8 Days Hanoi, Halong Bay & Sapa Tour - D4 (Sapa)

We reached Lao Cai at 6.15am, took another hour’s drive to reach Mountain View Hotel at Sapa. By the time we finished checking-in, taking breakfast and booking the tour packages for the following two days, it was about 10am. I stick to my original plan, not joining them for the Ham Rong Botanical Garden.

Breakfast at the restaurant next to the hotel, nice but expensive.

I went for a walk alone after taking half an hour rest in the room. My plan was to spend about two hours to stroll along Sapa Town and Sapa Market, one hour for lunch, and then three to four hours in trekking at Radio Tower or Cat Cat Village. Being alone, I felt a little bit lonely and excited.

Sapa Market

Sapa Market

Sapa Market

I was quite surprise to see three of them at somewhere near the entrance of the Botanical Garden half an hour later. They did not take the right route in the beginning and I just saunter to there by chance and didn’t even know that was the Botanical Garden they had been looking for, what a coincidence! That made me changed my mind and decided to join them.

Ham Rong Botanical Garden

Ham Rong Botanical Garden

The garden is pretty big, and divided into different sections, e.g. Orchid Garden, Stone Forest, etc. There is a pavilion along the hill where we can have bird’s eye view on Sapa town. As it was autumn to winter time, there were not much flowers in the garden, also because we reached there around noon time, we did not view much birds too. We had early breakfast this morning, so we just took some snack which we brought along in the pavilion as our lunch.

Bird's eye view on Ham Rong Botanical Garden

Bird's eye view on Sapa Town and Sapa Lake

After leaving the Botanic Garden, we strolled along the wayside stores, looked round the Church ……

Until after 3pm, we then had our lunch at “Little Sapa”, a restaurant AH got to know from internet. The food there was inexpensive and nice, except the chicken was too oily.

Lunch at "Little Sapa"

Since we had very late lunch, we thought that we would not had to have dinner, but I was hungry again at around 8pm, so HM, BL and I went to a restaurant near our hotel to have some snack before went on bed.