The sun came out for my last day in Sapa. I made some last climbs up and down the mountain to enjoy the warm weather. I spent the morning talking to travelers. One adventure driven Brit gave me some tips in Laos, which I gladly took seeing as I had yet to get a guidebook and was due in that country in less than a day.
He told me that he never took the same route out of a city as he took into the city and that he was disappointed that when he took Laos Aviation it wasn't as shoddy as he had hoped. I got the sense that he had booked the flight in hopes of a plane crash, or at least a loss of one engine. I saw him in the market later chewing on a piece of corn and sitting with a local. He was basking in his schmoozing with the locals and wanted little to do with another traveler.
I met a timid American couple who had been in SE Asia for more than a month and were still using bottled water to brush their teeth. We went for a walk down one mountain to Cat Cat village. Halfway to the village on a bamboo bridge across a river, the girl announced that this was as far as she was going. I had seen enough of the area and went back with them happily.
I took a walk on my own in the afternoon with a few hours to spare before the minibus took me back down the mountain to the train station. I walked up to the flower gardens at the top of the mountain on a recommendation. Many flowers, she said. Very beautiful.
A more accurate description would have been: Many stairs. Very exhausting. It was one staircase after the next built into the side of the mountain. The flowers were mostly dead, too, seeing as we were heading into winter. I followed signs to the orchid garden and found lots of bare hanging pots of orchids and a few dying blooms. I followed more signs to the flower garden, up and up. I climbed out of the fog and into the sun. I quit before I made it up the last set of stairs.
As I climbed back down, the fog thickened around the bamboo trees on the side of the road. It was beautiful how the trees were wrapped in mist, how the stalks looked dark and looming and shot straight into the sky, and how sun lit up the tops of the branches creating tiny halos at the tips of each one.
On the minibus, I got a very comfortable seat in front of a very loud Australian. He had a booming laugh that started with a squeal and then exploded into a laugh track cackle on high volume. I could picture his teeth clapping together as he laughed. The bus jerked around curved and jostled me on the mostly unpaved roads down and around the mountain. The Australian struck up a conversation with another loud couple at the back of the bus and the topic of conversation quickly turned to the Australian's full bladder. His friends suggested that he stand up and use one of the windows on either side of him to relieve himself. The pitch of the bus was not making me sick, but one more guffaw or possible way to relieve his full bladder and I thought I might need to use one of the windows myself.
Made it off the bus and into a soft sleeper. Met some Americans at dinner who invited me to the dining car for a drink, which I accepted and then stayed inside and read my book instead. For some reason, the book seemed like more promising company.
