View from the Cat-Cat Hotel in the northern Vietnamese town of Sapa.

We visited in April 2007.

When the fog finally lifted.

The night train from Hanoi to Sapa is fantastic.  The four-person 2nd class rooms are quite cozy, good aircon, easy to sleep.  You go to sleep in Hanoi, wake up in Sapa.

Matt in his fancy new Hmong embroidered hat.

Sarah in socks.

Where we live in the South, there is never, ever occasion for socks.  But up in the altitudes it gets chilly.  Sapa is the only place in Vietnam where it snows.

Water Buffalo

It often seems like there are more water buffalo than people up in these mountains.

Everybody's got a water buffalo.

Yours is fast but mine is slow.

Oh, where we get them, I don't know, but everybody's got a water buffalo!

But in Sapa, everybody has, like, nine.

I asked whether the Hmong, Yao, and other ethnicitiesended up cultivating these incredibly steep slopes because they were driven up here by the Vietnamese.

No, was the reply.  They just like rice farming in impossible situations.

In town, we stayed at the Cat-Cat Hotel.

This is a view of the town from our balcony.

When we arrived at 7:00 AM, the whole world was suffused with thick fog.  We checked into our room, presented with grand views of blank white mist.

Quite a wondrous surprise, then, when the fog burned off about 9 o'clock.

The hotel provided a complimentary cat.

Water buffalo downtown.

The guy who runs the English pub said it was quite rare, actually, to see water buffalo traveling through town.

On our second day, we rented motorbikes and cruised up over the Tram Tom pass, and into Lai Chau province.

There was even a modicum of off-roading.

Non-terrace farming in Lao Chai province.

Dunno what they're planting.

Waterfall comes down to the road....

...under a bridge and further down the mountain.

Sarah poses in front of Fansipan Mountain.

Fansipan is the tallest mountain in Vietnam, at 3143 meters.

More water buffalo!

We took a hike down through Cat-Cat village.

These girls walked with us the whole way, several miles down and back up, trying to sell us trinkets.

Their business plan was to be adorable and persistent as hell.

The eldest girl was dour.  Almost like she didn't enjoy her profession of Ethnically Themed Beggar.

Cat-Cat village is more a dense collection of farms than a village.