Driving into the mountains is an exciting experience; whether in Wales, the Alps or Vietnam, when I see peaks on the horizon my heart races and my eyes come alive. On the bus journey from the plains of Hanoi towards the Northern mountains, my smile grows as the distant peaks grow bigger and then surround us.

The coach weaves through mountain roads, gently ascending beside the steep rock walls on our right and a deep valley plunging away to our left.

Sapa is an old French colonial town set high in the mountains near the Chinese border. French-Vietnamese architechture stands around a lake, set to a backdrop of stunning jungle covered peaks. Stepping off the bus just took my breath away. I think my first words were “I’m gonna like it here”.

The local guides know the bus schedule, and as we collect our bags we are surrounded by people offering to take us trekking. Sapa is home to a number of ethnic minority hill tribes, who consider the incursion of ‘lowland Vietnamese people’ and tourists as an odd distraction and an opportunity to make money. The biggest tribe is the Hmong, an ethnic group of Chinese origin, of whom many fled to Northern Vietnam due to ethnic and religious persecution (they are Catholic). The town is bathed in ornately coloured garments of the different tribes, black for the Hmong but also pink, gold and many more.

We make our way the short distance to our hotel, and settle in. First task in town is lunch and a coffee while working out what we’re actually going to do in this beautiful place. Most people do a single or multi day trek through the rice paddies in the valley, a beautiful walk to take. It sounded lovely, but something else loomed over us.

Sapa sits in the shadow of the tallest mountain in Indochina… Fansipan (or Phan Xi Pang to locals). The town sits at a lofty elevation of about 1500m, and towering over it are ridgelines leading to the Fansipan summit at 3,147m. On a clear morning you can see the summit from the town centre, and a cable car leading to it. We hadn’t come here to climb it, but it called to us in a way we could never ignore.

With some 1500m of ascent over a 10km walk to the top (ignoring the descent) and going well into the territory of altitude sickness, most people take 2 or 3 days to summit Fansipan, usually then getting the cable car down. It is possible to do it in a single day, a 6-8 hour ascent to get the cable car down, and for the few tourists  who choose it a further 5 hour descent.

Tourists are legally required to be guided to the summit. I don’t know whether any attempt is made to pretend that this is for safety, but it is clearly to support the local guiding industry on which the economy is founded. We had read many reports of people who had climbed Fansipan without guides or permits and gotten away with it (as well as some people who’d been fined $100 each), and we were in no doubt that we could do it without a guide. There was no navigational or technical difficulty, just a long slog up a path to the top. We thought and discussed a lot, and agreed that we should get a guide, not so much for the law but for the ethics of supporting the community who were hosting us, and playing by their rules on their ground.

We began checking out guide agencies and speaking to the many guides offering themselves in town…. The resounding answer was that nobody guides it any more as nobody wants to walk to the top now that there is a cable car. A couple of shabby organizations would guide us there, but over multiple days and/or with big groups. We decided to do it in a single big day, since we thought we could and we didn’t want to pay for 2 days of guiding. We certainly didn’t want to tag into a big group and be subject to the lowest common denominator.

The last stop was one we’d read a lot about, the best guiding service around, Sapa O’Chau. They would guide us on our own over a single day, but it would cost more. Normally we would go cheap, but Sapa O’Chau is an award winning social enterprise who employ young mothers so that they can afford for children to continue going to school rather than being sent to work as guides or street vendors at an early age. Those children can then also board at the charity’s school, where English literacy is taught as a priority so as to maximise their earning potential in the future. We were very happy to pay a bit more knowing that our money we going to such a good cause.

We met our guide Duong at 0530 the next morning and drove through a spectacular sunrise to the ranger station at the base of the route. We were given some breakfast and we set off up Fansipan at around 0615.

Around 45 minutes in, with over 12 hours still facing us down, the question that every hillwalker or mountaineer asks themselves came to light…. Why on earth are we doing this? (We may have used different wording) It’s hot at 7am, we’re already breathing hard following Duong’s blistering pace, and it’s becoming apparent that the view all day will be nothing but fog. We both mulled this over as we trudged on, passing through Camp 1 after just over an hour. We were told that groups doing the 3 day trek can be so slow that they stop here for the first night.

Time and kilometres ticked by as we joined the ridgeline that would curve around to the summit, if only we could see it. Occasional breaks in the cloud gave us views of beautiful ridges and couloirs, but never long enough to truly appreciate it. And that was the realisation, that we do this because we feel a sense of belonging here, an affinity with and adoration for the mountains. Their size and scale, the beauty of their curves and ridges and edges, they call to us in a way we cannot ignore even when suffering for our love. When on their slopes, we may be wishing for the achievement of the end, and the end of suffering, but we also somehow feel belonging and purpose in a way that no town can give us. And so we resign ourselves to suffer for our souls.

Our approach to the hills, after time spent with people far more experienced than ourselves, is to take a steady pace which we can sustain indefinitely, without the need for a break (though we may take one to appreciate the location). When in the UK we often find ourselves being overtaken by countless others on the way up, only to pass them in a collapsed heap 30 minutes later. We were adopting this pace, and it soon became apparent that our guide Duong wasn’t appreciating it. I would hear him gasping for air behind me, and after a while he was dropping back out of sight. We established a routine where he would drop back out of sight, we would slow a little, and he would come racing up to catch us. He evidently preferred the sprint and stop approach.

We soon arrived at Camp 2, where people doing the 2 day trek (the most common) will sleep, and where Duong had planned for us to eat lunch. It was 9am, so we weren’t quite ready for lunch, but we were quite pleased to be 2/3 of the way to the top already. After a short stop to chat to people and for Duong to have some rice, we headed out for the top.

