Author: mmm-yoso

On our last morning in Sapa, still feeling the jet lag, we rose early, and the Missus decided that She wanted to take a "short hike" down to the waterfalls near Cat Cat Village. With our last "short hike" still fresh in my mind, I was a bit hesitant. But this turned out to not be too bad. To reach the trail down to Cat Cat Village, you walk through the Sapa Market, and down the road. The early morning view of the misty valley is breathtaking.

After paying admission at the entry booth, you start heading down the well paved road. Young Xe Om drivers stop as you head down the hill, each one lobbying for the ride back up the hill. "Mister, I’m Coca-cola(tugging his coke hat), you remember me for later ok?" "I’m Lucky Strike(showing me his lucky strike T-shirt), maybe I give you ride back. You remember me ok?" And so forth. Luckily, we arrived early, and the cool morning air made everything much more pleasant.

Instead of heading through Cat Cat Village we just stayed on the main road, eventually crossing this bridge.

There are two or three different trails that lead around the hills. After passing several fields growing Indigo plants, we ended up at the falls, and the bridge that crosses the river. It’s a nice place to take a break.

If we headed across the bridge, we’d have looped through Cat Cat Village.

Weary of the "hard sell" we decided to turn around and head back.

We were lucky to have had an early start. We passed large groups of tourists making their way down the road. It was a nice little morning hike.

Famished from our morning walk, we noticed a quaint looking little shop just down the street from the hotel. This was in the opposite direction of most of the businesses in Sapa, so the street was a bit quieter.

The place was called Drop & Drop Restaurant. We walked in and had a seat. When it came to ordering, the Missus still wanted more vegetables. So we started with the Mixed Vegetables(10,000 VND – about 60 cents/US).

For this price we hadn’t expected much, and this was just a basic stir fry of onions, cabbage, carrots, and tomatoes. Light soy sauce and black pepper flavor, the tomatoes were very good.

I had decided to try one meat dish, and settled on the H’mong Style Beef(24,000 VND – $1.50/US):

The dish arrived on a sizzling plate, well seasoned, and pretty tender. The meat had a good beefy flavor, and was much better than I thought it would be.

The story of the next dish was interesting. I recalled seeing the wonderful watercress in the Sapa Market, and was happy to see stir fried watercress on the menu. When I ordered it, the Young Lady took a long pause, and looked at us, and said; "okay, we can do that!" While we were eating our stir-fried vegetables, a Girl entered the restaurant carrying a bundle of fresh green watercress, which was stir fried, and made its way to our table a few minutes later.

Fresh, crisp, slightly bitter, with a hint of sweetness this was quite good (16,000 VND – $1).

After our meal, I managed to arrange for a late check-out with the hotel($9). Soon enough the day passed and we caught our Bus back to Lao Cai.(31,000 VND/each)

In Vietnam they don’t tell you anything Part 2:

Now it gets a bit strange. We arrive at Lao Cai, but instead of stopping at the Train Station, we stop in front of a restaurant. The Driver gets out and announces, "okay, everybody, you stop here and eat before you get on train." Huh? Not getting a good explanation as to what was going on and unable to get any information, we crossed the street, and walked over to Lao Cai Station.

We knew we had to exchange our tickets for boarding passes, but where was the question of the day. As we head to the train station, we see the "Guy with 3 wives" sitting with a young lady at one of the juice stalls in front of the train station. So I ask very innocently, "Is this your wife?" And he gives me a weird look and say, "no, no, we are not married." I dunno, working on wife #4 perhaps? After asking around a bit, the Missus figures out where we exchange our tickets. We had to go 2 blocks from the train station, into another restaurant, and up to the second floor to a desk to exchange our tickets for boarding passes. I’d say they’ve got a bit of a racket going.

After buying a few oranges we settled in. I noticed a couple looking confused, and disoriented, just like we were 30 minutes ago. I went up to see if I could help them out. They turned out to be tourists from France. I had gotten to them a bit late. They had just paid someone $5 to get their tickets exchanged. I dunno, but I don’t think I’d hand my train tickets over to some stranger…..

  Soon after sunset, our train was called, and the huge mass of humanity boarded the train. Just as on our train ride to Sapa, we thanked Beach for making sure we had an entire 4 berth to ourselves. Not much sleep tonight, but lots of excitement. Tomorrow night we’d be in Siem Reap!

As I started typing this up, the Missus peered over my shoulder; "no, not another market!"
Me: "Yep…."
She: "Just how many markets are you going to do posts on?"
Me: "All of the markets we visited."
She: "I am soooo over all these market posts."

