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Dear friends and family
We've now been i Sapa in Northern Vietnam for 5 days. It's a lot more calm than in the big city of Hanoi. We have been doing a lot of trekking around the mountains taking photos and simply enjoying the view of the beautiful rice terrasses. Even though we're far from the big city the hill tribe people have tasted the sweet nectar of money-spending tourists. So they stalk you all the time which can be quit a pain in the ***. We first tried a short hiking trip taking about 4 hours. We came through some small hill tribe villages but we experienced that they were far to focused on milking the tourists. For that reason, the second day, we planned our own hiking route and we didn't meet one single tourist on the way, and the hill tribe people wasn't trying to sell us stuff all the time. The path wasn't that well marked so we ended up walking for a long time and couldn't find the correct way back, so we had to walk the same way back that we came. It turned out to be a very beautiful experience though.
The next day we decided to climb Fansipan, the highest mountain in Vietnam. We got our own guide and sherpa and began the climb from 1800 m. It was a very hard climb up with some very steep parts at times, but we made it safely to basecamp at 2800 m, where we were going to sleep. We were told that it would be a bamboo hut , but it turned out to be a hut consisting only of metal. The weather got really bad during the night with a lot of thunder and it continued out through the morning so we had to abbandon the idea of reaching the top (we only needed to climb further 300 m). Still we got to see an amazing view of the mountains and the Sapa (the town in which we live). It was actually also possible to see some chinese mountains. Sadly we had to continue down. We met up with some belgian guys that we met in basecamp and we all got a full body massage and afterwards went out for dinner. Later we got some rice wine and sat on the roof talking until 2 am. And now (the day after) we are taking a day of relaxation just walking around town and enjoying the view from our rooftop before leaving for Halong Bay in the afternoon.
We hope that you are all well.
Love Martina and Christian
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