To be perfectly honest, I’d only vaguely ever heard of Sapa before I arrived in Vietnam, and I had no plans of visiting the mountain resort. It turns out I’m closely following the “tourist trail” since most people fly into Hanoi and then take side trips to Sapa and Halong Bay before heading south, and that’s exactly what I’m doing.

When I first arrived in Hanoi it was hot (in the high 80s) and really humid, so the weather combined with the general insanity of the place made this “colonial French mountain station” called Sapa sound extra nice. My arrival in Hanoi was a little over a week before Tet (lunar new year) begins, and the pace of the place is a bit hard to take, especially right off the plane from Portland.