Sigh, so yes, it is but another market post. I believe that each market we visited had it’s own personality, and told me much about the towns, villages, and cities we visited. Cho Sapa was no different. It may have been smaller than all the others we visited, but I learned a bit.

The Sapa Market is located right off the main street down a set of crowded slippery steps, or the down the alleyway lined with produce a block further.

And though the market has a nice section of fruit.

 

We noticed most of it was being unloaded from large trucks early in the morning, coming from elsewhere. It was the sparkling fresh vegetables that really caught our attention.

In spite of the fact that we had already spent over a week in Vietnam, our internal clocks were still off kilter. But one of the benefits of jet lag, was rising early. Walking around Sapa Market in the morning, you could see the fresh vegetables arriving.

By motorbike and by foot.

Up the steep hills from the green valleys below.

The slow procession of fresh, green produce made its way to the market.

If this were San Diego, people would be going ga-ga over this stuff.

I found these very fresh young and tender bamboo shoots to be inspiring, as you will find out later on in this post.

And though I found many similarities to the steep climbs we had in Cusco.

I never saw anything like this old man carrying a bed frame up the hill from Cat Cat Village!

Or the "meat delivery"…..

I noticed something very interesting at Sapa Market. All the butchers were women, and they worked with such skill and precision.

   

You knew they were not to be trifled with.

There was only one or two vendors selling fish.

But I managed to snap this photo of some very alive Rice Paddy Crabs, since I know they have many fans in the States.

Though we never found a bowl of Bun Rieu in Sapa. Perhaps I wasn’t looking hard enough.

Later on in the day, the area around the market steps comes alive with prepared food. You can find Banh My, Banh Bao, and other snacks. One booth had long sausages coiled up, it was a nice variety to go along with the offerings from the "food court" in the center of the market. This booth had a variety of cut and shredded pork.

We watched this lady preparing and chopping pieces of pork into thin little strips. Until it hit us. She was making Bi(pork skin and finely shredded pork) by hand!

The item below is quite interesting. We had been told about it, but had never seen it until our last day in Sapa. H’mong Smoked Pork.

It’s not very surprising that the H’mong smoke a good amount of meat, since it looked like many of the homes in the villages we visited lacked electricity, and thus refrigeration. Smoking is probably common practice as a means of preservation.

Of course to some, this is just another day at the office.

But to me, it was a wonderful melange of sounds, sights, and smells, that has been welded into my grey matter.

Even the little things, like the little coal cylinders used for the stoves. The Missus mentioned them as being part of Her childhood in Qingdao. No central heating then, so the coal was used for the stoves, and the long lasting radiant heat for warming the family during the cold, Qingdao winter nights. Not to romanticize the whole thing, I’m quite happy with modern conveniences. But as a child of Hawaii, I am forever fascinated about these type of things.

We returned to Sapa from our overnight trip to the Can Cau Market and Bac Ha feeling a bit tired. We wanted something a bit more comforatable than the rooms at the Mountain View Hotel. After checking out a few places, we decided that a back room at the Auberge Dang Trung would fulfill our needs. The price? $18/US per night.

The room we had was quiet, though it was a bit of a march up several flights of winding stairs, and through a raised courtyard.

After stowing our stuff, the Missus and I were a bit hungry, but we weren’t ready to face the hoards of hawkers on the streets trying to sell us stuff. We decided to grab a bite at the hotel’s restaurant/lobby/bar/tour office….or whatever you may want to call it. The Missus had one condition; "no more pork, or even meat for that matter." Say what? No meat?

The menu was an interesting hodge-podge of almost everything. In fact, we noticed that many French tourists eat here. They all seemed to order the "ohme-let-te"; fried eggs with a baguette. 

We started with the stir-fried vegetable of the day. Which ended up being cabbage. Ehhh. But what should I have expected for 10,000 VND (less than $1)?

The rice was also typical of what we had in Vietnam, unpolished, off-white, with little gritty bits.

The stif fried noodles with vegetables was decent, mainly because I really enjoyed the soy sauce that was used for the dish. (20,000 VND – approx $1.50)

I scoured the menu for something that I thought would be good. Having seen the lovely fresh bamboo shoots at the market, I ordered the stir fried version, in hopes that it would be fresh bamboo shoots ($15,000 VND – approx $1). And these delivered mightily. If you’ve never had fresh bamboo shoots, you’re missing something good. The texture was a wonderful mild crunch, followed by an almost meaty bite.

Simply seasoned with some decent quality soy sauce and black pepper, this hit the spot. In fact, we made sure to have this again before we left Sapa. Not a bad meal for 50,000VND(a tad over $3/US).

