We woke up right in our hotel the next day, excited to get on with our exploration of a part of Vietnam that many Vietnamese, let alone tourists, never get to visit. Waking up, we had an amazing view of the rural mountains, but they got even better when we headed to a cafe on one of the lower floors which had this very open view of everything in the area- even mountain Fansipan which we would be visiting today- it looked so close because of its size, but we would later find out that it was really, really, really distant.
For breakfast we ate anything of our choice from a cafe in the area which served absolutely anything you could ever want. As we ate, me, Mia, Koia, and Casey all yapped about the vacation and probably other stuff. (It’s already been a year since this happened lol, I don’t remember anything)
But things got a lot more interesting soon as after we headed back to our hotel room, we began to pack up for the hike to Mount Fansipan.
A little bit about the mountain: It’s one of the highest in Southeast Asia. We ended up taking some shortcuts to reach the very top quicker, but if you decide to go the long way and hike the entire thing, expect to take a few days to get to the top. Wikipedia says that it originally could take up to five or six days to the top, but we managed to get up there in just a few hours (we cheated).
Our driver took us to a building at the edge of a valley where we seemed to be buying tickets for a trip up to Fansipan. I wasn’t sure how we were getting up at first, because experienced hikers could still take days to get to the top.
It turned out we were going up like this:
This was extremely interesting and classifies as the longest three rope nonstop cable car in the world, so it’s actually a world record, whatever that means. It’s a total of 6.3 kilometers long and got us across the whole valley near the top of the mountain. That recording was just a tiny part of the trip. Casey actually did record the entire 20 minute trip on his phone somehow, and we got some crazy views of the valley’s rice farms as we went up, but I don’t have the recording sadly (Casey’s phone couldn’t handle that)
At first, we had a really clear view of the rice terraces below. It was absolute stunning how large the area was, and finding out now that that was just six kilometers honestly blew my mind. I feel like I could run across it all day and still not travel halfway across the valley. On the ground were a bunch of houses and more civilization, including a bunch of villages (which we will visit in part 15, stay tuned) and as we scaled up another mountain, we saw several more isolated houses covered in blankets of forest. I wondered what those houses were there for. According to wikipedia, a lot of houses were sprinkled along the path up to the top of the mountain because the mountain supposedly took days to climb. I’m ultimately not sure, because the houses looked kind of depressing and abandoned, but who knows?
As we started climbing up the mountain, we flew right into a thick layer of clouds and spent about 10 minutes just flying through, seeing nothing but white on all sides. It was absolutely surreal to see this- we were basically in a white void with nothing to see in all directions. It was a boring view with amazing context. We saw nothing but white and a little bit of the trees below us until suddenly we saw a building- the ride was over, but it was very memorable. We were now near the top of Mount Fansipan, with merely a small hike ahead of us.
We took a moment to plan out what we’d do next in this cafe area which served a surprising amount of western food.
Because the hike was uphill, a lot of us didn’t really have the strength for it, so a plan was formed: our grandparents, my mom, Koia, and her father would all take a train that apparently took you straight to the top of the mountain right away. Everyone else, Mia, me, Casey, and me and Casey’s dad would all take the hike all the way to the top. Oh, man, that hike was really long. There were a LOT of staircases. A LOT. There were so many, when we started the hike, we played this game where we counted how many stairs there were on the whole hike. It’s been more than a year since this happened, so I don’t recall how many steps there were, but I remember passing at least the 300 mark (it was probably way more than that, this could be hella off)
300 steps doesn’t sound like it’s that much work, and I agree that it isn’t. But my legs were still burning after each flight of stairs because they were extremely steep! I had to raise my feet very high to get to the next step each time and I was scared to climb just about any flight of stairs because if I fell, I was going down at least 30 feet to my doom. The slope of these steps had to be at least 45 degrees. I didn’t climb or descend down any flight of stairs without the bar to cling onto- I was kind of paranoid.
And that’s not to mention that this mountain, des2pite the fact we’re in Southeast Asia, was extremely cold. It was my first time being cold since we flew into Southeast Asia all the way back in Chapter 1. Throughout all these crazy locations- I was always sweating a river because of how hot it was. I’d vomited in Saigon already because we didn’t have an air conditioner working (Chapter 4) and I suffered through the heat because I thought I was being weak by asking for an air conditioner. It was hot even up in Hanoi- the place was either extremely hot or pouring buckets of rain on us. This place was actually really cold. A lot of us got tired along the way and went pretty slow, but of course Casey went ahead and was always at least a hundred fifty feet ahead of us.
But at least we had a lot of interesting structures on the way! There were a lot of statues and temples that we saw as we walked up, some of them straying off the path (But we could barely see those because it was still foggy as heck). We came across what I think is a Buddha statue (which had this interior thingy), another temple (Which we took a break at because it started to rain pretty hard along the way)
The interior of one of the Buddha statues is shown here (Unless I don’t have the video for some reason):
Pictures of the path up to the top of Fansipan don’t look like very much on the Internet, but trust me, it is a lot more than it looks like. My feet were burning once we got to the top, and the view wasn’t so worth it, to be entirely honest. We just saw clouds in all directions- not the great mountains surrounding Fansipan and Sapa that we were promised. The area in the top featured a lot of viewing spots to see the view around, but since there wasn’t much of a view most of our attention was diverted to the cafe at the top of the mountain and the flags on the top that people could raise when they reached the top. The flags didn’t include America or European ones- they mostly did the local flags, so flags of Southeast Asian countries like Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Indonesia.
The cafe served a load of stuff, and had two floors to serve the fairly crowded tourist load that had climbed up the stairs (or cheated with the train) to see the roof of Indochina (fun fact: the nickname of this mountain is actually “The Roof of Indochina”).
The absolute top of the view was kind of ruined by the clouds, and the weather started toying with us. As soon as we began to head back down to the cable car center, the view finally cleared up and allowed for some extremely surreal images:
There was a perfect amount of clouds. This place was the kind of thing from a movie; a lot of people say that for a lot of things, but it’s absolutely true here. We headed back down the cable car to the same place and I took even more pictures of the whole area. This was the most fun I’ve had in a long time.
And tomorrow, we were headed to-
(gets interrupted)