Ethical Trekking in Sapa: Two Days with a Red Dao Community

If you’re looking for things to do in Sapa that go beyond the usual tourist traps, let me tell you about the two days that changed how I see travel and to this day is probably the most authentic travel experience I’ve ever done. There was a lot of walking, a fair bit of mud, some very fragrant herbs, and one genuinely wonderful woman named May Lai.

We booked a two-day Red Dao trekking homestay with ETHOS, a community-based tour operator working directly with ethnic minority families in the mountains around Sapa. Our guide and host was May Lai, a member of the Red Dao community.

I spent a month in Sapa in total, and this sits at the top of everything I did there and it’s something I’ll continue to recommend to anyone who asks!

Practical info

Day One: Into the Mountains

We started the morning at ETHOS’s community centre in Sapa town for a briefing over tea, then climbed into a car and drove out towards the mountains.

For the entirety of both days, we were the only foreigners around. With no other tour groups or crowded viewpoints – just us, May Lai, and the mountains. That alone tells you something about how ETHOS operates.

The trail wound through steep rice terraces, bamboo forest, and open hillside paths. The minimum distance on day one is around 8.5 kilometres and May Lai set a comfortable pace, stopping regularly to point out plants, explain what they’re used for, and share stories. Watching her pull things from the hillside almost absently and explain which ailments each one treats was genuinely so impressive and a testament to how important the nature around them is to the Red Dao people.

We stopped for a home-cooked lunch at her mum’s house before May Lai took us out into the surrounding mountains to forage, gathering herbs for two purposes: our herbal bath that evening and dinner ingredients.

A Night With the Red Dao

We arrived at May Lai’s home in the late afternoon. Her house sits on a hilltop with views straight out of a Studio Ghibli film: layers of mist curling around mountain peaks, rice terraces dropping away below, chickens doing their thing underfoot.

We dropped our bags and got immediately roped into hide and seek with her daughter, who is picking up English from the stream of travellers she meets through her mum’s work. We played for hours on the terrace overlooking the rice fields.

Before dinner, May Lai mentioned we’d be having bamboo shoots. When we told her we’d never tried them, that was decided. Out we went to harvest them ourselves. Her daughter showed us what to look for, we pulled them up, and they went straight into the kitchen.

Vietnam is home to at least 54 ethnic minority groups, and the Red Dao are one of them. Their language, clothing, traditions, and way of life are still very much alive in the highlands around Sapa.

The Red Dao Herbal Bath

Before dinner, we took the traditional Red Dao herbal bath, made with the herbs we’d foraged from the mountains that afternoon.

The bath is a large handmade wooden barrel filled with a dark, reddish brew made from foraged medicinal plants. The Red Dao have used this practice for centuries. It’s said to ease muscle pain, improve circulation, and benefit the skin. After a full day of hiking, my body had no complaints whatsoever. It smells earthy and medicinal in the best way, a bit like soaking in very strong, very good tea.

Dinner and Happy Water

We helped cook, which was chaotic in the best way, and then sat down to eat with May Lai, her husband, and both kids. The bamboo shoots were delicious. Happy water, the local rice wine, appeared and was happily accepted. Stories were swapped across the language gap and it was one of the nicest meals of the whole trip.

Day Two: Views, Sugarcane and the Journey Back

We woke up relaxed, had breakfast with the family, and set off for day two. The trekking distance was longer this day and meant we passed through all sorts of terrains (and all sorts of weather too!). Beautiful mountain villages, buffalo trails, and the best vistas I’ve seen in Vietnam.

We stopped for a home-cooked lunch at the house of one of May Lai’s friends before continuing along to where a car was waiting to drive us back to the ETHOS office in Sapa.

Back at the ETHOS Office

Something I hadn’t expected to enjoy as much as I did: the debrief back at the community centre. It’s essentially a coffee and a chat about how the experience went, but other groups were returning around the same time, all with their own versions of the last two days, and there was something really lovely about swapping stories in that room. It rounded the whole thing off perfectly.

Is It Worth It?

There are plenty of things to do in Sapa. You can take the cable car up Fansipan. You can visit artificial Cat Cat Village. You can sip coffee over a rice terrace view and have a brilliant time doing it.

But if you want something that stays with you past the scroll of your camera roll, book the Red Dao trek. Forage your own dinner. Play hide and seek with a kid who’s learning English from travellers just like you. Soak in a wooden tub of medicinal herbs at the end of a long, honest day and feel genuinely glad you went somewhere real.

Travel slower. Travel kinder. Go meet May Lai.

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