Tuesday 19th March

Tuesday 19^th March

Oh deary me it rained yesterday… Rain is GOOD!  Yes indeed; it is so wonderful to have real rain at last after so many months of drought… But Pete, with the aid of Rob Braithwaite, is labouring away at the slipyards, scraping the underbelly of 2XS and putting several layers of bright blue antifoul to replace the slime and scum and barnacles which have accumulated.  I helped do this last time, in April 2011, and it was all very strenuous and c-o-l-d.  Not sure how it was be in the rain!

I, in the meantime, am in a warm dry office, trying to get everything organised to hand over to Alison, who starts after Easter.  I am not sure if antifouling would be easier or not…

Sleepertrain 2008

This was a beautiful trip.  We had only two in four berth cabins, very luxurious not having to share.  The beds were narrow but quite comfortable and there is something immensely soothing about sleeping on a train, clickety clack clickety clack.  The only problem is that this particular journey is too short, and they knock on the door and chuck you out into the world at 5.00am…

Sapa (Highlands of Vietnam)

It is an hour by bus from Lao Cai, where the train stops, to the beautiful little mountain town of Sapa.  It was a lovely trip, gorgeous, winding our way up into the mountains, with rice paddies on narrow terraces all the way down the steep hillsides.  Our theme of vomit, however, continued - we had a teenage girl in the front seat heaving quietly out the window, while her younger brother in the back seat made good use of a paper bag or two…

Last year Kerry and Pete stayed in the Cat Cat View Hotel and they had booked it again for us.  Rina and I just loved it.  It is on about seven different levels - Sapa is a steep little town - and we had rooms nearly at the top.  Pete’s and my room was nearly all windows, so we were just a bit on display to people walking by to the next level, but it was just wonderful, with a view out over fabulous Mt Fansipan.  The shower was hot, the toilet flushed, we had a beautiful little restaurant a few steps along the terrace - we were all set for a very happy five days.

While Kerry and Rina unpacked, Pete and I went for a walk around the centre of Sapa.  Sapa is an incredibly picturesque village that lies on the Hoang Lien Son mountain range near the Chinese border in NW Vietnam. It is called "the Tonkinese Alps" You can see many hill tribe people, their villages, rice terraces, lush vegetation, and Fansipan, highest peak in Vietnam.  I was about to wax lyrical re this place, and then decided to see what others had said on Google.  The above will do… The architecture is very interesting; most of the buildings are from the French colonial era.  The French built big villas; I think they went up to the hills to get away from the heat in the lowlands.  Most of the villas are now hotels and hostels.  So it doesn’t really feel Vietnamese; it feels European, except for the people, in their fantastic colourful costumes.  I spoke to some young people from Austria, who said, “It is just like the Austrian Alps in summer!  We didn’t need to come here!” 

On this our first excursion out into the streets, we were absolutely swarmed by Hmong women.  The Black Hmong are very enterprising; they learn every language they need to know, and are very persistent in trying to sell their embroidery, jewellery, postcards.  They wear their indigo dyed costumes, all hand-embroidered, and look just great, although they must be SO hot with all those layers of thick hemp clothing.  Some of them recognised Pete from last time.  “Aha!” they cried.  “You are the man who doesn’t buy anything!”  I, on the other hand, quite wanted to buy just a few things, but it was very difficult to look at any of the wares, either being toted about by the women, or displayed in the market.  As soon as I picked up, for example, a small embroidered dress - how cute would Eva and Jemima look? - on a stall, all the other stallholders would start shouting, “I have better!  Cheaper!  More!  Look at mine!!”  I gave up altogether, and we went to find Pete and Kerry’s guides from last year, Ker and Yang, who were thrilled to see us.  I started to feel overwhelmed and suggested we go to a café along the street to sip a soothing cup of coffee and watch the world go by.  The Hmong women still wanted to come and sell us things; we just had to be resolute, not look at them, say NO THANK YOU very firmly.  One of them slipped through our guard, a very gentle, nicely-spoken woman, Soo Mai.  She REALLY wanted me to buy a cute little baby hat, but I knew that if I did, the other 700 onlooking Black Hmong would bay for my blood…after all I had been saying a firm NO THANK YOU to all of them; why would I favour Soo Mai??  She said she was about to go back to her village, to look after her children.  She said she was very tired; she looked about sixty, very careworn, but told us she was thirty…

We were going to explore the culinary delights of Sapa, but we ended up having breakfast, lunch and dinner at our Cat Cat View Hotel, sitting on the peaceful terrace, looking at the mountains and the valleys.  The food was just great.  I had pho for breakfast, and delicious fresh spring rolls for lunch - what could be nicer??  We were a bit more adventurous on other days but really we couldn’t do much better than our own new little home on the side of the hill.