Right, so Sapa wasn't even meant to be the main event. We'd booked a week in Hanoi — Bea had work calls, I had a lot of coffee and a lot of aimless walking — and we tacked two days in the mountains onto the end because every single traveller we met said we'd regret skipping the rice terraces. They were right, annoyingly.

So here it is, the way I actually kept it on my phone: waypoint by waypoint, two days, most of it on our feet, one rattly night bus at each end. We booked the whole Sapa add-on through TGROUP while we were still down in Hanoi, which turned out to be the one genuinely smart decision we made all trip.

The "sleeping bus" is a proper Vietnamese institution and I did not sleep a wink. Pickup was bang on 21:30 outside our hotel in the Old Quarter — they message you, a little van shuttles you to the big bus, and then you're in your own pod with a curtain and a blanket. Fully flat, which is more than a plane gives you, but the road up the Noi Bai–Lao Cai highway has strong opinions and my pod sat right over a wheel. Bea slept like the dead. I watched three films and made my peace with it.

We rolled into Sapa early, had breakfast at the hotel, dumped the big bag and packed a small one for the trek. The town sits up around 1,500m, so even in July the morning air had a proper chill to it — the first cool we'd felt in two weeks, and honestly worth the trip on its own.

This is the bit you come for. You drop off the road into Muong Hoa Valley and it just opens up — terraces stacked all the way down, that impossible green, water catching the light on every step of the paddy. Our guide (booked through TGROUP; his English was genuinely good and he was patient with all my daft questions) walked us down through Y Linh Ho and Lao Chai, villages of the Black H'mong.

Twelve kilometres, and I'll be honest, it's more downhill than up — which sounds easy and is a lie your knees uncover the next morning. It had rained the night before, so the trail was slick red mud in places. Wear real shoes, not the trainers I wore. And the thing nobody quite warns you about: a few H'mong women fall into step with you early on, chatting away, steadying you over the muddy bits — lovely — and then at lunch they open a bag of handmade bracelets and it would take a heart of stone to say no. We bought bracelets. We still wear the bracelets.

Lunch was a little place in Lao Chai — plastic stools, a view worth more than the bill, and the bill was tiny. My one tip: don't fill up on the safe stuff, try the mountain things. Com lam is sticky rice cooked inside a bamboo tube over coals — smells like a campfire, you peel it like a banana. Then the grilled "cắp nách" pork, these little free-range pigs the H'mong raise, leaner and smokier than pork has any right to be.

That evening back in town we did the salmon hotpot — Sapa farms trout and salmon up in the cold streams, and a sour hotpot broth in mountain air is exactly right. There's also thắng cố, the proper H'mong hotpot, which I'll leave braver travellers to describe. Midday in the valley in July is warm and sticky even when the town is cool, so the shade and that cold beer at lunch were not optional.

 After lunch, the trail levels out along the valley floor toward Ta Van, home to the Dzay (or Giay) people. Their traditional dress, architecture and way of life feel noticeably different from the H'mong villages we had passed earlier. Some tours have you sleep out here in a homestay; ours had a room back in Sapa town, and after twelve kilometres of mud I was quietly grateful for a hot shower and a bed that wasn't doing 60km/h.

We wandered the town square in the evening, ate the aforementioned hotpot, and were asleep by nine like a pair of pensioners.

Day two is the gentle one. A four-kilometre walk down to Cat Cat, the Black H'mong village closest to town, with a waterfall at the bottom and the bones of a little hydroelectric station the French built back in colonial days — half museum, half photo stop, genuinely pretty. Back up to town by noon (that short climb is the only real "up" of the whole trip), check out, one last lunch, and by four we were on the bus. Home to Hanoi by nine, legs aching, phone full of terraces.

Would we go back? Yes — but for three days next time, so the valley isn't a race. If you've got a week in the north and you're umming over whether Sapa's worth the night bus: it is. Go in a shoulder season if you can; July is green and gorgeous but warm and wet underfoot.

We ran the whole thing — bus, hotel, guide, the lot — as one package through TGROUP, which is the only reason two people who can't read a Vietnamese bus timetable made it up a mountain and back without a single hiccup. If you're planning it, that's the bit I'd sort first: just ask them for the two-day Muong Hoa trek, and tell them how many kilometres your knees have left in them.