track our trek

we spent one nightmarish afternoon in desperate search of a working atm, when we realized we would run out of dong before we could pay for our accommodations...turns out sapa only has 2 atm's, neither of which takes foreign mastercard atm cards! completely our fault for not reading up ahead of time...so we hopped on a van after our trek in hopes of making it down the mountain to lao cai where we were told we'd easily find cash. an hour and a half later we made it into town, after circling sapa no fewer than 3 times with horn beeping until the 12 passenger van was filled with 16 people and luggage. (vietnamese van drivers don't go anywhere until the van is bursting at the seams!) we also had to stop twice for two more people to be sick on the side of the road. the driver tried to charge us 30,000vnd apiece. (the standard fare is 25,000vnd per person.) i refused, insisting he could have 50,000vnd or zero. finding no atm near the train station, as we'd hoped, we set about asking at several guesthouses...not an easy feat as almost no one spoke any english...one nice woman managed to pantomime something about walking 2km. finally we found a travel agent who helped us arrange two motorbikes to carry us to lao cai's 3 atm's to try them out. we agreed to a price of 6000vnd per person each way...half an hour later, having tried all of lao cai's atm's in vain, the motorbike drivers brought us back to the train station & demanded 7000vnd each instead. sigh...did i mention the reason we were there in the first place was that we were running out of dong?? to make matters worse, as there are no trains arriving from hanoi after 5pm, there are no buses returning to sapa...we made several inquiries and were told we could hire a car or motorbike for prices ranging from 300,000vnd to 700,000vnd or spend the night in lao cai and return in the morning. quite an increase from the standard 50,000vnd for 2 people! after an hour of hanging around the train station asking numerous people for help, we were quite frustrated...if we'd had 700,000vnd to throw away, we wouldn't be in lao cai in the first place! finally, a young boy at a restaurant agreed to call his "friend" to take us for 200,000vnd. that left us with exactly enough cash to pay for our previous night's stay and retrieve our bags and passports from the cat cat hotel...and it was 9pm. (hotels in vietnam retain your passports at the front desk for the duration of your stay...that was a bit hard to swallow at first.)
exhausted and disgusted, we decided we needed to turn the evening around. short of calling family in desperation to arrange some western union help, our best option was to find an expensive hotel that would accept credit cards and give us a cash advance. so we  trudged to the lovely chau long hotel, where they gave us a cash advance on our credit card, & we promptly checked into a beautiful superior room (with working electric heater) for $90. phew! in our three months of travel, we have not spent more than $13/night for hotel accommodations, except for our week in japan! that one night in the chau long was like heaven!! we took 2 loonnnng hot showers apiece, one before bed and one after the delicious buffet breakfast! and we lounged around until about 3 minutes before check out time! we gotta do that more than once very 3 months! btw, we learned our lesson and now carry a handful of us dollars everywhere in case of emergency...