Day 33 to 35 Tuesday, 2 February 2016 Sapa

Xin Chao - Good day

Green rice terraces, beautiful mountain landscape, and mild climate, that's how it looks here, just not right now, only in 4 months when everything blooms. It must be dreamlike, yes, fairy-tale beautiful when winter is over up here, and we are lucky at least on the day of arrival here in Sapa in the north of Vietnam.

It is 6 o'clock when we get off the bus and oh I expected it to be colder, now it's 6 degrees and therefore pleasant. The day should and actually positively surprise us, as we were welcomed with dreamlike sunshine, and that is perfect because that's the only way you can see where you actually are. Madness, this mountain landscape, and even in sight, the summit is free of fog (a rare occurrence even in good weather), the Fan Si Pan with 3143 m, the highest mountain in all of Indochina. So we spent the first day in shorts and t-shirt on our hotel terrace with a perfect panoramic view.

Day two and the good weather is over, so everything that warms out of the backpack, goodbye sun, today 12 degrees and fog, sometimes visibility less than 40 m, so good thing we had a good look yesterday, otherwise, we wouldn't know where we are landscape-wise.

Today it was time for hiking, we decided to take the untouched tour without a guide on our own. And we also walked past the ticket counter for a tourist village and then walked on a different path to another H'mong village (that's what the minority groups of the surrounding villages are called here, furthermore, there are Red Dao, Kinh, and Thai) of course, there is also a ticket counter there.

Day three, the weather, or rather the fog, seems to be even thicker, we walked to the Cat Cat village 3 km below Sapa, today we paid the entrance fee, which was not so bad after all, so we could see directly how they lived in their houses. Below the village, the fog cleared and I came across a small but beautiful waterfall. On the ascent to Sapa, the fog caught up with us again.

In the late afternoon, the pick-up came to transport us to Lao Cai, a seemingly rapidly growing small town on the border with China, where we changed to our night bus headed to Halong Bay.

Tam Biet - Goodbye, Hen gap lai - See you soon