Visiting Sapa, Vietnam’s northern mountain region

Sapa lies about 1500 meters high, 380 km north-west of Hanoi, close to the border with China. According to Wikipedia, 5 ethnic minorities live around Sapa: 52% of which are Hmong and 25% Dao. I arrived in Sapa in the early hours of dawn, after a night in an overnight train from Hanoi. There were…