Sapa and beyond

Low cloud

We've covered a huge distance since our last blog. We've been to hill tribes in Vietnam, chilled out Laos and then travelled all the way to Southern Thailand.

We arrived in Sapa, in the North Vietnamese mountains, without any plans, as usual. Sapa town has plenty of amenities, and looks a bit like an alpine ski town. There are, however, ethnic minotity tribeswomen from various different trbes walking around in their colourful traditional dress - you don't get that in the Alps! Of course they all want to sell you something, but we did get talking to one particular woman called Ma, who offered to be our guide on a 2 day trek.


Ma, our guide in Sapa
 



Ker who accompanied us on our hike.
Great Hair!

   When we started out Ma had 3 of her friends with her, one of whom was 9 months pregant! The 6 of us set off up the hill out of the town. We were on paths running between the terraced rice fields, up in the clouds - a beautiful landscape with amazing views. We walked a quiet route, to avoid being followed by hoardes of souvenir sellers. It worked - we hardly saw anyone for hours. This left us with the challenge of a much longer route included steep inclines. We finally stopped for lunch at one of the women's houses. It was very basic, with dirt floors and a fire to cook on, but they had the only TV in the village, so the house was full of all the neighbours' kids. After lunch the women who'd accompanied us asked us to but some of their jewelery and handicrafts, they were pretty instistant, which left us feelng pretty conflicted as they are really poor yet we had stated clearly at the start that we weren't interested in buying anything - just interested in the tour. We relented and we did buy a few things it was a difficult situation being on a tight budget oursleves, yet being so much richer than the tribes-people. We left wishing we could have helped them more. Oh woe to internal conflicts!


Ok, so I became addicted to taking photos of rice terraces..

 

Looks like hard work!

Ma's house amongst the rice fields

By the time we arrived at our homestay, just before dark, after nearly 20km, and felt like we just climbed kilamanjaro ha ha. We were absolutely knackered. We were greated by our very friendly host. It was much plusher than our lunch-stop - like a Vietnamese B&B. There was thankfully less walking the second day. We visited Ma's house and met her very cute kids before getting back to Sapa exhausted and filthy.

Rice Paddies

We were sad to leave Vietnam after enjoying it so much, but we wanted to squeeze in an unplanned stop at Luang Prabang in Laos, and we weren't disappointed. It's a beautiful town, like France 100 years ago. And it's by far the most chilled out town we've visited. The constant sound of car horns and motorbike engines, present in your average Asian city, is replaced by birds singing and boats cruising up the river - bliss! We went to a copule of temples in LP, to the royal palace and ate some great cheap eats (less than one pound each ) at the nighmarket. We also spent a day kayaking up the Mekong - which we thought would be gentle until we got in the boat, when the guide announced that there would be 'some rapids'! But with some frantic paddling we made it to the cave of Buddhas and the Whiskey village without a soaking. And while we were in LP, Liz was crowned Queen of the Hmong tribe! (see photo).

Queen of the Hmong Tribe!



The main road in Luang Prabang at about 6pm.
No sign of rush hour here!

BBQ at the night market, Luang Prabang

The Mekong, Luang Prabang

Liz's low-impact kayaking technique

After LP, we knew we faced some long journeys. Travel time by road in Laos are measured in days rather than hours. We took the least worst option, to fly to the Laotian capital, Vientiane (a small city, but unremarkable compared to LP), bus it over the border into Thailand, and fly to Phuket. This is one of the Thai islands, but not the one we really wanted to see. So we then island hopped to Krabi. We stayed in a lovely resort nestling in the jungle, with the luxury of a pool. But we were less impressed with the seafront town, which looked like Skegness. So some more research and yet another long bus journey later, has brought us to Ko Lanta, which we'll tell you about in our next post.

Chilling in Krabi



Backpacker's champagne

 

Hope those of you in England are enjoying the heatwave (it's cooled down a bit here, so we've got the same temperatures that you're promised).

Enjoy the photos.