Textick

Sunday, 25th December, CHRISTMAS DAY!!, Mountain View Hotel, Sapa, 8:10pm

Sapa.
your fog is so immense
your mountains apparently exist
we cannot see them.
In your streets
the words echo
“…you buy?”
O
Sapa!
We buy!

The overnight train to Sapa was intense . The train derailed fifty trillion times. At least, it sounded like it did. Grinding, screeching, churning mechanical movements, sudden slamming of brakes (at one point, our bag fell out of the ledge it had been so firmly jammed into), general rocking like a boat in a violent storm. We slept above an American couple who slept like corpses (corpses that snored gently). Interesting couple; I could only see the woman. She had wild, long grey hair and a warm, chubby face. I pictured her home as being covered in Native American artefacts, a farm in Colorado or New Mexico where she would chop her own wood and weave dream catchers using the traditional dried skin, rather than the commercialised string. She seemed the kind of woman who would live by the codes of spirits and the land. We chatted for some time to them both, but then we couldn’t put off trying to sleep any longer.
I must have slept. I must have, because at 6am, when we arrived in Lao Cai, I felt sprightly and not at all tired. That lasted for awhile. We were standing in the cold for ten minutes before I started to feel lethargic. And we had the added fun of trying to find our bus. Imagine about 50 buses lined up, with numbers written on them, one of which is supposedly yours. We wandered for about five minutes, asked someone, got handed over to person after person, then finally lumped in with a group of people who seemed as baffled by it all as we were. We got hustled onto a bus that wasn’t the same number as the one on our ticket, but we got to our destination and that was all that mattered.
Our first impression of Sapa was made of two things. The first is the gangs of Hill Tribe girls, in traditional dress, hawking hand-woven bracelets, blankets, shirts, hats, silver bangles and earrings. No postcards. The girls again speak incredible Engrish. What follows is an example of a typical conversation with a child of a tourist-saturated city:
“Hello! What your name?”
“Angela. What’s your name?”
“My name Lo. Where you from?”
“Australia.”
“Oh! Kangaroo! Koala bear! Which city? Melbourne or Sydney?”
“Perth.”
“Oh! Perth! What old are you?”
“I’m 21.”
“So young!”
“I’m young! How old are you?”
“8.”
“You’re just a baby!”
“No! I oldest of two brother and one sister! How many brother and sister?”
“1 brother, 1 sister.”
“Older or younger?”
“Older.”
“You youngest?”
“Yeah, I’m the youngest.”
“What you do?”
“I’m a writer.”
“Oh. Hey! You buy from me??”
So often the kids will talk to you for quite awhile before trying to sell you anything, and if they do, I’m much more inclined to buy. The worst, though, are the ones who can only say “you buy from me,” and they repeat it over and over and over and over in this mind-numbing droning voice, that rises at the end into a whine. “You buy from meeeeee, you buy from meeeeee.” It’s most uncompelling sales-wise.
So the second you get off the bus, small kids swamp you asking you about yourself. They wear black decorated with bright, woven patterns, and velvet stockings that are tied with woven string. Any exposed skin dirty, and their faces are smudged with filth. Their hair is usually unbrushed, and their hands are cracked and dry. We later found out that the girls wearing black belong to the Black H’Mong Tribe, and the women who wrap loose red cloth around their shaved heads are from the Red Zow tribe. These tribes live in harmony with one another, though, and they may marry across tribes without any problems.
The second major thing you realise about Sapa is how beautiful it is. The city is built right into the mountain, and the views are just spectacular. We got a room with a balcony that faced, unobscured, unto the mountains. There were large, leather chairs and the sun was warm. There wasn’t a cloud to be seen. After a brief nap, we sat on the balcony all afternoon (which is where I wrote most of my Halong Bay entry). The air was smooth and crisp, and the only sounds around were everyday life sounds, not city traffic and loud music. What an oasis!
We did go for a brief walk, down a cobbled pathway that was dotted with children and puppies. Rolly-polly puppies, nothing but fur and warm eyes. Another reminder that we’re out of the city: the animals are well-fed again! A woman sat in the sunshine, embroidering a piece of black cloth. She wore traditional gear, and didn’t look up when we passed the first time. But the second time, we had just passed her when something flew by. James said,
“Was that a bat??”
