July 15th
We woke up to the train worker knocking on our cabin door. We were almost to Lau Chai and we needed to get up. We got our stuff together, and disembarked from the train. When were almost out of the station I realized Kyle was wearing his sandals but didn’t have his tennis shoes. He ran back to the train just in time, the moment he stepped off the train after he retrieved his shoes the train took off again! That was close!
As we left the station we were surrounded by taxi drivers and people holding signs with peoples names on it. We did not see our names anywhere. We were getting a little worried. Kyle looked over at me and asked, "Are we stupid?" I didn’t know what to say, but I was completely embarrassed at how unprepared and how trusting we had been when we booked the tour. The tour agent spoke such good English and she was wearing this cute little skirt suit, and when our hotel called her she came straight away to help us book our trip even though it was almost 9pm, maybe we should have been a little more leery then. But now we were in Lao Chai and we didn’t see our names.
Other taxi drivers were trying to get us to go with them, telling us they would give us a receipt and we could take it back to the hotel in Hanoi and get paid back since our ride hadn’t showed up. We turned the taxi driver down because he was obviously a scamming dirtbag with no morals, and tried to find a pay phone that worked so we could call the hotel, at least we had been smart enough to ask for that.
(Kyle) There was a young man who was nice enough to direct us to a phone that was operated by an old man that apparently was the "pay phone." We called our hotel and pretty much asked them, "what he f@ck|!" He told us that we should wait 10-15 more minutes and everything will be ok. OK. Sounds nice and warm and fuzzy, except that we are now in the middle of the mountains of northern Vietnam with no clue as to what or where what to do or go to next. Quite reassuring I must say.
At some point in time we were able to recognize a friendly face among the crowds. It was Caroll, one of the lovely woman that accompanied us on our city tour. Imagine that, she just happened to be in the same place at the same time. We walked over to say hello and ask her what her plans were. We were actually hoping she would have some info on what to do next assuming that she booked through the same tour company as us since she was on the same city tour as us.
Unfortunately she was as clueless as we were. It seems that this is the norm for most of the people who travel here. Every one that we’ve talked to has had the same experience, some worse. Luckily when I turned around to look back towards the train station I spotted a sign that said Angela Marie. Thank God!
We ran over and said that we were the one’s she was looking for and she ushered us to a bus. We got in and waited about 5-10 minutes before we headed out to Sapa. It was about an hour bus ride until we entered Sapa. The bus ride was without incident.
The bus dropped us off at a hotel and we got out. The girl at the hotel said that we can have breakfast and then use a room to shower before we leave on our trekking tour. She told us that we could have breakfast their for 30,000 Dong ($2 USD) or go somewhere else. Seeing that their breakfast was very basic and probably not worth the money we opted to go find a restaurant for breakfast. Angy had a Vietnamese soup called Pho and Sapa Soup, and I had an omelet with a baguette.
After breakfast we headed back to the hotel we were dropped off at. When we arrived the lady told us that we were at the wrong hotel. Great, more problems. Luckily though this wasn’t a problem. The girl just walked us over to a different hotel, the one we were supposed to be dropped off at in the first place.
The man at the Pumpkin hotel had us sit down and gave us some bad tea. Then told us that we could now have our free breakfast. Nice. We informed that we already ate because the other hotel was going to charge us for breakfast anyways. So he just gave us a key to our hotel room so we could shower for the day. He also made sure that we knew that we could only use the bathroom since we weren’t paying to stay in the room.
We both showered and commenced to have a little nap before our trekking. Our rest on the train apparently wasn’t very restful.
After awaking we gathered all the things that we wanted to bring with us on the trek and then put the rest of our stuff in another bag for the hotel to hold onto while we were gone for the night. We made sure that the laptop was put into their safe.
It hasn’t been very easy to upload full resolution pictures onto the internet as I thought it would be. It is quite slow. So all our pictures and videos our saved onto the computer. All in all we have about 5 gigs of pictures backed up on the computer. I actually fell that we could have everything stolen and as long as we had the computer I we be ok with that. Everything else we have can be replaced. Not the computer though.
Where were we? Oh yes, so we were ushered out the doors of our hotel and introduced to our tour group and tour guide(s).
