What Sapa dude

The drive from hanoi to sapa takes about 6 hours but it flew right by coz we were on the best bus ever! It was a bed bus so instead of seats there're two rows of bunk beds and you get to just lie down and sleep the whole time. The Sapa town centre was very different from how i expected it to be, it felt more like a european ski town than anything youd expect to see in asia. The train station was massive and looked like a romanian cathedral or something, the trees were all tall pines and the rest of the buildings were either huge modern hotels or wooden hillside cottage type accomodation, it was a pretty discordant vibe but quite cool. The coolest thing about sapa is the clouds that waft through the town, they come out of nowhere and move fast with super whispy and defined edges, it was like we were in that poison smoke area from hunger games two, very mysterious and ethereal. There are also often clouds obstructing the view of the valley floor below which made the town feel like it was a floating magical sky land. We spent our first afternoon exploring. We went to a nice lush mossy garden where we got to shoot a crossbow and then went for a drink at a bar that had a big statue of moana.

The clouds that i initially loved ended up having quite a large impact on the trip, it was pretty grey most of the time, visibility was usually not great and it often rained. On our second day we braved the rain and went for a guided walking tour into the valley to check out some of the local villages. It was ok but it was mostly just people hassling us to buy things the whole time. On the third day the weather wasnt good enough to see fancipan (the building on the top of the mountain - sapas main attraction) so we just roamed around and got harassed by a crazy local hawker girl the whole day. I eventually got fed up with the girl coz she was saying stuff like "im just going to keep following you around until you buy something" so i yelled at her and then she got real mad and said i was a mean boy and no one would ever marry me (ya hate to see it). We took taxis for the rest of our excursions coz we didnt want to run into her again lol.Read more