The next and last stop in Vietnam would be Sa Pa, a small town close to the border of China in the northern mountains of Vietnam. From Sa Pa, travelers can arrange a trek to minority villages and home stays with people that live in the minority villages.
This amounts to cold, damp weather, long walks from primitive village to primitive village and a chance to finally wear the fleece, pants, socks and sneakers I've been carrying around. Sa Pa is accessed by a nine hour night train to the town of Lao Cai and then another hour minibus ride up the mountain to Sa Pa, which calls for a soft sleeper.
Only hard says the woman behind the ticket window at the train station. This is two days before departure and she's telling me that only hard sleepers are available? I ask again. She says it again, hard only. We shoot each other dirty looks and then me and my fellow travelers hand over the 65,000 dong to take the trip ($4US). At least its cheap. With the tickets written out and about to be handed over, I take a closer look. Berth type: hard seat. Hard seat? Hard sleeper I have done. Soft seat is one step below that. Hard seat is the bottom rung of train seats. This could mean plank benches with cages of ducks and chickens shoved in between. I panic. I shake my head and make every gesture I know to indicate that this is not what we have requested. My fellow travelers look at me like I am crazy. The woman behind the counter sets her dirty look into a deep, penetrating evil eye and locks her eyes with mine. She points to the refund counter next door, ticket price minus ten percent. I take my ticket and try very hard not to hate her.
Okay, well we've got a full day to sort out this mess, which we spend eating, shopping and trying to forget that we have a hard seat for the next night's journey. We tell other travelers that we've booked a hard seat to give them a hearty laugh. We meet travelers who have managed hard sleepers and have booked the tickets at the same window after us. I try again not to hate the woman who sold us tickets.
The night of the hard seat comes and we can only pray for an upgrade on the train. We beg the conductor before we board but he smiles and points us to our assigned hard seats. The hard seats are not plank benches, thank goodness. There are also no livestock in sight and my scan of the walls and ceilings for bugs and roaches comes up dry. Okay, I breathe out. The hard seats are wooden benches that seat two people. They have backs that are so upright that you feel like you are leaning over. The wooden slats are arranged in such a way that slouching and stretching your legs numbs or sends shooting pains through your limbs. When a woman squeezes in between my friend Jane and the window to make the number of people on her bench three, I think she's about to cry and I can't blame her. I am ready to cry for all three of us. Instead, I manage to ignore the pain and doze off to sleep as the train rolls out of the station. My body shuts down and defense system comes to the rescue.
An hour into the ride, I am shaken awake by a female conductor who had her hands clasped against her face, the universal symbol for sleep. Sleep... she means soft berth! We jump up, grab our bags and follow her, desperate to recline for the remaining eight hours of the journey. We cross through an endless number of carriages, jogged around the corridors with our packs on our backs, hoping to be led to a soft berth. A soft berth it is. My friends are taken to one compartment, and I am given my own quarters, a single bed. Okay, so my bed is narrow and hard, but its a bed and its all to myself. I wrap myself in my sleep sack, flick the lights off and fall into the rocky slumber of a night train. Somewhere that's not quite sleep but better than trying to get comfortable on a church pew.
