Sapa

Take the first cabin of the morning if you want the cloud off it. By afternoon the summit is usually inside it. A cable car opened in 2016 lifts you up in 15 minutes, and from the top station a funicular or six hundred steps more. At 3,147m it is cold.

The fields drop in steps between the road and the riverbed. You can walk the bunds down to the villages below, but they are a hand's width wide and turn to mud in rain. When the levels are under water you have to pick out where to put your feet.

The stone church gives the town its square. Its Gothic roof, French work, stands out sharply among the timber houses, while minority women lay out embroidery and silver on the square. Saturday evenings bring a performance in front of it.

It is a Hmong village 3km below the town, and the 1925 French hydro station still stands by the waterfall. A ticket and a fixed route now shape the visit, so it reads more as a walkway than a village. Most people walk down and call a motorbike back.

You walk about 10km down the valley from town, mostly downhill, to a village the Giay settled. Women selling handicraft fall in beside you at the start, talk the whole way and ask you to buy at the end. Several houses take guests, so people stay the night.

Steps behind the church climb into a garden threaded between rocks. You pass orchid beds and narrow rock passages, and the cloud yard at the top takes in the town and the valley at once, two hours of steps there and back.

Fifteen kilometres of climbing from town brings you to the 2,073m saddle where Lao Cai meets Lai Chau. People pull over at sunset for the light on the Hoang Lien range, and roadside stalls sell corn and grilled eggs. The bends going up make passengers ill.

The water comes down right beside the pass road, 12km out of town. A stairway climbs part way up alongside it, and from the bridge below the spray reaches as far as the tarmac; it is a stop rather than a destination.

It runs on Sundays only, so people leave Sapa before dawn. The road takes about three hours, and Flower Hmong women come in embroidered colours. Buffalo and horses change hands in a pen of their own, and it crowds after nine and is over by early afternoon.

Most of them carry no marker, so people on the path go by without noticing. Spirals, figures and patterns like terraced fields are cut shallowly into some two hundred boulders over a few kilometres of valley floor. It was made a national relic in 1994.

Heading downhill from town into the Muong Hoa valley, this is the first Black Hmong village. The half-day trek along dirt paths between the terraces to Ta Van begins here. Hmong women who fall in beside you often end the walk by offering something to buy.

A village of red-turbaned Dao people northeast of town. Household after household offers the Dao herbal bath, a soak in water boiled with dozens of medicinal plants. The limestone cave behind the village needs a torch to get far inside.

A waterfall in the Hoang Lien National Park forest near the O Quy Ho Pass. From the ticket booth it is a forest walk of just over 30 minutes beside bamboo and a stream. The pool beneath is so cold that most people only dip their feet.