While we were walking around Sapa, we took a ton of photos. Here’s an interesting one; the Pink Floyd Bar & Restaurant, in Sapa? Somehow, I can’t make the connection between The Wall and The Dark Side of the Moon and Sapa. Hmmm, maybe Animals? There must be a story behind this……

Here’s a photo of the Vietnamese-China Border crossing from the town of Lao Cai, which is the dropping off point from the trains arriving from Hanoi to Sapa.

Crossing over the Red River via the Ho Kien Bridge and you’d be in the town of Hekou, Yunnan Province, PR China.

We stopped by on our way back to Sapa to take a photo for the Missus’s Parents. We thought they’d get a kick out of it. And of course, while we were there, we ran into some Chinese visitors:

Who told the Missus She should visit Hekou; "you don’t need a visa, just sneak across the border, see, no problem, we do it all the time when we have visitors." Ummm, no thanks.

So what the heck does Hekou have to do with Com Lam and street food in Sapa? That’ll become evident a bit later on. Street food is quite easy to find in Sapa. Little stalls and vendors line the streets around the Main Square.

Actually, I’d be pretty generous in calling these stalls. In most cases, the set-up consists of a few tiny stools, a grill, and maybe a plastic table.

All of these little stands sell basically the same thing; grilled pork skewers, duck eggs, sweet potato, chestnuts, sometimes grilled sparrow…and Com Lam. Com Lam is basically sticky rice cooked in tubes of bamboo. We were awestruck at the immense amount of these little stands….all selling the same thing.

We chose one, manned by this young lady:

 

Who turned out to be Chinese, and originally from Hekou! Leave it to the Missus to find the only vendor in the whole area who is Chinese. The young lady was overjoyed when she found out the Missus is Chinese.

As she grilled our Com Lam, we learned her story. She was born and raised in Hekou, and ended up marrying a Vietnamese man from Sapa. He was a schoolteacher by trade, and makes a decent amount of money, but it is not enough for the family of three(she has a 5 year old daughter) to make a decent living. In order to make ends meet, she mans this little stand 5-7 days a week, for up to 12 hours a day during the weekends.

This was on our first evening in Sapa, and we could tell a storm was brewing. Several times the winds almost blew the umbrella off the stand, but the Missus helped her hold it in place. For some reason, it is one of my favorite photos.

Soon after my little tube of sticky rice was ready; and with skill and precision(and a knife), the bamboo was peeled back to reveal the tube of rice within.

  The rice is chewy, and mildly nutty in flavor. I really like the "dip" made of peanuts, salt, chilies, and a bit of sugar. You can read more about Com Lam on Wandering Chopsticks blog, here and here on Oishii Eats.  While the Missus was waiting for Her item to be ready, She learned a bit more about the young lady. Her Mom who she tries to visit every month, still lives in Hekou. Her Vietnamese is not very good, which makes her kind of isolated among all the other vendors, though she has a few "friends". You could tell that the young woman missed speaking in Chinese.

Can you see what the Missus is getting?

Yep, it’s what they call Trung Vit Long…aka Balut. Something I’ve had before, but don’t really seek out, and this version was way past it’s "due date". Egad, I can’t even describe it. Good fertilized eggs have a wonderful "juice" that tastes like the essence of the bird, this one didn’t.

I’ve never seen Balut that already had feathers…….we couldn’t make it past a mere taste. The Young lady though it was funny. At that point, the wind was whipping up, and it looked like the rain was on the way so we left. Knowing that the young woman was starving for some company that could understand her native language(the Missus told me the accent was sometimes very difficult to understand), we decided to drop by and grab a bite before leaving Sapa.

She told the Missus a bit about her life in Sapa(where men love to gamble, and a "justifiable" beating of your wife is still deemed ok by some), about having a daughter who barely knows her because she works all the time, and the feeling of being so close to your "home", but feeling so far away…..

There is a large group of covered food stalls just North of the main square, and while walking through the booths we saw this, the "pig on a stick".

It was 240,000 VND a Kilo($15/US)….there was no way the Missus and I could eat a kilo of pork meat. Somehow, we managed to let them know that we wanted a half-kilo. We chose some leg meat, and some back meat. It was pretty disappointing. The skin, instead of being crisp, was more sticky and hard, and the pork had no flavor.

Oh well, at least I got "pig on a stick!"

One last thing. Here’s your typical Sapa full service masseuse, barber, hair dresser, and most importantly ear cleaner.

Ear cleaning must be a pretty big event, he’s even got a spectator!