Bravado, breakfast and brilliance

We wake on the train a little after 5am today. It would be nice just to stay curled up there and chill out but we have another brilliant day to get stuck into so we get up and dressed. By the time I try to use the facilities on the train which I wish I'd used before I went to sleep the floor is...well...as Kyle put it so perfectly you need to swim to the toilet. The stentch is too much for me so I cross my legs and hobble back to our cabin - a choice I will soon regret!

We get to the station at Lao Cai, don our packs and head off for the bus. Full bladders and rucksacks are not a good combination and now I am busting! Kyle organises for him, me and one more to go to use the station facilities which I am assured are better than the train (in part because you pay to use them). WRONG! They are pit toilets - that is ok but they are flushing ones and the first toilet is blocked and overflowing. Swimming here is cleaner than on the train but it's also deeper and just wrong. I tip toe through to the cubical with a door (only one of 3 do) and after leaving the paper at the door (der!) I have to wipe bidee style....interesting! Kyle tells me I was very brave.

We jump on the bus and I sleep most of the way to Sapa. We get dropped off at the most stunning hotel and we're all awe struck. Unfortunately we were dropped in the wrong place, but our hotel is the next nicest one in town. It's about 7am and we are welcomed to the buffet breakfast and our tables are on the balcony looking out over a wide valley from a high point. The view is spectacular but it's hard not to be a little distracted by the food. This part of Vietnam has a French influence and our hotel has combined the french influence with vietnamese food for breakfast. Jumping on a change of cuisine quickly, I have a toasted ham cheese and tomato sandwich along with bacon and sausage and noodles. I follow my first course up with a crepe with banana folded inside....Super Yum!

We have until 9am to get changed in the hotel bathrooms (our rooms aren't available until 2pm). A few of us head out to find proper coffee and have a poke around town. Once we're all gathered again, we jump back on the bus and stop up the road a bit to pick up our pack lunches. Setting off again we're dropped a little way out of town where we set off on a day hike. Sadly Kyle's achillies has got really painful so he missed today in favour of seeing the doctor. We have a really good time with Tom on our hike/walk. The terraces of the rice paddies are bare having just been farmed but they are soooo tall making their way up the mountains. Tom tells us that they can take a life time to terrace one section of a hill/mountain.

We see little waterfalls, farmers on the other side of the river with their buffalos feeding on the terraces and hidden in the bushes alongside the road we're walking on is an Albino Buffalo - it's so cute in a Buffalo kind of way. We wind up the track a bit further and see some of the local women of the hill tribes. We're told that their head dress becomes larger with their increasing generation - unmarried girls have none, married women have a head dress and remove their eyebrows and hair line to the edge of the head dress using wax to stop it regrowing. Mothers have a bigger head dress and grandmothers even larger again and so on.

As we reach a small village we're in for a treat. It has one of the local schools and all the nearby tribes people are there as well as the children in their classes. One class is outside doing stretches/PE and they are so cute. The men are gathered at the building next to the school chatting and smoking a large pipe (not too unlike the super huge bong we saw at the Luang Praban airport). It's the first time we've seen a group of men anywhere yet and this group is about 40 strong so it felt quite strange. Tom takes us to another part of the village where we are allowed to go into one of the houses. It's hard to describe the set up but there are large open plan rooms downstairs where one part is the laundry/wash room, over a bit is the kitchen and dining room, another section is a bedroom with a couple of double bed sized racks separated from the kitchen/dining room by the access to the upper floor. The upper floor is the store for the corn and rice and other food - almost like a pantry in the roof space. At the back of the kitchen/dining room is a door to access what they call dormitories - 3 sectioned off areas in a corridor each with a double rack. It was a privilege to see inside their home and an image I won't forget (no where near as bad as I thought).

We left their home and continued on a way, eventually walking down one of the terraces to the river where we settle on the rocks for lunch. Tom and my team mate Greg entertain us with their leap frogging over the boulders in and around the river. Once they are on the other bank and making their way along, they look like they are disagreeing on which way to go and then it's on - they race back to us on their alternate routes and jumping wildly over the upper section of the river from boulder to boulder. Greg wins the race and we're all relieved they didn't fall in.

We head back up the valley, cross the river again and climb up a little hill to the road where the bus collects us again. We get back to Sapa and can get into our rooms now. I settle in for a sleep for a couple of hours before showering and going shopping. It was a brilliant afternoon of easy trekking, lovely sights and a nice rest.

What I hadn't shared before now was before we left our hotel in Laos, we were informed we wouldn't be hiking up Mt Fansipan. This comes as a mix of relief and disappointment. We're the pilot for this adventure and a few of the treks to date have been under-rated (i.e. they were harder than advertised/rated by the local guides) so by now with only 1 24hr rest period we're pretty exhausted. Having said that, the acomplishment that would have come with completing such a hard trek would've been awesome. The decision was made because there had been torrential rain for a few weeks and parts of the track had been washed out. The area was foggy so there would be no view at the top and although we were fitter than at the start of the trip, many of us would have really struggled. A man was medivac'd off the mountain by helicopter the night we boarded the train to Lao Cai which reinforced the decision not to undertake the mountain for the safety.

One of the upsides though was that we got to stay in the hotel that night rather than camp on the mountain and after dinner (where the lights went out again but we did have candles this time on the table) I took full advantage of my bed.