All Summer Long

“Where you stay in Sa Pa?” asks the bus driver, five hours into our journey from Hanoi.

“We don’t know.”

This is the kind of thing that happens when you let your hotel organise anything more complex than a single day out. We asked them to arrange everything; we thought the best gift to ourselves for Christmas would be a rest from planning. Somewhere down the line, between all the swan towels and Christmas cakes, they forgot to tell us what the hell we would be doing on our trip. So here we are on the bus, almost arriving in Sa Pa for a three day trekking tour with no idea where it starts.

A few phone calls later and we’re dropped somewhere at a hotel, given a strange soup and talked through their plans for us. Sa Pa is an edge-of-the-world kind of place in the coldest part of the country. Our itinerary here involves three days of walking through contoured rice paddies, valleys and bamboo forests. There’ll be a home-stay with a traditional family of the local village. We’ll be fed an extensive menu of Vietnamese dinners that will bring us to our knees, and we need to be ready in fifteen minutes.

After a quick bag drop in the room, we’re met by our guide for the day, the unusually small Mi. She says she’ll take us down the “small path” to her village and giggles as if she’s being tickled by the tip of a thin crop. Seconds later, we’re out in the cold, bounding through rice paddies with a stitch, practically falling through the valley with little time to take in Sa Pa’s sweeping vistas as we try to keep up with her. Not only is she small, but Mi is unusually fast.

When I fall and slice my hand in a turmeric-yellow scree, she repeats the words “be careful” like a mantra. It’s as though we were wrong to follow her example of leaping like young kangaroos through the paddies; and while I’m bleeding out, agreeing that I will be more careful and secretly stealing a moment to see the mountains curtained in mist, Nicola once again produces a wet wipe. It really only amounts to a simple scratch in all honesty. Yellow from the dust, Nicola cleans my hand, covers the wound with a plaster, and we forge ahead through the beauty.

Not long after, Mi’s giggling—which she’s managed to keep up for the duration of the tour, even between the “be carefuls”—gives way to hysterical screaming. I ask what’s wrong and she turns to us with an expression somewhere in the vague realm between laughter and pain to reveal that we have finally encountered snakes. As it turns out, our tour guide has a fear of them, so I’m quickly deployed as her human shield while she lobs rocks and clumps of mud over my shoulder to scare them away. I struggle to see them at first as we’re surrounded by long grass and roots, any of which could easily have been the serpents themselves, but then I finally see them curled together at the other side of the rock and it’s disgusting. The small black coil vibrates slightly as it’s bludgeoned with mud.

Now we’re running. There’s snakes everywhere, apparently. She hadn’t told us this before. If they get into your house, you have to call a shaman who, like an exterminator of bad spirits, will cleanse your home and restore the karma for your family. Mi’s giggling is infectious and it seems to have taken me as a host; my eyes are shot red. Nicola’s usual giggle is now also out of control as tears are falling down her face. I’m feeling so dirty with my bleeding hand that I hope there’s a shaman somewhere in the village with more to offer than a wet wipe.

To top it off, in order to get to Mi’s house, we have to go through a stream. The water hasn’t been graced with a carefully arranged carpet of stones to help us cross. Instead, we watch Mi drop random rocks into the water to form a “bridge”, which—let’s face it—could never be used, and we’re thinking “has no one ever done this tour before?” So, encouraged by the snorts of two pigs that are now running wild in the paddies, we cross our fingers and just leap.

Finally we arrive at the village with its water wheels and cascading falls. Mi picks up a trident made from sticks, which she uses to discourage the excited dogs, but that is really the last obstacle we have to overcome. By 4pm we’re in a small hut watching something they’re saying is a dance, but actually the dispirited man that’s found himself implicated in this performance just seems to be writhing on the floor, whispering through some ancient instrument with the capacity of a tiny lung.

Note: I am only kidding about the wet wipe. Nicola produces a medicine chest miraculously from her pocket whenever there’s the threat of injury, and I’ll probably need her full array of first aid if I mention wet wipes again.