Summiting this mountain is particularly tough for something of its size and nature for 2 reasons. The first is that if doing it in a single day, you go from 1500m to 3147m in a single push, without any acclimatisation time in the middle, so you really feel the altitude. The second is the amount of descent required to ascend. The route follows a beautiful undulating ridgeline, meaning that for every ascent to a small peak, you then descend to carry on. Leaving Camp 2 we thought that we could see the summit ahead, and that most of the descent and re-ascent was over. Duong then pointed out to us that the summit was behind what we could see, and as we got closer we saw a huge descent ahead of us, the biggest yet. It was pretty gutting. Nonetheless, after 4 hours of walking we arrived at the cable car summit station. It was such a relief to be at the top!

We went though the station to see the summit point we were expecting, but Duong pointed us up another set of stairs. Then another. Then another. It turned out that 30 more minutes of walking up steep staircases remained.

Knowing that for the last 5 years there has been a cable car and cafe at the top, I expected something similar to Snowdon in the UK, a tasteful building cut into the mountain, and a few more visitors than you would expect. What we found was more like a shopping complex, and we discovered that the cable car transports around two thousand people an hour to the top….Two thousand people….an hour!

We dragged our tired, sweaty, oxygen deprived bodies through the complex and up the stairs. The 2-day trekkers had summited at dawn and aside from the 3 who we passed walking down that morning, any others had long since descended on the cable car, so we were the only walkers there in such a state amidst the thousands of people in their casual town clothes, some dressed quite nicely to pay respects at the new temples here. As we closed in to the summit the altitude was really affecting me, and I was hauling myself up each step, using the handrail to my side, a wreck. I looked to my left, expecting to see Duong casually cruising up having been acclimatised from regular trips here, but was relieved to see him collapsed over the railings. Step by step we hauled ourselves closer, eventually telling Duong that he could wait for us as he had no desire to reach the summit for his many hundredth time.

Every time someone coming down the stairs wouldn’t break their 3-abreast row to allow me past, I wanted to kill them. At one point a guy similar in age to me came up to me, grabbed me by the arm and said something in a Vietnamese accent which I couldn’t understand. After asking him to repeat it twice, him still clinging onto my arm, I heard him say ‘I want to kiss you’. I threw his arm off and he got the message.

The final set of stairs complete, we stood atop the summit. It was heaving with people! On this platform only 10m square there must have been over a hundred people.

We have been to this height in mountains before, but never so unacclimatised… We were shredded.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw him coming towards me, the kissing guy…. I was ready to throttle him. He opened his mouth and said far more clearly ‘I want piktur with you’. Ohhhhh! Sure. Oops!

We descended back to where Duong was awaiting our return. Having descended only 100m we felt a little better, and saw that Duong was laying on our lunch. Out of his bag he pulled bread, cheese, a wide selection of fruit, some meat and drinks, a luxurious lunch for such a place.

Physically and emotionally refreshed, we started our descent. Cruising down the stairs we could see the hoards of people around the complex. It upset me. I felt that these people had not earned the right to be here, had not paid their respect to the mountain to earn their place on it’s summit. My somewhat arrogant view of this place made me feel angry at the pollution of something as sacred as a summit by so many people here with such a casual attitude. While I continue to feel this way, I also respect that to the Vietnamese people this is a part of their land, that they are just as (if not more) entitled to be here, and that my warped views on the nature of mountains is nothing but my own opinion. I do still find it sad that the peace, awe and beauty of such a summit has been torn apart by a desire to make money from maximising the number of tourists who can get there.

Most people who walk up decide to take the cable car down, but both for principles and for budgeting we would walk back. The descent was brutal! I have nobody but myself to blame for this, as I am out of shape, but still, it was hard! The early stages involved a lot of descent then re-ascent while still at an altitude we struggled with, then as we got lower and our lungs recovered, the suffering was taken over by our weak knees.

Duong clearly struggled with the ascent even more than us, but absolutely cruised the descent. As a rule of thumb, the lighter someone is the easier they find descents, and Duong was a lot lighter than either of us. Also, lighter and more nimble footwear makes quick and accurate steps easy in descent. Duong would stop and chill on his phone for a while, then run down to catch us up. Guidebook time for descent is 5-6 hours, and Duong told us that the day before he had descended from the top in 2.

For the last hour, the tendons around my knees just screamed, until finally the jungle opened and we were at the ranger station, we were finished.

Having both consumed all of our considerable water supplies, we raced to a stall and bought a drink, collapsing in a chair to enjoy the refreshment. At the next table was a Hmong guide in her beautiful attire, and two American women doing a valley trek. The guide asked us whether we had done a 2 or 3 day trek, we said we’d done it as a 1-day. She was rather confused until we repeated it a few times. “Wow…so quick” she said, turning and saying to her clients that normally a quick group of 1-day trekkers arrive back after dark, having walked for 12 hours. We looked at our watches and smiled…it was mid afternoon and we’d done it in just 8.5 hours.

A shower was great, an iced coffee was amazing, and our bed was perfect. We were woken the next day by our hotel staff knocking on our door telling us that we had to leave. “No… We’re booked for another night” I said, apparently there had been some communication issues and the gentleman hadn’t understood my English as well as I’d hoped. Nobody’s fault, just one of those things, but they had guests arriving booked into our room and we had to leave. A rapid pack up and we were back on the road, finding a new hotel.

Sadly such short notice did mean that the cheaper places were gone, but we found the Sapa Romance hotel, and it was perfect. We spent the day relaxing and recovering, while planning our next adventure!

Read our post about the rest of our time in Sapa here, or check out our blog library for past posts, including our little taste of paradise in Nha Trang from just before we came to Sapa.