Mt. Fansipan Day 1

10/11/2006 Today was the first day of the Mt. Fansipan climb. We were told that it would be a 2 day climb during which the first day we would climb to a camp about 2 hours from the summit, drop our bags, go the the summit, go back down to the camp, sleep, and climb to the bottom on the 2nd day. This wasn't exactly what happened. After a few delays, we headed out around 9:30 am for a 30 min drive up to our starting point, which was actually a good amount up the mountain already. Mt. Fansipan is about 3100 meters high, I think. The picture to the right is of some of us before the start of the climb. Just before our first break, we saw some people returning. They said something like the trek was very bad, that it was "dangerous," and that there was "corruption." This puzzled those of us who heard them, but I think that English may not have been their first language. They also didn't have very good shoes. The first day was really not very difficult. There were some uphill and downhill parts, but none of it was particularly challenging. It was drizzling the entire time and very muddy. We had one main guide named Teh (I think), who was very nice. There were also a couple other guides who didn't speak English but were very good at carrying large quantities of stuff. The scenery was probably very beautiful, but I'll never really know because it was too foggy to see much. We made it to a camp at about 1:30 pm and started to leave the stuff we wouldn't need for the summit. However, Teh then told us that we would sleep there and climb to the summit tomorrow. We were all a bit stunned and confused because that is not what we had thought we would be doing. We were explicitly told not to bring anything to do (books, etc.) since there would be know free time, so we had a ton of time to kill before bed. At least the food was great. Sleeping wasn't quite as good.