Sapa-- November 11 - 15, 2009

The last five days were spent in the ethnic village of Sapa.

We got to take another overnight train to get there (yay). It was actually pretty chilly because it is slightly more northern but much higher elevation.

I made friends with a woman named Chi, of the Black Hmong people. Admittedly, she probably only talked to me because she wanted me to buy some trinkets from her, but it was still really nice talking to her. I was looking for the lake to walk around and she pointed me in the right direction and then walked with me. We talked about her kids and her village, it was nice.

We also climbed Mt. Fancypants, the highest mountain in Vietnam and in all of IndoChina. The name is actually Fansipan but because that is several degrees less fun than Fancypants, my name for the mountain will be used exclusively in this blog. It took us a day to climb up; we hiked for about 2 hours to a semi-permanent camp where we ate lunch, then hiked another roughly 2 hours to the second camp, where we had dinner and slept. We had hired porters who carried food and sleeping bags for us, which was great, except the sleeping bags they provided were not warm enough by a long shot. and we slept on a bamboo platform which really just let the cold air get under us to suck our heat that way. So it was a very cold, uncomfortable night and in the morning, most of the group decided to turn back and not see the summit. So seven of us (out of 15) started up the 2 hour hike to the top ("a geographical oddity, two weeks from everywhere!"). Our friend Alaina, however, fell pretty hard about 30 minutes in; she was fine but shaken up and had lost her momentum to keep climbing. So she turned back and the six of us went on. The top of Fancypants was very windy and foggy so there was not much of a view but still completely worth it! We had conquered the tallest mountain in Vietnam, when others had fallen short. We had braved the cold and the wind and the steep path to get to that point and the fog just made it seem more intense. We came, we saw, we conquered!