26th March - 2XS all fixed and flying up the coast - Sapa Saga

Tuesday 26^th March

I don’t like to sound vainglorious but…

Team 2XS is BETTER than Tobias Fahey and Tony Bullimore, just for the moment!  I can’t claim any credit; all I have done is sit and worry, just a bit, about my poor darling friends bobbing about at Long Point with a non-functioning port-side gearbox.

Pete rang at 2pm yesterday, sounding very perky indeed.  He and James had struggled away down in the engine hatch.  They discovered that they had gone through a big patch of pesky seaweed which had completely jammed the works.  After much patient and exhausting work they were able to fix it, and now they are off, speeding towards Flinders Island.  They had been going so well – averaging 9 knots – that they would have made it to Gabo Island last night had it not been for the pesky seaweed.

So…onwards and upwards; all is well!

Sapa continued 2008

After lunch, we walked through the village to a big open shop which sold very cold beer (bliss!) and soapstone carvings, which were made on the premises.  They were so intricate, and some of them so very beautiful, but we couldn’t buy anything other than the beer - too heavy… Kerry and Rina took the opportunity to go back to Sapa, on ever-ready motorbikes.  Pete and I were invited to go to Ker’s house, up the hill.  Up the very very hot hill… Ker’s family own rice paddies and corn fields all the way down to the river; they are not, by Vietnamese standards, poor.  But the way they live… To get to their house we had to negotiate a steep track, which is also used daily by their buffalo.  It is like negotiating a steep and muddy little river in full flood.  I can’t imagine that it would be possible to do this climb in the dark; why they haven’t fenced off a proper pathway to their house is hard to understand.  The house is small, with two rooms and a loft.  No windows, no furniture other than two or three small wooden stools.  No decorations, maybe a few newspaper photos peeling off the walls.  Miserable, poky, dark… Eleven people live there - Yang and her husband, some of Ker’s siblings and their spouses and babies and toddlers.  Ker isn’t there all the time; she often stays overnight in Sapa, or in guest houses with her trekking clients.  There is a firepot in the corner of one of the rooms; this is where they cook, and how they heat the house.  I imagine there would be lots of smoke billowing up into the loft.  The family has chooks, pigs, ducks, veggies, so they aren’t hungry, but they certainly live a very basic and uncomfortable life.  In fact none of the houses in the villages we walked through had windows.  The villages are so picturesque, set in rolling hills and valleys of supreme beauty, but the houses are resolutely unadorned and turned inward…

Time to go back - and once again, no need to trudge fourteen kilometres up steep mountain tracks - motorbikes appeared!  Ker whipped out her mobile phone and within minutes three bikes were ready to whiz us back up the road to Sapa.  My helmet, this time, was very big and heavy, and didn’t even pretend to have a strap, so I just wobbled it onto my head and hoped my driver wouldn’t tip me into a ravine.  Ker and Pete went ahead and I realised that my bike was going slower end s-l-o-w-e-r…and then putt putt pfft…we had run out of petrol.  So maybe I would have to trudge back up the mountain?  But no; Ker and Pete came back looking for us, and we got some petrol in a plastic bottle at a small shop on the edge of the road.