Never Underestimate a Mountain

So I and 2 friends, Steve and Sarah (fellow Canadians), hiked the highest mountain in Vietnam - Mount Fanxipan (kind of pronounced like 'fancy pants'). I am not sure where to begin or what part to write about but I will say it was hard, crazy, and at times scary just as my friend Melissa had warned. The height of the mountain is 3,143m and we started at around 1900m, however it was quite the distance just to get to the base of the mountain. We had a guide, who had a cigarette in his hand for almost the whole time, and a porter, who carried all our food, cooking stuff, sleeping bags and mats, and tent by himself in a pair of broken sandals and tatered clothes - and yet these 2 still whipped our butts up the mountain.

We hiked through fields, valleys, streams (which I fell in within the first hour and had wet feet for all of the first day and had to wear plastic bags around my feet on the second day), bamboo forests, rain forest, vertical rock faces, and other muddy and slippery surfaces. We indeed made it to the top but now we had to worry how we were going to make it down since it had rain during the night and there were some serious steep sections along the trek.

Sarah and I rejoicing that we finally made it.

It took us all day and the next morning to make it to the peak, but when we got there we were there less than 10 minutes because it was absolutely freezing and we couldn't see anything since we were in the clouds and the fog was thick. The frustrating part of the hike was on the way up to the peak, we would being going down a lot that we knew every step down was an additional step up that we would have to do later. A funny realization we had was when we were looking at the other mountains, someone said "wow, they are so high" and then we would realize "oh crap, we are going higher than those mountains".

Steve on top on the world, well on top of the mountain

We had some casualties along the way, I actually fell on a rock the day before and had cut open my shin which wouldn't stop bleeding since it was in a awkward spot and we didn't have much medical supplies on us. Luckily I had my good old hiking bandana and used that to tie around my leg, but had to be careful to not make it worse. Sarah is allergic to smoke and with our one pack a day smoker guide, one eye got really aggrevated that she could only wear one contact and her depth perception was slightly impaired. Steve became an old woman (just joking!) because we did so much trekking going up that going down was hard on the knees.

You can see our porter near the bottom corner of the pic.

The trek to the peak was beautiful and we did have some clear skies. If the fog lifted more often we would have been able to see China and Laos. I don't regret doing it and feel great that we did it, but I don't think I would volunteer to do it for a second time. We ached for days afterwards ...

So when I said our porter carried our tent, I should rephrase and say he carried our tarp!

We assumed we would be sleeping in a regular old tent, but when we saw them collecting bamboo wood for our campfire we noticed they had cut 4 fresh green bamboo sticks down. The frame of our sleeping accommodation was made out of bamboo, which I thought was pretty cool. Then they drapped a tarp over it and we slept on a tarp, all five of us together, my friends and I with our porter and guide at about 2400m up the mountain. It rained and was windy during the night and poor Sarah was on the edge, but our tarp didn't collapse, the wind just blew right threw it ...

Anyway, we survived and thinking back it wasn't that bad, but doing it once is good enough for me.