Three Adventurous Souls Alone in the Jungle

While waiting for the bus to Sapa, I met a guy from New Mexico named Sam. For the rest of this post, I'll call female Sam, Samantha, and male Sam, Sam. An old lady started rummaging through Sam's bag ostensibly trying to find empty aluminum cans that she could redeem at the recycling center. I had seen a similar situation in Halong where a local lady poured out half a girl's beer to get the can for recycling. I stepped in front of her to block her from looking through my bag and she started tapping me in the crotch with the back of her hand before I pushed her away. The old ladies of southeast Asia are quite an odd bunch. Back in Hoi An, while I was walking down the street an old lady came up behind me and tried to shove her cane up my ass. And on overnight bus rides, some lady always seems to play music on her mobile phone in the middle of the night.

Sapa's dramatic views and proximity to small hill tribes mean that it's all about trekking. Everyone arrives and books a tour that includes a guide and homestays in the towns they will walk to. We don't like tours, so we bought a map in town and strode off on our own. Little did we know that our map was not only vague, but in some cases demonstrably wrong. Paths forked and forked again, but showed as only a single route on the map. We hit dead ends, backtracked, and chased river crossing that didn't actually exist. At one point, we reached a small clearing where no fewer than seven paths branched off and we had highly conflicting evidence about which one to choose. Some of these paths forked just a few steps from the clearing, multiplying the already dizzying array of choices. None of the trails during our entire adventure had a single sign or blaze. After two hours, we were less than a kilometer from the road we had started from and began to think that going it on our own was quite foolish, but we finally found our way on a random trail certainly not visible on the map. At the top of one of the passes, we reached a lone house with three young boys who must not see outsiders very often because they yelled and ran from us at first. As we stood at the top of the ridge and pondered our options, the boys eventually came over and pointed which direction to go.

On the descent from that ridge, we started following a boy in flip flops carrying a log over his shoulder, but we couldn't keep up. He walked down the steep dirt paths as if they were flat, leaving us behind to creep, slip, slide, and fall. After more mountain pases, we found an unmarked village and finally a path to a road leading to our destination, at which point we felt confident enough to break for a late lunch consisting of canned mystery fish sandwiches. We had bought lunch food at the store the night before and one of the few items that wasn't exorbitantly priced was some canned fish with a strange picture on it and Lao writing all over it. It tasted a bit odd, but Sam and I decided it was edible. Samantha wholeheartedly disagreed.

We had to walk the last few kilometers on the road rather than trail, but it was still a successful day since we reached our village just before sunset. We didn't have any problem finding a local family to stay with for the night and the large hut even had electricity and a television. Before dinner, the family watched a hilarious Chinese show involving a peasant with a rake in the desert fighting a sea monster. During and following dinner, the men of the family all had a staggering 15 shots each of "Happy Water" (rice liquor).

The next two days we hiked to other towns with similarly challenging navigation, but it was just me and Sam. Samantha had had enough and we left her back at Sapa when our route took us nearby there on the second day. Sam and I trudged through rice paddies, gardens, and straight up mountains and managed to reach our planned destination each time, although we had to hike nearly from sunrise to sunset to accomplish it, and we were rarely on the trail we intended.

After three days, we took a white-knuckled ride on the backs of motorcycles to return to Sapa and were thoroughly worn out. Sam headed back to Hanoi to catch a bus to Halong Bay and Samantha and I headed towards Laos. Even as incredible as Halong Bay was, I have to say that Sapa was my favorite spot in Vietnam.