This is the tale of the Edwards family journey to the Northern Highlands of Vietnam.

Well, we are on the train from Hanoi to Sapa, well the train station arrive’s at is Laocai. Then another 40 to 60 minutes by car to Sapa. An overnight sleeper, this is a first for me, cost $84 per person for a two way trip. The sleeping berth is a two up and two down, not much room, but shall we say cosy.

We have two big suitcases, you can tell we are not backpackers, well there is an idea, start a blog for non backpackers. The Twitter and blogs are full of backpacker information about how to do and that on the cheap, so why not a middle of the road blog for those who need info on what four star hotel to use.

So back to the journey, first problem arises. Someone or should I say four people are in the berth that was booked for us. We explain to the lady guard, she gets on the mobile phone and an agent appears to tell us there was a mix up and they had double booked the berth. Anyways, we move to another one and all systems are now go. But not for long, we try to open the door and it won’t open. After some messing around we open it, I step out close the door and guess what it doesn’t open. Call on the little lady guard and she comes along and open it she does. We get the hang of it and off the train goes on it’s journey of 8 hours, stopping at every station on the way.

Now settling down to write this post on my bunk as the train rocks and rolls. Fell asleep and then I hear the guard calls that we are 30 minutes to our destination, so now is the time to get all our belongings and get ready to disembark the train.

We are met by a driver to take us to Sapa and to our hotel. We are staying at the U Sapa hotel. Feeling tired we check in and crash out for a little while, then decide to take a look around the town of Sapa. The town is filled with hill tribe people selling, hard sell in fact, these girls, ladies and older women are very forceful when it comes to selling. After a while it can become very tiresome and a little irritating, but still they are trying to make a living and feed the family. There are many hill tribes in the town ranging from Black Hmong, Mien and many more. I will have a post with pictures later and a few more stories.

After a couple of hours we head back to the hotel for a quick nap and then out late for dinner.