Living and teaching in P.R. China: Sa Pa

Crossing the border from China we entered the city of Lao Cai. There were a number of things that we noticed right off. The first was that the men were wearing hats; men's hats are very unpopular in China. We also noticed the lack of private cars. There were some but not nearly as many as we had become accustomed to in China. There seemed to be a lot greater adherence to traffic signals than there was in China. And it was raining…

The driver from the hostel, the "cat-cat," met us at the border station in Lao Cai and we loaded into the van. Then he went all over town trying to insure that his van was full before continuing to Sa Pa. This waiting in the van at various locations in town for over an hour and a half wore very thin.

We finally had a full van and continued over the pass to Sa Pa. The Hotel had very nice views and Debra and I shared a nice room; however, the hotel is located on the side of a mountain so the stairs are killers.

The room

Killer stairs, great view

That first day I took a nap while Debra went for a walk and after we returned we went for a dinner in town. I have to say that the first dinner in Viet Nam was very disappointing. Neither of us liked it and it seemed to be very overpriced. We later determined that most of the restaurants in Sa Pa were over priced.

The park and the church (church under repair)

Being as we did not like the food at the first place we wound up having a second dinner at the Hotel. We had then planned to watch a movie but Debra fell asleep as soon as we returned to the room so I watched the DVD that she had purchased in Kunming (Stargate) by myself, then I also went to sleep.

The next morning we were both much more ready to be active so we went and rented a motorcycle. The first place we went… well, the first place we went was to get petrol; and in a town with one station and an inability to say, "petrol," in the local language turned into its own adventure.

From there we started out of town and quickly decided that we were going the wrong way, it was the same way we had come to town and we had already seen it. We then took to another road; I noticed tour buses and decided that we must be the route to something interesting, so we continued on that road.

The road quickly turned to mud, and rather deep mud at that. We stayed with the road and were rewarded by a large waterfall; the place the tour buses were going, the name was similar to, "Silver Falls."

We left there and, seeing as we were going at our own pace; not that of a tour group, stopped at some viewpoints and smaller water falls on the way back to town. We returned to town early enough that there was still time to do more before meeting with our bus back to Lao Cai.

We had lunch at a place that we liked a lot more than the place we had eaten previously. It was funny, the owner apologized to us for the fact that they were not fully prepared for tourists, in fact it was much better than the places that were.

We then took a road into the valley in order to see some of the villages. One thing that Debra commented on was the water runoff plan for the road, there were no culverts, the plan was for the water to run over the road.

We stopped in a small town in order to top off the tank on the motorbike and the gas pump was an old gravity pump. It had a large glass tank on top of the dispenser (I hesitate to even call it a pump) which was then filled and then a graduated amount was drained from that with a hose and billing was based on lines drawn on the side of the glass tank. The whole affair looked like something from a picture in the thirties.

At that point we, again, turned off of the paved road and continued toward the village. This road made what we had bogged through in the morning look good by comparison. We reached one road stop, consisting of a café and bar, where other westerners had decided to go no further; however, throwing discretion, and good sense, to the wind, we forged on.

The road got considerably worse; it was here that Debra got a sunburn that plagued her for the rest of the visit to Viet Nam. At the end we were rewarded by a visit to a small, pleasant village whose first observed signs of live were a pair of small pigs playing in the road, followed shortly by a young boy riding on the back of a water buffalo.