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We went to visit Cat Cat village with our guide at the beginning of the rice planting season. We walked there from Sa Pa, saw the waterfall and walked back. The walk was scenic and not too tough. The village was an eye-opener as it is very poor and not as well built and maintained as the Red Zhao village, or indeed any other village I saw. Buildings with gaps in the walls, no natural light allowed inside, muddy paths are all prevalent which made us wonder what was the cause. Our guide’s explanation was that the Hmong enjoy their free time and don’t work unless they have to. The rice paddies are photogenic and obviously hard work to maintain. Climbing Fansipan is great fun and a nice accomplishment. While you should not take it lightly, if you are prepared it can be very We paid $40 per person and did the climb in one day – a minibus picked us up from our Sapa hotel at 0600 or so, we started climbing at 0700, and we were done the climb by 1630 on a day with rather poor weather (nearly continuous rain and, closer to the top, hail). Our relatively fast trip is probably not typical – most people do it in 2 or 3 days, which has the advantage of allowing you to take a different route down than up, but the disadvantage of that you get to sleep in the mountain huts there, which, while if the weather is nice might be ok, when it’s cold and raining as it was on our day, is pretty unappealing – our group basically didn’t want to stop (we had to only because the guide was tired) in order to preserve warmth. The climb itself can be broken into thirds: the first third (to the first station) is relatively flat – up and down gentle hills. the second third (is considerably more vertical and monotonous, and the last third features a surprising amount of descent (to get off a false summit) before making a final push for the Fansipan summit. there is some variation of vegetation over the whole trek, but not that much – the summit is only 3300m or whatever, after all. there is considerably more variation at Kinabalu in Malaysia (a hair over