And indeed it was! In the middle of the day!! And it landed on the wall directly behind the woman’s head. We backtracked, to get a photo of the bat, and she smiled at us. One of her canines was a gold tooth. She saw the camera, and assumed we just wanted a photo. We pointed behind her. She turned, jumped, then giggled and continued with her embroidery. We took photos. We can’t resist bats. Or beautiful women with gold teeth.
We booked our trekking tour through the hotel, a two day, one night trek, with the one night to be spent in a home stay in a village. James was convinced we’d be the only ones on the tour. I told him again and again that there’d be a group of four or five in total. The next morning we headed downstairs to start our walk, and it turned out that James was right! We had a guide all to ourselves, a 20-year-old girl named Tung who was part of the Black H’Mung people. She was dressed traditionally (aside from a lime-green cap), and she was friendly and spoke well. She said she had learnt English from the tourists. This was proven when we reached a sign written in English, and I helped her read it aloud. She couldn’t read very well at all, but she could speak brilliantly.
The first leg of the trek was along the bitumen road, and we chatted with Tung about tribal culture, her life, and Vietnam in general. She told us she had been married once when she was 14, for two months, but it had ended in divorce, which is common but quite difficult to get. They don’t date before marriage, so often people find they don’t get along well once married. Now, she said, it was more common for the younger tribes people to be boyfriend and girlfriend before getting married. After her marriage, she had decided not to get married again, but now she was rethinking this decision. She had met a nice boy the night before, and stayed up late drinking and chatting to him. We talked a lot about boys and drinking. She was, in many ways, like any other 20-year-old. She mentioned going to the big lake in Hanoi, and watching the boys and girl canoodling, and how it made her giggle and feel shy. Later in the trek, a little girl asked James and I if we were “boyfriend/girlfriend?”. When we said “yes” she had giggled and said something excited to her friend. I think the girls are both embarrassed by the idea of being boyfriend and girlfriend, but also enchanted by it.
As we walked, we past some grotty kids selling bracelets and similar souvenirs. We said no, and a five-year-old girl said “Bullshit!” and spat in our general direction. Tung stopped and went back, and let rip in a stream of angry Vietnamese. She told us she had told them off for being rude to tourists, and had told them that if tourists didn’t want to buy something, they didn’t have to.
At our first stop, there were boys selling bamboo sticks. Only the girls sold clothing, bedding and jewellery. The boys either didn’t sell at all, or they sold bamboo sticks they had sharpened at the end to be used as hiking sticks. We heard people bartering over the sticks, and we bumped into Edith from Halong Bay. She was with a group of five others, all single travellers who were friendly, warm and not afraid to laugh. We ended up spending a lot of time with the group, and also ended up spending Christmas with some of them.
As we rested our feet from the 45 minutes walking we’d done, James said,
“I think that was the hardest part, just getting here.”
That strikes me as the funniest thing in hindsight. At the time, he was serious. We really had no idea.
After morning tea, we started our descent. This wasn’t a road. It was a path of hardened rock, scattered with so many stones, rocks, boulders, that you just couldn’t look up once. My eyes were constantly on my feet, and after half an hour of steep, steep descent, my knees started to ache. I felt like a 60-year-old woman! The downhill walk continued for another hour, ending at a tranquil river. Here we saw a family who had been on the Cu Chi Tunnels tour with us in Ho Chi Minh City. Small country!! And, of course, it being my duty in this world, I was the first person to slip of a slimy rock and soak my foot in lovely, murky paddy water. It wasn’t my fault. The rock moved. Not for anyone else, no, it was solid for the fifteen people ahead of me. But I accept that it’s my lot in life, to be the person who falls over on tours.
The sun was out in full force, and I put sunscreen everywhere, but still managed to get burned. I can only wear v-neck shirts for awhile. The scenery was breath-taking, though. The mountains were clear and lush with greenery, and the magical terracing of the paddy fields is a unique and beautiful sight. A lot of the farms were so beautifully constructed that it was like something out of French palatial gardens!
