Getting to Sapa is easy, as long as you don’t mind a 9-and-a-half hour train journey!
I wanted to get tickets to get to Sapa quite quickly, but when I went to the Train Station on the 31st March, there weren’t any ‘soft-sleeper’ tickets available for another four days…well I didn’t want to wait THAT long! I did instead find that I could get there on the 2nd if I booked ‘hard-sleeper’. I didn’t think that it sounded that bad.
I looked on the internet later that night to find that the hard sleeper beds looked okay, there was no mention of how much head/body space you actually had, but it didn’t look bad.
I arrived at the station bright and early and had to wait in the waiting area with all of the locals, it appears that most tourists do this trip through an agency where you get everything sorted out for you, even your own special waiting room! The Westerners that wandered through were all headed by an enthusiastic tour guide and usually a flag…whereas I had to just wait until everyone else seemed to be moving.
Once I was allowed to go through to the platform I had to walk over the track (yep…actually about four train tracks) to get to a badly signposted platform. At the platform I walked between two trains: One tourist train and one ‘normal’ train.
The tourist train looked like the type of cabins that you would expect back at home on a luxury sleeper to Scotland: four bunks in one lockable cabin, water, plush seats and even toothbrushes! The normal train looked like the type of train you’d take into London!
When I got inside the train I could see that it was indeed old, but it wasn’t bad. There were six bunks in each cabin, and they were lockable too. There wasn’t much space to put your bags apart from under the bottom bunk or above the corridor in a sort of alcove bit, but I only have a backpack.
For me the journey was quite long because I kept waking up in the night worried that I’d missed the stop. I hadn’t: Lao Cai is the end of the line! It was pleasantly okay and I got to Lao Cai and headed straight onto a minibus. Easy Peasy.
Arriving early in the morning means that you generally have a long time to sort yourself out and get going with activities. Today however, I was tired and grouchy and couldn’t be bothered!
I got accosted by a man offering a cheap hotel as soon as I got off the bus, but it was all good as it turned out to be a very lovely room with an amazing view over the hillside: mist and all.
Once sorted I had a bit of a wander and then decided to think about getting to Laos and on to Bangkok…after a bit of research it didn’t look like going from Sapa was a great idea: the roads are apparently quite bad and it would take three whole days just to get into the country. I decided instead to go back to Hanoi and then go to Bangkok from there on a short airplane ride.
Sorting out bus/train/plane tickets was very easy and everything seemed to go in my favour…I guess I’ll only be able to tell once I am in Bangkok!!! I didn’t really do much else in Sapa on my first day, but I’m here for another two nights, so it’s okay, I have plenty of time to get to see the town.
Today I didn’t wake up until 10am, and I felt very good for it! I walked down to one of the little bakeries along the main stretch and bought a bag full of various breads: Coconut Bread, Chocolate Bread and Apple Bread. They were delicious!
Then I rented out a motorbike for the day and rode up into the hillside to see if I could find the ‘Silver Waterfall’, which is a short drive/ride away up in the hills. The ride out of Sapa is amazing, with plenty to see and some EPIC views out over the hills and mountains. There is a large mountain here that people trek up: Fansipan. I could see it up above me and it looked misty and mysterious!
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