Travellers - Day 83 April 28th

Travellers - Day 83 April 28^th

You can get up in the morning and the place you are in can seem like a lot of work and a long way from any kind of reason or home.  Uncomfortable, strange, exhausting.

 

Or you can get up full of the spirit; thrilled by the possibilities and improbabilities of the incredible place you have woken up in! Intriguing, exotic, stimulating.

These places are a long way apart.  It can be a long journey between.  A journey often taken in the morning – either way.  After lunch I am usually reconciled and pretty good with where we are.  We sure have been to some places!

This morning we went to Sapa. We had chosen Sapa because of pictures we had seen months ago and not really thought about since.  We were tired and had to pack again. We left early and missed breakfast.  It was a five hour bus journey and lunch on the bus was a quid’s worth of chestnuts, peanut snacky things and fruit.  

But the bus was pretty swish and MC’d by the extraordinary Max






so by the time we arrived we were OK.  It is delightfully cooler here at 5000 feet, the air fresher than the city and we are in an absolutely drop dead wake up and wonder landscape.   Our hut has a balcony overlooking it all.

It got to us.  Taran and I were soon racing poo sticks.  The best game in town: every separate paddy is an individual pond with its own water level and supply from above so there is an endless and intricate network of irrigation channels. If you were to go to the top of the mountain and release 1000 bath tub ducks maybe you’d end up

with one in every rice paddy. But let’s not; there is plenty of homeless plastic here already. We went out in the evening light and took lots of pictures




and then had a delicious supper at a rather chic hill side restaurant.  With puppies at sunset. 


It cost us a million Dong!  We are living like millionaires. That is £30’aires. Well at least for supper.

I think we will wake up full of the spirit tomorrow.