At our lunchbreak, girls milled around and chatted to us, trying to get us to buy. One girl looked like a troll doll, and whenever James and I saw her we started to giggle. I felt bad, but she really, really, really looked like a troll doll, and as soon as James pointed it out, I knew I couldn’t look at her again, but then I kept accidentally seeing her and starting to giggle again. This lunchbreak was also our first encounter with chickens, running around our feet. It’s hard to break to paranoia, and I kept having to tell myself that if the chickens were infected, all the villagers would have been dead long before us. By the end of the trek, we were fairly blasé about chickens. Not foolishly so, but realistically so. We spent a long time watching the antics of a mother chicken with two chicks outside our home stay. How could such cute, feathery, yummy creatures want to kill us??
After lunch, I was so bloated from yummy cheese and salad baguettes (we’d given out last baguette to a grimy girl in an oversized jumper, who had snatched it from us, hidden it behind her back, then scurried off to her family outside to share it with them), and we had our first major uphill trek. Tung laughed as I wheezed and gasped my way up the mountains. I was getting blisters, and my knees were still sore, but I struggled on. Hey, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not the trekking kind!! I tried not to whinge, and made general observations instead, such as, “I have blisters on my feet,” said only once and in a matter-of-fact way that avoided any association with being a complaint. It was just a fact that I felt needed to be stated.
We arrived at our home stay village at 2pm, so we’d only walked for about four hours in total. It was a pretty easy trek, challenging for me due to my general lack of fitness and hiking skills, but I still acknowledge that it wasn’t stressful or too strenuous. Just enough to make you feel like you’d actually done work.
Four girls played cards by the side of the path. James took a photo, and then they ran along beside us.
“You from Australia,” one said. “Your guide name Tung.”
“How did you know?” I asked.
“We talk to you at lunch!” the girl said with a giggle. They must have had a secret, direct route between lunch and the home stay village!! They girls walked with us and chatted the whole way, asking us about our lives and our families. Finally we got to the school, where a woman asked me if I wanted to buy a bracelet. I did. I’d been saying since I’d arrived that I wanted a bracelet, but I had chosen to wait until I got to one of the minority villages before buying it. I looked at this woman’s bracelets for some time, before the little girl who had walked with us down the hill said with a shy smile,
“I have bracelets too.”
But she didn’t immediately move to get them out for me, she only got them when I asked. I couldn’t resist her. She hadn’t done the hard sell, she had been genuinely friendly. Suddenly I was surrounded by six women shoving bracelets into my hand. I had to just ignore them, despite the sad voice of the first woman who said,
“But you were going to buy from me!”
I felt really bad, but I preferred to support the lack of hard sell than the woman’s shoving of bracelets in my face. I bartered the girl down from 25,000 to 15,000, but when I didn’t have change, I gave her 20,000 and took two hand-woven bracelets as well. The 15,000 bracelet is silver and thick, and I love the feel of it on my wrist.
The home stay was nothing like we expected. It was quite Westernised. It was a wooden barn-like structure with about twenty mattresses on the floor with individual mosquito netting. There was a large TV, a DVD player and a VCR. A fridge was in the corner, filled with cold soft drinks and beer. We were a little disappointed that it was so comfortable, but then it wasn’t so comfortable that we felt like we were totally missing an experience.
As soon as we arrived, there were women selling blankets waiting for us to come outside. We had both decided that we’d really like to get a hand-woven blanket as well. I expressed interest, but didn’t like any of the colours the women had. One woman, though, was much more insistent than the others. She hung in the doorway, showing me item after item. When I said “not blue” she asked me to choose colours, and she would make it for me and have it by the next day. And so the bartering began.
Bartering for our blanket is definitely one of the best experiences so far. I was standing in the doorway, and I said,
“All right…how much would it cost?”
“150,000,” she said. I laughed. The night before we had met a guy named Noel, an Irish engineer, who had said that you should always go a third of the asking price, then judge their reaction. So I tried it out.
“50,000,” I said. All the woman went, “ooooooh!” and the woman laughed. It was on.
“It a big blanket!” she said. “150,000!”
I stepped outside, and she opened a blanket to show me the size. It was blue, but folded out James and I saw it was really nice. So we decided to barter for the one I was holding.
“We’ll take this one for 50,000,” I said.
“130,” she said.
“70,” I said.
