Meanwhile, Jo was being helped on her way by Thuc. He was taking a step and then bracing himself on the slope, heaven knows how. Then Jo would slide into him. He took her down most of the path this way. It was a good few hundred metres from top to bottom.
The local people are used to this kind of weather and have no problem negotiating the pathways. They think our clumsiness and falling over is very funny indeed. Whilst I was dithering about whether a particular divot would collapse under my weight or not, a woman from the village below sauntered up to me. She thrust a black shape at me. “You buy pillowcase!” she demanded. There is a time and a place for buying home furnishings and I think when you’re balancing on the edge of a precipice isn’t one of them. I declined.
I did eventually make it to the bottom and had an emotional reunion with Jo who had slipped and skidded down a few minutes before. I glared at any Vietnamese who came near because I still wasn’t in the mood for bargaining. It’s all very well trying to meet local people, but invariably all they want to do is sell things.
With great relief, we piled into the lodgings for the night, a Vietnamese homestay. In theory, this is supposed to be somebody’s house in the village, but in practise it is a purpose built house that looks a bit like those that the local people have. Which was better in this case because after all that we had been through what we really wanted was a posh hotel with a hot shower, MTV and pizza on delivery. We had none of those things but at least it was dry.
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