According to local advices and the information I searched, when it comes to Sapa, the following places which locate on two routes are often mentioned:
- Route 1: Sapa town -[12km]- Silver waterfall -[2km]- Love waterfall -[1km]- Sky gate
- Route 2: Sapa town -[7km]- Lao Chai village -[2km]- Ta Van village -[3km]- Old carved stone -[1km]- Cloud bridge
It’s easy to hire a motorbike around 80,000-100,000 vnd per day (from 6am-6pm, sometimes 8pm), you would yourself take care of gas cost.
While the waterfalls were just fine enough to take a look, the scenery along the road was amazing.
Love waterfall – Feb 16, 2013
Scenery along the route 1 – Feb 16, 2013
Sapa town was not as interesting as I heard. Everything became commercialized. If there’s something different from the backpack area in HCMC where I live, Sapa town is smaller and its weather is cooler. I spent only one night in town to see the well-known and highly-recommended Love market that takes place every Saturday around 8pm. Well, let’s be honest, it wasn’t worth at all! The show was poor and boring. I don’t know how interesting it was in the past but now things seem to change. They all were only rotating while blowing Khen La (for boys) and holding an umbrella (for girls). I was patiently waiting for something else but it’s just the same.
So in the early morning of the following day, I moved to Lao Chai village where I had an unforgettable experience with a H’mong family which was recommended by Nikolina Horvat. Their small lovely house is lonely located in halfway of a mountain.
On the way to Shu’s house
Inside Shu’s lovely house
Hmong people often grill a whole pig then cut and hang it above the stove like this – Feb 16, 2013
My interested place: Toilet. You must see inside, it’s even more interesting LOL 😉
We gave the children 2kg A4 of coloring pictures along with color pencil and sweet candy as a gift. They were very enthusiastic and kept coloring over lunch time. We didn’t notice but in the following early morning when we got up, they had already colored all of the pictures!!!
Our host – Shu, and her family were very nice. They cooked a delicious lunch for us and even invited us to join their dinner party with Shu’s whole big family which was absolutely a pleasure I’ve never expected to have!
After lunch, we went trekking over two mountains leading by these kids. It’s great until we realized we went too far and everybody was tired. Moreover, going back in the same way would be kinda boring. So we decided to get along the stream that freaked kids out because they had never tried that route. Now everything turned out much more exciting ever!
It took a while to find the way down to the stream. The scenery was so perfect with mountains, sunshine, cool air and the sweet sound of the stream. We lay on the rocks in the middle of the stream, then jumped rock by rock, and run fast on the terranced fields racing to home… We had such a great time ever!
Climbing up…
Then coming back home by the route along the stream…
I won the race LOL
It was so hard to say good bye in the following day, especially with those children. We’d miss them a lot!
/// Written by Hao Hong Dinh, Vietnam