Everyone laughed and jeered the price, chattering in Vietnamese. I was grinning, and the woman’s eyes were sparkling. She was having as much fun as I was.
“Your turn,” she said. “I go, you go.”
“I just went!” I said.
“No! I went! You go!”
“Don’t be cheeky!” I teased. “You said 150, I said 50, you said 130, I said 70, it’s your turn!”
She grinned and said, “ooooh you!” and she jumped up and down on the spot. Then, with a squeal she said, “okay! 120!”
I grinned. “80!”
She gasped and laughed again. “110.”
“100.”
“110!”
“100!”
“110!!”
“100!!”
We continued for a few minutes, huge smiles on our faces, each with a hand on the blanket, her on 110, me on 100, and then finally she said,
“Okay, 100.”
And the blanket was ours! Yay!! I asked a couple of guides later if 100 had been a good price and they had choked and said,
“Yes! That’s excellent!!”
Apparently they usually go for 150-200, but the woman had started low and had taking a liking to me. She gave my arm a squeeze after and said,
“You’re a good girl!”
So, with our new possession in hand, James and went up to our mattress and napped for an hour or so, covered by our $8AUD hand-woven, hand-dyed blanket. And the best thing is, every time I look at it, I’m know I’m going to smile. Even now I’m grinning away at the memory.
After napping, we sat outside and watched the chickens and the ducks and the dogs and the cats. A group of five ducks kept waddling up to the food bin. Whoever reached first, ate, and the rest milled around. Then they would quack their way back the way they’d come. Then, five minutes later, back they’d come, waddling over to the food, where one would eat. Then they’d leave again. A rooster kept trying to impress a mother chicken who had two chicks in tow. I made up commentary for them (along the lines of “Henrietta! You’re looking…really good.” “Don’t you even think about trying anything on, Roger! You haven’t been paying any child support, and I heard about you and my best friend!” “I wasn’t going to try anything! I just wanted to see you and the kids,” etc.) It amused us for so long that Tung asked us if we wanted to eat with the family or by ourselves. We’d been outside watching the animals for a couple of hours!
We ate with the family, who were grandparents and a daughter in her late teens. She was unmarried, apparently focussing on her studies instead. The dinner was extensive, and most of it didn’t get eaten. There were a lot of dogs around outside, though, so I hope the leftover food went to them.

(continued 26th December, Baguette and Chocolat Café, Sapa, 10:05am. We’ve been gone exactly one month today!)
With our meal, we also had rice wine. Oh boy. Shots of rice wine, slammed down with a cry of “Yo!”. The wine was in water bottles, homebrew that the locals get direct from the maker. It has an interesting taste. It’s difficult not to wince, but in the aftertaste there is a definite reminder of soil and the warmness of steamed rice. We had about six shots each, but didn’t get very drunk, so it mustn’t have been very strong. That being said, we slept without stirring from 9pm to 9am. Opium, perhaps?? Actually, we keep getting offered opium here, more than anywhere else. One woman even produced a bag of black powder to James, to prove she had some. He said it just looked like black dirt.
After dinner, we sat chatting for awhile. There was one other person in our homestay, a Frenchman who was ¾ Japanese. His name was Julian (and it is up there as the sexiest name to be said in a French accent). Julian was the object of desire for most of the women in Edith’s group, as we discovered later. I don’t think Julian could follow our accent very easily, though, so conversation was stilted. His guide spoke English, French and Vietnamese, so his guide, our guide and the three of us sat around drinking rice wine and chatting for awhile. But then James and I decided to go join Edith’s group at their home stay for awhile.
Oh, I forgot. After we napped that afternoon, we went for a quick walk around the village. That was when we first saw where Edith was staying. When we saw them, we sat and chatted for awhile, then continued our walk. Which descended into tiptoeing across ledged between paddy-fields, hiking up muddy paths, and generally having no idea where we were. Finally we emerged near what looked like a road, and a girl was watching us.
“Hello!” she said. “You staying here?”
I said, “Uh, yeah. Somewhere.”
“Where?”
“We’re not actually sure!”
James and I looked around for a bit, and then decided to just walk forward. The little girl said,
“I walk with you.”
I looked up, and said,
“Oh! We’re here!”
