New territory

02/01/2024

Get out of bed, pack your things, check out and take the grave to the old town. We headed for the café from yesterday morning, because after all, what's good can be repeated. This time we ordered the cappuccino again, plus an overnight bowl and avocado toast with scrambled tofu. Delicious! Strengthened, we went to the departure point of our booked bus. We still had so much time and had to wait until we realized at some point that we weren't equipped with water, let alone snacks. We got water from a nice woman on the street, and we had to hope for snacks during the journey.

We didn't start at 12:15 p.m. but were collected at 1 p.m. We were expecting a van for 9 people, but a bus pulled up. Okay, so no problems with our large luggage. The bus staff rushed us a bit - although we couldn't help it for the delay. Well, we got on, what awaited us was a bus with reclining cabins. That was unexpected. At first we were overwhelmed by which of the cabins were ours. But one of the drivers looked at our tickets and took us to our seats. He almost threw his hands over his head when he saw that we were still wearing our dirty shoes from outside and that we had even dragged in dirty water from the sidewalk. The young man brought us bags for our shoes and spent the next 5 minutes cleaning up our tracks. We scrambled into our cabins, and everyone else on the bus was probably already extremely annoyed with us at that moment, because we could hardly control our laughter for the next 15 minutes. What have we booked here again?! We stretched ourselves out, well, as long as we could because we were simply too big for the lying areas. After we got settled, we spent the trip reading and relaxing a bit. Fortunately, this time there was the option of using the toilet on the bus, which we gratefully took advantage of. Not so easy when a woman doesn't want to sit down completely but the ride is really wobbly. A short time later we stopped at a rest stop. The staff only spoke in Vietnamese, so we had no idea when to move on. We decided to look outside for snacks. To do this, we took our shoes out of the bags, went to the front and saw a box of slippers standing in front of the bus door. Feeling unpleasant, we took our shoes away again, followed the others and slipped on the slippers that were too small. We bought some chocolate cookies and gold coins (a snack that resembles a waffle, but is shaped like a gold coin and is filled with cheese). We thought it was absolutely delicious! Nina bought another one and had eaten half of it before we realized we had to get back in. Loaded with chocolate cookies in one hand and half a gold coin in the other, we were intercepted at the front of the bus and had to leave the food there. Great. We were so happy. In the further 3 hours of driving we were treated to beautiful views of green mountain landscapes. From kilometer to kilometer the visibility became clearer and the sun appeared more and more. After the sun had set, the journey led through a very, very winding area and Ronja was really afraid of rolling out of her bunk.

When we arrived in Sapa, we were of course spoken to directly by taxi drivers. However, they demanded a price that was far too high! We walked the 900 meters, a little exercise was good for us, even though we were under tension again because our bladders were so full.

Taxi driver: “80,000” - we: “NO!! Too much!! 10” - Taxi laughs: “50” - we “20!” - Taxi “No” - we: “ok then we will go”

Our new room in the hostel is absolutely acceptable and for the price of €56 for 3 nights including breakfast you can't really say anything! Driven by hunger, we started looking for a restaurant again and first looked on the Internet. We took the best rated restaurant, a 13 minute walk away. When we got there it was yawning empty. But we got the menu and ordered 2 very tasty lemon iced teas. The food we received was not what we ordered. And we would never give it 5 stars. We saw in the menu that you get a free drink for a 5-star rating that you give online. Oh man, it's really a shame. What was funny, however, was that we had to eat our spaghetti-shaped rice noodles with chopsticks. This is still new territory for us. We were the biggest monkeys (although they would probably have done even better). Since there was no one in the restaurant, we didn't feel uncomfortable. You couldn't eat without lip smacking. And not without completely pissing yourself off. You could hear every sound we made, there was no music and you couldn't hear anyone else. We dutifully ate, sipped our drinks and then bought ourselves chocolate for the evening.

We really laughed so much today! We're really excited about this beautiful area and looking forward to exploring it while hiking tomorrow!

Until tomorrow

Ronja & Nina