Good morning SE Asia!: 30/10/13

One of the main reasons that we still wanted to go to Sa Pa was to climb Mount Fansipan, the highest mountain in Indochina. The trek starts with a bus ride up to around 2000m, where a guide takes you the rest of the way up. Most tours take two or three days believe it or not and have a hill stop at some village or in makeshift accommodation on the way. We didn't want to do that for reasons of cost so we were looking at the 1 day tour. This would take a full day (from 6am to 5pm) and was recommended to only the fittest adventurers (I don't think it would have been so tough but they must cover all the bases - after all its a 1400m climb and they have a multitude of ability ranges of tourist trekkers to deal with - most don’t seem to have much ability despite wearing the correct clothing brands (/cynicism). The thing that put us off in the end was the weather and the cost. We would be traipsing through mist and cloud the whole day and would be almost guaranteed to see nothing from the top. All for $95 each including the lunch and guide and entrance ticket. The entrance tickets alone were $30.

After consulting the hotel staff and other sources we decided a different option for a tour in the area instead, to visit the rice paddy villages and people of the area as we would get to see so much more and the cost was much more palatable - £10 each including lunch, much more in our budget range and still hopefully a good trek.

We started after a breakfast of pancakes in the top floor 'restaurant' of the hotel. It was a little shed construction that you could see daylight between the bamboo walls which was precariously balanced on the roof almost.

The Transit Van arrived at 8.30, and the rest of the tour guests had either come from our hotel or another one in the main street of the town. There were a German couple, a pair of French girls, an older Australian couple from Melbourne and us. Our guide was a perfectly well spoken 23 year old Vietnamese girl, dressed in a casual H'mong outfit. She must have been 5 foot tall wearing shoes.

There were already a few ladies and girls trying to sell us stuff before we even left the hotel. When we arrived at the drop-off zone to start the tour there were loads. We found it a bit uncomfortable at first as they don't leave you alone, but after a while we realised that they were going to be with us for the whole tour, and that they were probably just looking for a tip at the end, or to sell us something along the way. We almost had a girl each, our two were very young, one was only 16 but heavily pregnant with her first child. She was really friendly and funny and had quite good English as well.

The tour started with a look at some typical houses where the H'mong tribes live and what they do. We saw how they dye their clothes etc, and got a lecture about how healthy they eat (they really do though). We then trekked through the paddies and villages for the rest of the morning, not alot occuring apart from filling terrabytes of SD card with pictures between the group.

We did pass one village where they were brewing and distilling rice wine. It was quite a nice setup, although probably boring to read about! I still am not sure how they make sure to get rid of the Methanol (it's temp dependant and they had no temp measurement). This is more than likely why I felt so bad after drinking the home brew the other day.

We stopped for lunch in a restaurant which was OK, choice of fried noodles or noodle soup (Pho). We had a funny chat with the others during lunch and then headed off again. Then it got more interesting, and made sense why the hotel had offered to loan us wellies or shoes for the trip. We basically climbed up into the paddies but no cleared path this time, just stomping through the mud. A few people immediately lost their shoes in the mire, or got stuck. There were a couple of hipster types in a group following us who were both wearing new looking converse trainers who had been looking smug before lunch as we clumped past them, seemingly over-shoed. Well the girl was the first one to lose her white trainer, then also her sock as she stumbled about. We carried on trying to keep a straight face.

The tracks got worse. It was eventually a sideways slide across the mountain, through bamboo forests and hopping over streams. Plenty more shoes were lost in the making of the trek. The funny thing was the little H'mong girls - some pregnant, some carrying babies had no trouble at all. And they were wearing the traditional footwear - moulded bathroom flip-flops. We put their nimbleness down to lightweight and experience, and it was funny to see them helping much better equipped people over the trickier bits. The whole thing was a mud bath, and we didn’t see too many amazing sights after lunch but our group agreed that it was great fun, and much better than the morning trek.

We ended up at a waterfall which was not too impressive, comparing the muddiness of various body parts with each other as the H'mong, and by then Red Dzau ladies also went in to full merchant mode, pushing the hard sell and looking to make as much money as possible from the tourists they had been shepherding for the last 5 hours. I bought a little bag for my sunglasses and Johanna bought a head scarf. We got off lightly as we had no more cash in the wallet so could keep showing our empty purse to them. Was only £4 though and we would have given them that for a tip anyway.