Somehow, in our loopy, directionless trek, we’d managed to emerge metres from our home stay! What luck!! The girl said her name was La, and she walked us to our home stay, chatting the whole time. James and I sat outside, and then she started to sell. Very shy, she said,
“You want to buy a bracelet?”
We said no. And then she pulled out some pillowcases. We said no. Then she pulled out some bangles. We said no. Then she pulled out some headscarves. We laughed. She had a Mary Poppins bag! It looked tiny, but there was a ridiculous amount of things in there.
“Come on,” James said. “What else have you got?”
La gave us a shy smile and shook her head. She held out the woven bracelets again.
“Shame,” James said. That was all the encouragement I needed.
“All right,” I said, and I took the woven bracelets from her. We chose a pretty blue one, which cost us 2000 Dong (about 0.15 cents), and then La didn’t sell us anything more. She just said “thank you,” then she moved over to the door and watched the TV. Her mum came around about fifteen minutes later, and she was strange. She was friendly, but she kept talking in Vietnamese, like we would understand. She was smiling, but probably saying “aren’t you both silly fat Westerners.” When she spoke, we would just look blank and shrug a little with nervous smiles.
Anyway, so we got to bed around 9pm, and it wasn’t too cold. We stole blankets from unused beds, and ended up quite toasty. James woke around 2am, to go to the toilet, and apparently had trouble getting back to sleep. I remember him waking up and coming back, but that’s all. I slept the deepest sleep, and when we finally stirred sometime after 8am (which is really late for travelling. When you travel, you quickly find it difficult to sleep past 8/9. It’s strange), nobody at all was up, not even the Vietnamese people! Our tour guides were still out, as was Julian. I thought farmers always got up at the crack of dawn, but apparently not!
The bad thing was that overnight it had rained. Every inch of ground was wet. The mountains were obscured by fog, and not even the hawkers were braving the cold. We didn’t quite realise how much this would affect our trek. After a breakfast of pancakes with chocolate syrup and banana (or lime and sugar), and the stack was enormous, we headed out at 10:30. Edith’s group was just heading out as well, so we quickly tagged up with them. Well, at this stage I knew them, so I can stop calling them Edith’s group. There was also a Singaporean girl named Samantha, an English girl named Laura, an Aussie called Bernie, and two guys, one was Israeli whose named was pronounced Goulang, and the other guy was named Aidan, who I think was Israeli as well.
Because we were a smaller group, we overtook fairly quickly, but they were never far behind. At one stage, we saw Julian and his guide on the next peak over. They must have been running! The track was completely treacherous. The dirt had turned to mud, and the rocks were all slimy and slippery. Uphill was fine. When you walk uphill, all your balance is forward. But when we came to the first serious decline, I said,
“Just letting you know, I’m going to fall over.”
There was nowhere firm to put my feet, and sure enough, about ten seconds later, down I went. My water bottle went flying, and my arse came crashing to the ground. Tung ran after my water (which rolled spectacularly off the path and halfway down the mountain), as I blushed and scrambled to my feet. At the bottom, there was a particularly steep, slippery section, and this time James went arse over. Tung told us to turn around, and she examined our dirty bums, and said, “His pancake bigger than yours!” and she giggled.
We climbed up to a rest point, and watched the groups behind us doing the same journey. More than one slipped over in the same spot James had. All around us, hill tribe people scrambled up and down the mountains, sturdy as mountain goats. Kids in gripless sandals practically danced their way down insanely muddy paths. And these paths are steep. You have to lean back so far you’re almost parallel to the path, and so your centre of balance is so off that naturally you keep falling on the downhill.
I felt a bit better when a mumma pig and her three piglets scurried past as at one stage. We had just crossed a narrow bridge made up of a single plank which had been covered in mud, and the pigs were coming up behind us. The mumma and one of the piglets went down and under the bridge. The other two piglets decided to try to cross the narrow bridge. Now pigs are hilarious at the best of times. But there is nothing funnier than seeing a piglet scuttling across a plank, and knowing they aren’t going to make it. They’re so awkward and clumsy, and sure enough the piglets little trotters scrabbled along for half the bridge, and then the fell straight over, landing heavily in the mud. The oinked and grunted, and scrambled back up and ran after their mumma. Seeing those piglets has to be one of the funniest things we’ve seen (they weren’t hurt at all, the drop was very, very small).
