Mount Fansipan - Hike

Mountains.. I just love them all and especially the high peaks of each country. Therefore the Fansipan (Phan Xi Pang) with 3143m as the highest mountain Vietnams and Indochinas I had to conquer.
Unfortunately the Fansipan is not allowed to hike on your own so I organized a guide. I decided for the 2days tour although it could be done in one day but than you won't get the sunrise which is always a magical moment giving me goosebumps.
My guide Mi Ching picked me up at my hotel with his bike and we drove to the closeby village Sin Chai to start the track.
After 5 hours of steep uphill crambling, some thousands stairsteps and only a short lunchbreak we arrived at the highcamp at 2800 meters where some other fellow hikers already had arrived, sitting, chatting and waiting for the dinner their guides already had started to prepare. Mi Ching joined into cooking and me into chatting.
You always meet interesting people with lot of good stories on a mountain and so we enjoyed a nice evening, had delicious and way to many dishes for dinner (our guides from 17-45 years all were excellent cooks) and went to bed at 7pm to get up at 3am for the last rush to the summit and the sunrise.
Unfortunately falling and staying asleep so early, even after a strenuous day, with wind shaking the metaldoors and too cool temperatures for too shitty sleepingbags wasn't so easy..
After some hours sleepy slumber the alarms went off and it was time to go get what we all were waiting for. This was enough to forget how tired we still were (the coffee also helped a bit) and after again a too big of a pot of noodles we started to climb the last 300 meters with our flashlights under a clear stary sky and almost full moon. Actually again a lot of stairsteps and couple of times up an down until we finally came out in front of the cablecarstation. Yes - a cable car, there's nothing worse to kill a summit (maybe in 50 years I'm happy about them), so it had to be destiny the cable car was closed for maintenance.
Combined with the best weather which was totally untypical for this time of the year (normally it's 0°,covered in clouds, windy afk and probably rain if not even snow - thanks climate change?)
I already started smiling while heading for the last stairsteps.. This time for real.
---continues with summit ---Read more