Trekking in Sapa (forgot to mention this)

Totally forgot to mention this amazing experience.  On the 29th i left for the northern border of Vietnam to go trekking in the hilltown of Sapa.  Along the way i met two israeli's, one spoke english, the other french, and we had a 3 language chat going on that turned a few heads.  Anyways, Sapa is literally 3km away from the Chinese border, theres quite a few Hmong and other ethnic minority villages nearby.  In the morning, there was blue sky and everything and everyone thought it'd be an easy 12km trek downhill with the village guides.

 

The village guides are all pretty much fluent in english (theyre exposed to tourists from birth), which detracts from the authenticity of the experience but it was still fun.  They led us down the top of a mountain.. and then half way through we started taking narrower and narrower paths until we were balancing on the edge of a mountain in super dense fog on a piece of concrete.  The views were absolutely amazing, rice terraces covered the sides of the mountains and small waterfalls could be seen every few hundred metres.  A few minutes later we got into the real trekking, instead of winding our way down the mountain on the public road, which probably wouldve taken all day, the villagers led us down 'their' path.  This consistedly mostly of a lot of wet mud, water, and rocks.  People fell over left right and center and within a few minutes almost everyone was covered in mud.  We literally were jumping down half body height ledges most of the way.  The surface we were jumping onto was wet mud.. which made getting a grip after landing near impossible.  To add insult to injury, it started to POUR, most of us had umbrellas and raincoats which kept us clean and dry at first, but now they were pretty much useless.  But this rain was the equivalent of just jumping into a pool.  Everyone's everything got wet.

 

When we finally did make it to the home we were staying it, there was a little cooking fire the Dzay family had going.. and slowly the fire was encircled by probably 20 pairs of shoes, all dripping wet and smelling of water mixed with buffalo poo.  I managed to take a video of the beginning of the trek when we were walking along the edge of the mountain on a gutter, but that video barely does the trek justice as to how difficult it is to descend a mountain thats covered in the summer equivalent of ice.