Saturday night’s ten-hour, 340 km train ride from Hanoi to Lao Cai was hardly the Orient Express but it is the most convenient way to reach Sapa and Vietnam’s hill people. We shared a sleeper coach with a couple of like-minded travelers from Christchurch, NZ and slept fitfully with the help of Tylenol PM and earplugs. We arrived at Lao Cai, the end of the track only 38 km from the Chinese border around six AM amid mass confusion. No one knew where to go and when we boarded on a minibus to Sapa we never saw anyone from the ET Pumpkin group again. We somehow ended up at the Auberge Hotel where we were rushed onto a bus for our three hour ride to Bac Ha.
Sunday is market day at Bac Ha. Villagers from miles around dress in traditional clothing and mob the square - some selling, others buying. There are 54 different ethnic groups and ten of them live in this northern part of Vietnam. The most colorful are the Flower Hmong. This is the place to buy fruits, veggies, meat, clothing, booze, water buffalo, to get your knives sharpened or find a significant other. It is a riot of color, smells, expressive faces, and on this day rain and mud.
On the ride back to Lao Cai we stopped at several temples whose significance was lost on me; too many hours with too little sleep. The road paralleled the Red River for much of the way with China just beyond and we stopped briefly at the border crossing to Hekou before returning to Sapa.
