Sapa, Vietnam

Much of my Southeast Asian adventure to date has been impromptu. Outside of my flights to and from New York and one pre-planned cycling tour with friends from New York, I had no other flights booked.  No trains, no buses and no commitments; literally an open-ended itinerary.  I did this because I wanted some flexibility in my travel and to be able to follow wherever my sense of wanderlust took me. It was liberating and exhilarating. I felt like I had the whole world laid bare before me like a cultural smorgasbord, each country and city ripe for the picking.

Feel like watching a play and having high quality food? I'll head to a major city. Feel like seeing some temples and learning about ancient culture? Just a short flight away.  Need to get to the beach for some R&R? Easy breezy by looking at a bus schedule.

While it's a little bit taxing to spend time arranging travel on the fly, the incredible amount of flexibility it brings has proven to be absolutely worth it. No matter how rave the reviews are in a guidebook, there's just no telling how a place will move you once you're there. This part of the world isn't easy to get to for Americans and it might be a while before I have the opportunity to come back, so being able to stay in a place you really love is worth the trade off of a little bit of uncertainty.

I would have been terribly sad if I would have had to leave Hoi An after the two days I planned to be there, but because I had no commitment to be anywhere else, I had the luxury of staying longer in an awesome place that turned out to be my favorite place I've traveled in Asia. And in another happy coincidence, the cosmos rewarded my open-mindedness with a recommendation from a fellow traveler while on a dive boat in Hoi An.

I mentioned that I was considering going to Sapa, a mountain town west of Hanoi, reachable only by overnight train.  Sapa is home to Hmong (pronounced 'mung') people, who are of Chinese descent, but have populated Vietnam's hill villages and who built and have farmed rice terraces in the countryside for generations. A fellow traveler that I met on a dive boat recounted the amazing experience he had staying at a homestay with some Hmong villagers.  He gave me the contact info for a woman named Pham and said, "Don't shop around, just call her."  So I did.

I phoned Pham at her home in Sapa. There wasn't a lot of discussion about what we would be doing, just that she would arrange transportation for me from the train station to where I would meet her, we would do some hiking and her husband would take me on a motorcycle ride.  "Where should I stay?" I asked her.  "At my house, of course," she replied.  Ok then.

I'd experienced an overnight train one other time when my sister and I took one from Madrid to Barcelona back when she was studying abroad in college.  We were young and poor and the train was dirty and noisy. We were so afraid that our bags would be stolen and our faces would be eaten by rats that we barely slept a wink that night. Our slumber wasn't helped by a fat, drunk man who stumbled into our car in the middle of the night to sleep in the bottom bunk and snored louder than the train engine. I remember waking him up numerous times to tell him to stop snoring!

Overnight train to Sapa.  *Disclaimer.  Not my picture. 

So I wasn't too excited about the idea of rehashing that experience with another overnight train, especially by myself. I pulled an extremely New Yorker move and tried to find any other possible mode of transportation to get there including a helicopter, but it appears that Sapa, for better or worse, has stuck to its reputation as a remote hill town far removed from amenities and creature comforts and overnight train or bus is pretty much the only way in. I couldn't believe my luck when I arrived to my train berth to find a totally normal (and pretty cool) American gal from LA who would be sharing my room for the night. There were two other beds in our berth that were unoccupied, so we chatted for a bit about our travels and tucked in to a rickety and noisy 8 hour train ride from Hanoi to Sapa.

I certainly can't say that it was a peaceful night's sleep, but I awoke to a driver waiting to take me to the mountains and in just 30 minutes I had met Pham, my mountain guide and homestay mama.  There were two other girls from New Zealand, Nina and Tessa, staying with Pham and her family as well.  We started out on a 3 hour hike up through the rice paddies that would turn out to be one of the coolest hikes I've ever done.

Me and my guide, Pham, as we take off through the rice terraces.

As we walked through fields and climbed up the terraced landscape, Pham described how the terraces are made and that every terrace has to be maintained every year.  First, you need a source of water, and in this part of the country it comes from mountain springs.  The terraces are shallow pools just deep enough to collect about six inches of water with a small retaining wall made of mud that keeps just enough water in each terrace. At some part of the wall, there is a break that allows water to flow freely to the next terrace like a giant infinity pool cascading water down the mountain terrace by terrace and giving life to the vast fields of rice. Each spring, the fields need to be plowed, typically by water buffalo, but depending on the terrain and the amount of land, some are plowed by hand. The terraces are then planted with rice seed and after the growing season has come and gone and harvest time is near, the rice terraces transform the fertile mountains into the most amazing, verdant green terraced panorama you've ever seen.  I was there just as planting had begun, but the pictures we saw near harvest time were just breathtaking.

In Sapa, most of the rice farms are subsistence farms, with the rice from one harvest is used to feed the family for the entirety of the next year.  Families typically don't plant more than they'll consume, so this makes rice an incredibly important crop and families with different harvest schedules will often help each other when harvest time comes. 

After hiking for most of the day, we arrived at Pham's house, a small two-story wood house a few kilometers from a very tiny village that would make the small town near where I grew up, Gaston, Indiana, look like New York City.  Gaston had one stoplight and a pizza place and you'd certainly miss it if you blinked.  Pham's dwelling was a palace compared to most homes in the area because she and her husband had been able to save up enough to build on the second story to accommodate space for their homestay. The floor of the main level was packed dirt and stone and surprisingly did feature a few amenities like running water, a shower, and an actual toilet.  Trust me, you don't know how luxurious a proper Western toilet feels until you've teetered above a squat toilet in the jungle with a 50 lb pack on your back just praying for enough stability to keep your shoes dry.  Needless to say, there was no wifi.

