Trip to Sapa - Northern Vietnam

Here we are on the night train to Sapa in Northern Vietnam.  This is a 4 person "soft sleeper" - a tourist standard, the locals usually book onto the "hard sleeper" - with six people to a section - which has even less space.  The train left at 8:30 pm and we arrived in Sapa at 4:30 am - we did get a bit of sleep.  It was pouring rain when we left Hanoi and it was still raining when we got to Sapa.  This was the most rain I have ever seen!  It was the tail end of a typhoon which caused a number of landslides in Northern Vietnam where we were and over 30 people were killed.  We were ok but we did see some evidence of landslides on our trek. 

As the rain was so bad we bought some really light ponchos ($1 each) to try to hold back some of the rain.  We felt like locals - everyone wears them here! 






















We spent a day on a guided trek with a lady from the local village.  It was about 5 hours long as we walked through the mountains along the rice fields and the river through 3 local villages.  Sapa has 4 seasons - it can get as cold as 5 degrees in the winter and up to 35 degrees in the summer.  Rice does grow here but only one crop a year due to the weather.  The scenery is fantastic and the air is really clear - a great break from Hanoi.  



















































Colleen (me), Cole, Chuck and Kenna on our trek. 



















The local houses are very basic - wooden walls and roofs.  During winter a wood fire is burnt within the house to keep the family warm(ish).  As it was Saturday we saw lots of children playing with sticks in the mud - and many of the small children were running around without pants (no diapers) and the other children had very old/worn clothes .  The Hill tribe people are very poor as was evident that day on our walk. 















This is our guide - Zee.  She is a mother of 3children.  She is demonstrating the use of the loom that is used to make the fabric for the traditional clothes, bags and pillow cases that can be bought in Sapa.  Zee is wearing the traditional clothes of her village - everyone wears the same pattern on their clothes to distinguish where they are from.   During our tour we learnt a lot from her about family life and school.   In the past the men logged in the mountains for the family's income, but this is no longer allowed by the government so now the women make crafts to sell in Sapa and lead treks while the husbands stay home and take care of the children.  Zee's English is surprisingly good - she has learnt it from speaking with tourists when she sold her crafts.  English is not taught in the schools at all here. There are only elementary schools in the villages so children must commute up to an hour each way to go to highschool.  In the past most girls got married at 15 or 16, the new law stipulates that they must wait until they are 18, after they finish high school, to marry.

We saw many of these contraptions throughout the villages.  The water, which is from the run off of the rice fields, fills the bucket to lift the hammer, and when the bucket overfills and empties the hammer crashes down to grind the rice into flour.  I'm sure these were around 100's of years ago, maybe even longer.  Cole wants to build one in our backyard!

 

While we were on our walk these 3 ladies joined us for several hours before asking us if we wanted to buy anything.  We ended up buying an indigo bag, pillow case, glasses case and some bracelets.  We now need to soak them in salt water to set the dye before they leach over all our other clothes.  The lady standing beside me was very chatty - asking me lots of questions about Canada.  I was teasing her - telling her I felt like a giant beside her. She told me that she was the smallest in her village.  I think she was being polite as all of the Hill Tribe ladies are very small and all the westerns look huge!!











Sapa was truly impressive.  We all really enjoyed our couple of days here and the children loved seeing the countryside of Vietnam and witnessing the living conditions of the Hill Tribe families.  We all felt very fortunate to be living in Canada.