Walking Tour of Sapa, Part Two

The walk from the café involves two more flights of steep, chipped stairs, some scary dogs, and, surprisingly often, rain, fog, and darkness. The photos here are from a daytime trip we all took with the children, so you’ll have to imagine the rain, fog, and darkness.

Although it isn’t uphill both ways, the way to school is seriously uphill one of the ways, and, at 8:45 when class is over, dark on the downhill.

On this day, we went a slightly different way than usual because we were coming from the park where again Bruce and Ann bought all the children ice-cream. Ann had one or two leftover after some of us declined, and she sought out other children to give them to. Before long she went back and bought another big bag of cones and gave them to all the children in the park. For at least one little pants-less boy, it was his first taste of ice-cream. We also gave a cone to our 70-year old Hmong friend who had followed me to the lake earlier in the day.

After ice cream, our whole group started up the first flight of stairs to school.

Then the second ...

And finally, the last hill. Here is the classroom building with children’s laundry drying outside.

The children spend a lot of time washing their clothes in a tub by hand with cold water, and Bruce and Ann wanted to buy them a washing machine so that they could spend more time studying and playing, and less time on chores, but others vetoed the plan because they feared the girls would not be able to readjust to hand-washing once they returned to their villages.