Then it was time to start preparing dinner.  Pham and her sweet husband Phuong cooked the ingredients for fried spring rolls, showed us how to assemble them, and then we were responsible for making them. I should mention that the kitchen was unique, to say the least. While the family did have electricity, the main heat source was an open flame over which a number of pots contained the various things cooking for dinner.  It made the house a bit smoky, and me a bit dizzy, so I spent some time with the kids outside dancing and singing the lyrics to songs from Frozen.  No kidding. In the middle of a rice paddy on the side of a mountain hundreds of miles from a major city in Vietnam, where the kids don't really speak English, the long-armed tentacles of Disney have infiltrated.

The "kitchen" - an open flame in the middle of the living room.

Me, Pham, and two awesome Kiwis, Nina and Tessa trekking through the rice fields.

So these two teenage nieces walk in, see me and the two Kiwis.  And stop dead in their tracks.  They looked like they'd seen a ghost. And I guess, to them, they had.  Pham told us that this may have been one of the first time they'd ever seen blonde-haired, blue-eyed white people. A sense of fascination spread across their faces the same way I might look if I saw Bigfoot riding a unicorn: sheer wonder, curiosity, and the sense that this is all probably a dream and my eyes must be playing tricks on me. After some initial hesitation, they ran over, grabbed my arm, and kept touching and stroking my skin. If it was anyone but teenage girls, it would have been a bit creepy, but it was kind of funny to see someone so enamored with the pale skin I've been trying to darken up over the last few months in Asia. Eventually they got up enough courage to ask if they could touch my blonde hair, and when I said yes, they were giddy with joy.  For the next hour, they brushed it, braided it, ran their hands through it, and were so excited the whole time they kept giggling and elbowing each other like kids in a candy store. The whole thing was a little surreal.  I felt like a minor celebrity for having a trait that most of us back home spend hours of time and the risk of melanoma to change our pasty white skin into something that won't blind other people from the glare.

Pham teaching us how to make spring rolls

Dinner was absolutely delicious and made even more special having been prepared by strangers who had invited us into their home and made everything from scratch. I was truly grateful to have come here and to have been so graciously welcomed by this family. The evening got a little more interesting when Phuong brought out a homemade beverage very popular in the area.  Or should I say poppy-lar. Every culture has its own version of homemade hooch; back home in the Midwest it was moonshine made from corn and rye or whatever grains we could make a mash from, in other parts of the world, spirits are made from potatoes.  In Vietnam, rice wine is the booze of choice, and in this part of the country where poppies grow in abundance, "opium wine" is a common after-dinner digestif.  It's not clear whether or not there is any actual opium in the wine, but Pham and Phuong poured so many shots of it that I'm pretty sure I'd be in real trouble if by some miracle I won a triathlon and had to take a drug test.  Thank goodness there's no real chance of that happening!

If there was one positive thing that came after multiple shots of opium wine, it was that it made the spartan sleeping situation a little easier. My bed was a thin mattress on the floor surrounded by a mosquito net with holes large enough to let in a small bird.  I could see the stars through the spaces in the wood plank roof and hear all the nocturnal jungle animals peeping and hooting.  Eventually, I drifted off to sleep.

A feast, prepared by Pham and Phuong

Red and white opium wine.

The next morning, I awoke to another delicious breakfast of banana crepes prepared by Phuong, which would sustain us for the adventure Phuong was about to take us on.  Just like the rest of Vietnam, the main mode of transportation in Sapa was the motorbike.  I hopped on the back of Phuong's bike and he had rented another bike for the two Kiwi girls. Phuong turned out to be an expert driver, navigating the steep, windy roads with no problem.  He was pretty confident even when sliding around sharp curves with loose gravel and steep cliffs! I wasn't really sure what the proper protocol is for holding on to the motorbike so I started out with my hands behind me, holding onto the metal bars under my own seat.  Seemed like the most polite way to ride with a stranger and Phuong didn't object, so I rode that way for an hour or so. This worked for a while until my arms got tired, so I changed my position to cling casually onto Phuong's hips. This felt a little more secure and he didn't look at me like I was totally molesting him, so I stayed this way until things got REALLY hairy. It should go without saying, but there are no such thing as guardrails up in these mountains. It only took about one hairpin turn before I was full on grabbing Phuong in a complete bear hug.  I think he knew how scared I was because he busted up laughing.  Think it was a coincidence that there were many, many more hairpin turns in our future?!?! 

On the back of a motorcycle in Sapa.

We stopped a number of times at various viewpoints to take in the majesty and vastness of the rice terraces climbing through the valleys and up the mountains and the pictures I have here really don't do justice to the just seemingly never-ending terraced landscape. And just like that, our time in Sapa was over and the overnight train awaited us to return us back to Hanoi, and civilization.

My time in Sapa was wonderful thanks to the generous and hospitable spirit of Pham and Phuong and their families.  It was an experience I will never forget.  Moral of the story: if you get the chance to experience life through the life (and home) of a local, don't pass it up!

Eyes on the road!  Riding with Phuong through the rice fields.

Kids playing unsupervised literally on the side of a cliff.