We arrived in this lovely mountain town via a night train out of Hanoi. Metarphorically and literally Sapa proved to be a breath of fresh air for us after the frustrations of the capital. For a start it's a smallish town so no danger of being run over by hoardes of motor bikes every time you cross the road and the people here are genuinely nice and you don't feel you're going to get ripped off at every move. Best of all though, it's so much cooler, around fifteen degrees or so which is nothing short of paradise after weeks of constantly frying and melting in tendem in temperatures near or over forty degrees. Dare we say it, the temperatures were similar to British summer and we never thought we'd say we craved the British weather! We stayed at an excellent hotel with awesome views of the mountains and rice paddy fields, appering as tiers on the slopes everywhere which were quite stunning. Many of the locals wear traditional dress which just adds to it's off the beaten track appeal. We stayed three days here and did some trekking on a couple of them which no doubt did our increasingly unfit bodies the world of good. The second, around a six hour trek was particularly good featuring top drawer scenery and enlightened by our seventeen year old guide Lily, a local girl from the mountains. She spoke great English and was absolutely hilarious, a real character, constantly referring to Stuart as a 'diamond geezer'. We met a Kiwi/Aussie couple here who we socialised with, Sarah and Jason. Quite astonishingly Sarah's family had lived in exactly the same house as Jo's family in Wellington as they bought the house off them. They knew some of the same people too, a completly crazy coincidence! We returned to Hanoi by train on the night of the 16th ready to fly out on the 17th which ends a near month long tour of Vietnam, from virtually top to bottom. It truly is a interesting and diverse country, with excellent beaches and mountain scenery. It's also wonderously cheap, maybe the cheapest country we've visited with loads of great hotels and pretty decent food. The shopping here is fabulous, and you could deck out your house with all the art and craft work we've seen here not to mention buying several new wardrobes. Getting around is also easy and there's a decent tourism infrastructure making life pretty easy for you not to mention many of the people here have a fair grasp of English. Which brings us neatly onto the people themselves who sadly can be somewhat of a negative here with their after your money antics. When not bugging the life out of you to use their hotel, shop or restaurant they hassle you to death to get on their motorbike or use their taxi. Having endured this sort of thing in Cambodia and India we can just about deal with it but to an inexperienced traveller it would all get too much. As you get to Hanoi it all gets considerably more sinister with blatent scamming and lying and some people's personal manners are just appalling. They may be poor but there comes a point where you can't feel sorry for them when they resort to this kind of behaviour. Don't get us wrong we have met some lovely people here but there are too many bad ones and it leaves a sour taste in the mouth. The heat here is also a real problem and at times it's been downright unpleasant. In the south, the temperatures were just about bearable in the low 30's. As you got further north it reached the truly unbearable in the shape of 40 degree plus temperatures with oppressive humidity and you just don't want to go out when it gets like that. It isn't suprising that a combination of heat and money grabbing, annoying people has made us and other travellers simply lose their tempers sometimes. Still, don't be put off coming here and in general we've had a great time but please be warned!