Visa stamps, baggage collection, and then WHAM - you've just walked into a semi-solid wall of humidity. You can feel the air as you walk through it, the rest of your senses are trying to get used to what you see, smell, and hear.
Nothing can prepare you for the next morning. Those who wake up early will venture out into the busiest of streets.
Motorcycles and more motorcycles. Food vendors, tourists, and excercise groups are drawn to Hoan Kiem Lake. However, you are here on a mission; you have a meeting at 9 am sharp.
Meetings and meet-ups, quick dinners, running arounds and last-minute fix-ups, the excitement builds as we prepare the final touches on modules and gather training materials. Tonight we board the train.
When you arrive in Lao Cai train station there is a flurry of activity before we find ourselves daydreaming on the bus up to Sapa. The highs and lows of Vietnam never cease. Extreme extremes challenge your body, challenge your patience, and inspire you.
And then there is Sapa. The energy is astounding. A hundred years worth of travel stories have been collected and interpreted between a multitude of cross-cultural interactions and histories.
Sapa is the main tourist centre. Sitting at the highest elevation of any populated area, the hotels, shops, restaurants, travel agencies, and government buildings are adorned in French influence. Below this busy hub of activity, and seen from easy-to-find vantage points, are the small hilltribe villages. They dot a terraced landscape that is worked on an annual basis. Subsistence farming is the means to which the Hmong, Dao and Day feed themselves.
These villages are also where tourists will go to take their pictures, do their trekking, stay in authentic cultural homestays, buy their handmade souvenirs, and hopefully learn something.
It is in two of these villages, Ta Phin and Lao Chai, where we will do the same, and then some.
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