There was a long section of relatively straight trekking, where the mud was almost ankle-deep, but easy to go around. This was through a bamboo forest. The three of us were completely alone at this point, and there was something so…magical about the experience. Not a sound, the drizzle of rain on our skin, the rich smell of mud, bamboo in every direction, towering over us. It felt like we were the only people in a timeless world. And yes, it really did feel like we might have been in the Vietnam war. As we sludged our way through the mountains, you do get an appreciation of what many soldiers went through. And these paths were already forged! I know it’s cliché, but when you’re trekking through bamboo in Vietnam, I think it’s impossible not to imagine what it might have been like 35 years earlier.
Tung told us our final stop was just after the bamboo forest. At the beginning of the walk, James’ boot had gotten covered in mud. It hadn’t taken long for us to have had pretty much gripless shoes. The mud was caked so thick onto the soles of our feet, that it was like being on ice skates. We’d probably have been better off barefoot. Even before I’d fallen over, James and I had decided we’d stop at the waterfall. The walk was meant to go waterfall, village, back to waterfall, then up to the road for a jeep drive back to Sapa. Tung said there was nothing at the village aside from two huts much like the ones we’d already seen, and the path was even worse. It didn’t take much convincing for us to say we’d just finish the trek at the waterfall, wait there till lunch, then head up to the road.
The end was in sight, and the walk had been great, but we were quite exhausted, wet and filthy, and very happy to stop. It had been fun, but we knew we were ending just at the right point, where the trek remained a fond memory, rather than a nightmarish, repressed experience. At least, that was until we saw the last hill. A decline. Of nothing but pure, slippery mud.
We went off the path quickly, walking through scrub which was, naturally, less slippery. But we couldn’t avoid the path the whole way, and the second we made contact with the mud I was gone. And this was a spectacular slide, a good metre or so, with everyone going “oooh!” as I bumped my way downhill. It was so steep, that you knew if you went, you were gone for a distance. But it was so slippery I couldn’t get up again. I may as well have not even been wearing shoes at this point, I may as well have had ice-skates on. Tung helped me to my feet (it took some time for me to find somewhere where I could rely my weight without slipping straight back over). I walked a few more metres, and then whoosh! down I went again. By this time I was just in pain, and so dirty, and the end was so near!! It was still fun, don’t get me wrong, but there is a point where you get quite frustrated over not being able to do something as simple as walking. We were about ten metres from the end, but I just couldn’t move. Every step I made, I knew I’d fall over again. So Tung took my hand firmly in hers, and carefully guided me down to the bottom. With her help, I made it safely. James didn’t fall over once, he just winced as he watched me continuously going arse over.
At the waterfall (which was just rocks, because, believe it or not, there hadn’t been enough rain to get it going), we scrubbed the mud as best we could from our shoes, then hibernated by the fire. About half an hour later, we heard the other group coming and ran outside to watch them coming down. The first thing we saw was Bernie, sat on her bum, laughing her head off as her guide tried to help her back up. Samantha didn’t have pants on; she had mud-cloth. Laura was heading down very, very carefully. Edith, Aidan and Goulang made it relatively effortlessly. We clapped every person as they made it to the bottom. Bernie fell over a few more times before reaching the end, but Samantha and Laura made it fairly easily.
The walk was fantastic, and we had a hell of a lot of fun. It was very challenging and intense in parts, but overall it was great and such an adventure. We’re just glad we stopped at the waterfall. It was just the right distance.
I was still full from breakfast, so lunch was a struggle to eat, but I didn’t want to be rude. There were Red Zow women trying to sell to us, and at some points it was so intense that we had to go inside to escape. The kids have a habit of saying “yes thank you” whenever you say “no thank you,” which is cute, but the novelty quickly wears off.
the mud and the rain.
The trek up to the jeep was intense, but we had the joy of knowing the end was very, very near. For some reason Tung hang at the back, and I led the way, which suited me fine. I find I have a weird, different energy when I’m the first in a group. If I’m last, I lag, if I’m first, I have renewed energy and enjoy leading the group. The jeep was an old Russian thing was Russian dials. As we got higher in the mountains, the fog got thicker and thicker, until we could barely see more than a metre ahead. Scooters and pedestrians would appear out of nowhere, and it was quite scary, but exciting as well. I’ve never been in fog like that before!
