The ride from hell is worth it when you get to remote Sapa in North Vietnam, writes Winsor Mcfaland courstesy travel with Niche Travel.

What side of the road do the Vietnamese drive on?

Whatever side they damn well please!

It's an old joke, but anyone who has tried to brave the traffic in Ho Chi Minh City or Hanoi knows that it contains more than an element of truth. Drivers routinely go the wrong way down one-way streets and blithely ignore traffic signals. Any pedestrian attempting to cross at an intersection will find themselves the target of dozens of motorbikes, many of them containing three, or even four people, some stacked metres high with goods going goodness knows where. All this mayhem is routine, however, compared with the goat track that passes as a road between Sapa, the remote and beautiful hilltop town in far Northern Vietnam, close to the Chinese border, and the outlying, and even more remote, settlements of Laochai and Fin Ho.
The road is currently being worked on, which is good news because a jeep recently crashed several hundred metres to the valley below, killing two tourists, after being hit by a boulder then swept away by a landslide, our hotel manager told us. We just closed our eyes as our cheerful driver, battling with a old Russian-built Jeep with almost completely bald tyres, bounced and slid his way over rocks and gravel made slippery by several days of rain, raced through waterfalls crossing the track and several times took us to within one or two centimetres of a sheer fall to certain death. At one stage we asked to get out and walk as he attempted to squeeze through a narrow gap with a deep fall at one side. He pretended not to understand and we somehow slid our way to safety. My wife said she aged several years in a few minutes.
Fortunately, the 30-kilometre hell ride was worth it. The views are stupendous and you really do feel you are visiting somewhere as yet untouched by mass tourism. We crunched to a halt beside an even smaller track that wound its way into the valley below, an extraordinary vista of paddy fields, roughly built huts, buffaloes and a wild river which was being used both by fishermen and washerwomen.
This is tough country, invaded by the Chinese as recently as 1979, but it is also extremely dramatic, and very beautiful in places. Our first destination was Lao Chai, a small settlement populated by the Black Hmong ethnic minority hill tribe, the majority of whom still wear traditional garb. It is hard to communicate with the locals, but a glance inside some of their huts showed just how tough life is for the minorities, most of whom are subsistence farmers or live from sales of hand-made clothing and jewellery to the growing numbers of tourists in the town. However, the villages have schools and makeshift clinics and the odd hut even has a satellite dish, even though the only electricity is generated by the water from local streams.
The huts are gloomy with bare earth floors, and large families often eat, work and sleep in just a couple of rooms. The air is thick with the smell of woodsmoke. You'll find schoolchildren keen to practice their English.
Our next stop was the village of Ta Van, home to the equally colourful, if more reserved, Giay people. We crossed a shaky wooden suspension bridge that appeared on its last legs and stopped in at a local roadhouse for a cup of tea.
If the weather had been better, and we'd had more time, we could have continued to the Red Dao village of Giang Ta Chai. Alas, we were beaten by the elements.
This is a trekking paradise, though, with stark emerald green hills and mountain views as far as the eye can see.

At the end of our four-hour trek, the jeep was supposed to meet us and return us to our hotel. This being Vietnam, however, it somehow failed to arrive. The jeep eventually arrived almost an hour late with the brief announce, "mud slides" but no further explanation.
The journey back was equally scary, with the rain now lashing down, but at least we made it in one piece. We passed another jeep that had broken down. It contained four very cold and disgruntled-looking Belgians.
Back in the frontier town of Sapa, built by the French in the 1920s as a hill station, there are plenty of restaurants and the pig on a spit outside one looked particularly appetising. A splendidly colourful market at which the Hmong and Dao women will attempt to sell you brightly dyed clothes, blankets and cushion covers.
Sapa is one of the most interesting places in Asia. In the shadow of Mount Fansipan, the highest point in South-East Asia and popular with hardy climbers, it is home to dozens of ethnic minority groups, whom you can distinguish by the colours of their distinctive traditional garb.
The Hmong women sell jackets, bags and shirts, and the Dao women, wearing striking red headdresses, sell some wonderful clothing dyed with indigo. The first time you wear it your body takes on a colourful blueish hue. The ethnic minorities are surprisingly aggressive and insistent salespeople, not at all shy with visitors and keen to haggle over prices. This is the real thing, however, not for the squeamish. We saw a buffalo being butchered by several eager locals after being slaughtered at the side of the road.
Some of the accommodation can also be rough and ready, so make sure you book in somewhere where there is heating available. We met one couple who paid just $ 20 a night for their room in a local guesthouse, but spent it with teeth chattering as all the heaters had been allocated. Be prepared, too, when you go out walking, as temperatures plunge below zero in the winter months quite a shock when it has been 35 degrees in Hoi An just a few days earlier.

Things may go wrong too. Sapa was opened to tourists only in 1993 and the infrastructure is struggling to cope. The compensations, however, are many and varied and the Victoria Hotel, an alpine chalet-style establishment which overlooks Sapa town, is a wonderful place to stay, should your budget stretch that far!