Day 8 - 16/07/25
Welcome back everyone! This day began bright and early at 7am as we began our hike of the Sapa mountains at 8. After a healthy breakfast of fried noodles, bread and a can of fanta I was all set to begin.
We met our guide, Sung, who was a lovely woman but must’ve been about half the size of me. She entrusted me with a bamboo stick to walk with, and before long we were off. I thought we would begin slowly as we were still inside the city, but within 20 minutes we were climbing a hill that felt almost vertical! Since I was still recovering from the illness (and because I haven’t regularly exercised in 4 years), I was wheezing and panting by the time we got halfway to the top.
I would have loved to have shown you the view from the top, but unfortunately there were none as we were inside of a cloud. At least the way down can’t be as bad as the way up, right? Wrong!
As soon as we started our descent we immediately got hit with a huge shower of rain, which quickly made everything extremely muddy and slippery. It was fun at first to see each other fall on our asses, but it got a bit less fun once it was happening every few minutes! The bamboo stick came in very handy and probably prevented a few bad injuries for me!
The rain and mud got so heavy that we were moving very slowly to prevent slipping, and could only hear who was directly in front of us or behind us. Things went from bad to worse as we got news that Polly had hurt herself, and after a while of standing in the rain we found out that she had broken her wrist when slipping over. As we tried to help Polly get off the mountain the rain got even worse and we eventually found ourselves standing in a small stream. I managed to slip backwards and sat directly in the stream, and a fast current of muddy water flowed directly into my underwear (I do not recommend). Dan requested I include this joke: ‘none of us could have seen this Sapa-ning’. After another 30 minutes of listening to Jagan say ‘for fucks sake’ 50 times, we finally got off the mountain and onto a road.
Polly and some others got a taxi to the hospital, and after saying our goodbyes we continued on the hike. Thankfully the rain let up at this point, and the rest of the hike was actually very scenic, despite the incessant squelching of our shoes!
Eventually though, we reached this extremely high, extremely narrow bridge. As someone who is deathly afraid of heights, this bridge seemed to resemble the exact one I’ve been having recurring nightmares about since the age of 12. I finally plucked up the courage and began to cross it, keeping my attention firmly on reaching the end and not on the fact that it seemed the floorboards were only held together with staples. About halfway across I got a shout from the rest of the group. I turned around and saw them all laughing, only to realise that we weren’t even supposed to be crossing this bridge. I’m glad I managed to face my fears anyway, and karma struck as Dan found a leech inside of his sock (not laughing now are you).
After an hour or so more of walking through the beautiful Vietnamese mountains, we arrived at lunch. It felt fantastic to eat my first proper meal since the depressing pizza at Mr Hung’s Pizza nearly a week ago. The spring rolls were delicious and I devoured about 8 of them. At this point the tour guide asked us if we wanted to do the long route, which was also slippery, or the short route that was along tarmac. Me and Jagan were baffled that even after seeing our friend break a bone on a slippery path, the majority of the group wanted to take the long route! We decided against it, so we ditched the tour guide and used google maps to find our way to the hostel in Ta Van. In hindsight this was definitely the correct decision, as Emily went on to dislocate her shoulder!
On our walk back, Jagan and I decided to stop for a few well earned beers to reflect on how happy we were to no longer be on the side of a mountain. The cafe we stopped at didn’t actually have beer on the menu, but when we asked if they sold it they said they did. We then saw a man hop on his motorbike, and return 5 minutes later with a crate of beers from the shop which they then sold to us. They also gave us these adorable little tea glasses to drink it out of.
Eventually, we made it to our hostel, and I finally had the pleasure of taking off my soggy shoes. A bad day turned even worse when the hostel manager showed us the room we would be staying in, which was basically just 5 mattresses on the floor. I couldn’t believe that only yesterday I was waking up in a swanky hotel room! They did offer to wash our muddy clothes for us, but unfortunately I only brought the one pair of shoes so I couldn’t stick those in the wash too.
After a refreshing and much needed shower, Jagan and I got in a taxi to visit Polly at the hospital. Nobody there spoke English, but after google translating ‘our friend with orange hair broke her wrist, where is she’, they directed us to her room. The Vietnamese hospital was very creepy; there were lots of people crammed into each room and it looked like the beginning of a zombie apocalypse film. Thankfully Polly had her own room, and she told us about how they reset her wrist with only paracetamol as a painkiller (in the UK you would be on much stronger ones). We popped out to get some codeine for her and smuggled it back into the hospital. It was also bizarre as other patients kept staring at us through the window - I guess they don’t get many foreigners in that hospital.
The taxi ride back to the hostel was quite a somber one, as we were both worried for Polly and wondering how on earth we were going to sleep in that room. We had dinner at the hostel, which was the exact same meal as we had just had for lunch, and apparently the exact same meal they served on every stop of the Ha Giang loop too, so the group was quite tired of it by now!
Our spirits were lifted when our tour guide started encouraging us to play some drinking games, and a couple of jugs of ‘happy water’ were placed on our table. It turns out she had quite a few drinking games up her sleeve! My favourite was the one where you had to pass a bottle cap to each other using only chopsticks, and whoever dropped it had to do a shot. The hostel also had quite a nice system where you don’t have to buy the beers immediately, you just write it down in a book when you get one out of the fridge and then pay for it later.
Several beers, shots of happy water and drinking games later, the night was in full swing. The hostel we stayed at was run by a family, whose young children (I reckon 4 and 7) were having a fantastic time interacting with all the drunk travellers. They kept tickling me and insisting I chase them, and then when I did chase them they’d get scared and ask for the game to stop. Their angsty brother/uncle sat playing computer games in the corner of the room too. There was also an abundance of pets in the house who were all very cuddly. After many hours of drinking I was finally in a state where I didn’t mind falling asleep on a floor mattress, and I went to sleep after a long day.
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