Oh, and I think I forgot to mention that Tung had a mobile, which was funny to see a girl in traditional dress, chatting on a bright red, brand new Samsung mobile. It was better than the mobiles of most people I know! But we still gave her a generous tip, because she had been very helpful, and had helped me down the mountain, and hadn’t fallen over once herself.
We spent the rest of Christmas Eve afternoon napping and reading. In the evening, we had a few drinks in our room, then headed out to meet everyone from the trek. It was a pretty uneventful evening, aside from my getting ridiculously drunk. Not entirely my fault. The manager of the place we ate dinner kept giving us free wine, and that mixed with my whisky just did me over. Apparently it wasn’t obvious, but I knew I was totally gone. By 10, the room was spinning. We were chatting to a girl who was an IT recruiter in London (and yes, we got her email for when we arrive, for James), and I said to James,
“Oh I really have to go to bed.”
So we left, and I feel pretty much straight asleep. I think it’s the drunkest I’ve been since Nha Trang. Which wasn’t really that long ago. So it’s not that impressive. But I didn’t drink at all on Christmas. I’m done for awhile! Especially when I was absolutely dying of thirst from about 2am on, and there wasn’t a drop of drinkable water in our room. I kept waking up, so thirsty, and first thing in the morning I headed downstairs to buy some. I opened it right at the counter, and skulled half the bottle. Best thing I’ve ever drunk!
The next morning was Christmas! Yay! We had a present to open, from James’ mum, which was special. It was so nice having something to open! We headed downstairs early, to make phone calls home. The chaos at home actually made me feel a little relieved to be somewhere so quiet, peaceful and unChristmassy (no offence family!!). But it didn’t feel like Christmas at all. I had to keep telling myself it was, and even then I didn’t quite believe myself. I did really miss my family, and roasts and stupidly huge amounts of food.
We met up with Laura and Samantha at 1, and we all went to a restaurant and ordered a buffet of food. It was some of the best food I’ve had in Vietnam, which is exciting! The lady said they’d run out of rice, though, which was…interesting.
Everywhere in Sapa was fog. My first cold Christmas!! We were in beanies, jackets, huddled up as we made our way to Baguette and Chocolate, where we wiled away the afternoon eating cakes and playing Scrabble.
In the evening, we got a girl in to light the fire in our room. We’d spent all morning trying to light it, but having no kindling made it impossible. She found some kindling for us, and we spent the rest of the evening in front of a roaring fire, typing, reading, chatting. Actually, we also went to an internet café and downloaded DOS games that will work on this ancient laptop, and so we played Hugo 3 for an hour or so, trying to solve the puzzles together. That was a lot of fun!! I love Hugo. But we’re stuck at the moment, we can’t get past the evil spirit in the cave. Once we’ve finished it, we’re going to get more games. We’ve already got Doom and Wolfenstein, but they’re for James, because I’m not a fan of shoot-em-ups. I’m really bad at them. It’s probably lame, but when you have a hotel room without any English TV, and it’s too dark, cold or there’s no nightlife somewhere, it’s a great way to pass the time.
Anyway, I think that’s it. Another marathon entry! Our hotel had the stupid check-out time of 9am (most hotels are 12pm), so we’re spending the whole day in Baguette and Chocolat. I’m drinking mint tea, and we’re about to order some lunch. Our train back to Hanoi doesn’t leave until 8:50, and our bus leaves Sapa at 6:30. Apparently we have the best train in Vietnam. We’ll see!
Oh, and I forgot to say that there was a kitten at our home-stay, which was tiny and scrawny, but very cute, and they had made a bridge out of cardboard that went over the fire (not over the flames, just over the grill), and the kitten was sleeping there, right by the warmth. Very cute!! And I just heard an English girl between 8 and 10 years old tell her mum that the barmaid spoke “very good English, probably the goodest I’ve seen!”. The mum didn’t correct her.
Merry Christmas to everyone, and thank you for keeping in contact with me. It’s great to know people are reading my blogs, and know that we’re both thinking of you all. I hope you had a wonderful day yesterday, and you have a super New Year!!

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