Sa Pa Day 1 - Rice wine, culture, danger ... and more rice wine

Great bus trip which took 6 hours but a nice new road and a fantastic bus complete with lazy boy chairs was what did it. I arrived into Sa Pa about 1:30 p.m. I immediately got invaded by local  tribal woman trying to sell stuff. I got followed and pestered by a small group for nearly 20 minutes. It was a real turn off to the town actually. The weather was quite misty and cold you could not really see more than 40 metres or so in some places. I  decided I would walk and try and get rid of these people trying sell shit to me but they persisted and just followed me everywhere, so i had to be quite rude in the end.

I decided to go to a money machine and get some cash out and  by pure chance there was Angelique and Shanine - two of the group of backpackers that I had met arriving in Hanoi.

They had already sourced the hotel so they came with me for a short while well i shopped for a good deal somewhere.

At the last minute i decided i would pay a little more and have a tiny bit of luxury here in this mountain town ,so i decided to check in at the Bamboo Hotel.

When I checked and went to my room, I went to the balcony and the whole mountain snd city was covered on mist, That was to change the following day and it was quite a spectacular view.
Once i was settled in and in true backpackers style, we agreed to meet and have a drink and talk about our plans in the town, we found a bar that served hot red wine so we tried some of that and we also tried some apple and plum special wines that were just disgusting. We had a couple of beers as well.



While we were sitting there we meet another backpacker from France so he joined us also
Shanine later left to go to the toilet and got intercepted by the owner who invited her downstairs for rice wine, and she later came and got us. The owner was having dinner on the floor downstairs at the back and we were invited to have traditional rice wine from a huge old cask with tree roots in it.  And we talked to him about his life and his life and Vietnam it was really interesting. We sat on a blanket and ate snails and some other dodgy things as well. It  was really good it was a real touch of Vietnam that I hadn't had yet. It was really nice.





But i think he really just had his eye on Shanine who had been drinking quite a lot. So it was for us to watch out for her. We must have had close to a dozen shots of rice wine with the food each in this time. Gilles left early.
As it was getting late and we made our excuses and paid our bar bill and got out of there safely.





Following this we went up to another bar. On the way we came across a few lads playing hacky in the street. We played for a while and got some funny photos, and had some giggles. At one point a car stopped because we were blocking the road and a man got out and grabbed Angelique by the arm and started to drag her away. I placed myself between them as best I could. I think i was enough of a threat that maybe he thought otherwise. We eventually just put it down to. .. it was likely that the guy was a nut case but it could have been very dangerous i guess.




Here we had a couple of games of pool and then the girls headed back to their hotel and i went back to mine. It was quite eerie around midnight to be walking through a mountain village in the middle of no where with the mist and very low visibility.  There was not a single person on the street i got a couple of photos that i think represent a little of what it was like as i walked home.