We arrived in Sa Pa in the evening after a long day on the road. We had decided to visit this hill station partly because we had been unable to visit Darjeeling and similar places in India.
The next morning there was a mist so thick we could hardly see across to the other side of our narrow street. We spent that first day exploring the town and dodging the army of sellers touting their trashy wares vaguely disguised as authentic handicrafts. Unfortunately for us that ended badly.
At first our second morning looked just as cloudy, until just after breakfast when the mist started to swirl a little and a definite brightening occurred. Although the sun never broke through, we anxiously hoped that it would, then decided it must.
Sa Pa sits above the Muong Hoa valley on the flanks of Fan Si Pan, the last major peak of the Himalayan mountain range. As the mist swirled and seemed to form clouds with a tantalising brightness we took for actual sunshine we decided that today we would go to the top of the mountain. We convinced ourselves that at 3,143 meters above sea level Fan Si Pan must have it’s head above these clouds.
No, we did not trek to the top of Fan Si Pan, but our trip to the roof of Vietnam, of all Indochina, was in its own way a gruelling trip. The summit is reached firstly via a funicular railway, then a record breaking and what would be breathtaking cable car ascent to the final funicular railway that takes you to the summit proper.
We travelled up the first stage through what I would normally describe as thick mist, but these were dense clouds with the track laying itself out only a few meters in front and even the tunnel entrances never fully revealing themselves. From there we walked through the disney style theme-park full of opportunities for for tacky photos. We resisted and trekked on to the bottom cable car station. I’ve often been to cable car stations shrouded in mist, but I think this is the first time I have seen the clouds pour in and fill the station.
We started off as we had on the bottom railway, but very soon we broke through the clouds. Unfortunately not into sunshine, but a clearing that gave us an idea of just how breathtaking this cablecar trip could be climbing steeply, high above the virgin forest dappled with rhododendron blossom. Sadly we were soon back in the clouds again. They stayed with us on the next funicular rail trip and that carriage never broke through the cloud. On the summit it was even hard to make out the summit marker only a few meters in front.
I know I haven’t described anything that would justify my earlier use of the term ‘gruelling’, but then I haven’t mentioned the crowds and the queues, the constant pushing and shoving and the interminable waits. If you count the journey times and add in the walks between stations it should take less than an hour to reach the top of Fan Si Pan. It took us five hours.
Some time after we got down, I stood in a queue at the only ATM in Sa Pa that takes foreign credit cards. As I mused over how they managed to keep it filled with money, my thoughts were interrupted by a diminutive woman, one of the local tribespeople. She wasn’t trying to sell me the usual tat, but sell me something she would.
‘Trekking?’ I just stuck out my paunch and slapped it with a questioning look which elicited such a roar of laughter that it was clear she understood my non-verbal retort perfectly well. She cheekily suggested that maybe I leave my baby here in Sa Pa and go trekking tomorrow. We both roared and she moved on and sought more fertile ground. It was a refreshing interchange that took away the bad taste from the previous day.
As I look out now, the same thick mist that has been with us the whole time is now interspersed with rain showers. We’ll take our brollies and head up into town for lunch, mulling over what we have missed and wondering if we should plan another trip to see the spectacular landscape that we know lies beneath this blanket of cloud.
