A Morning in Sapa: Egg Coffee, Almond Croissants, and a Bracelet for the Road

The drizzle hit the instant I stepped out of the Delta Sapa Hotel, where I’m holed up for two nights before the sleeper bus drags me back to Hanoi. Sapa’s mountain mist is half fog, half rain—the kind that seeps through your jacket if you give it half a chance.

Earlier, the hotel breakfast room had been a shoving match of tour groups—mostly Chinese, all lunging for chafing dishes of phở, fried rice, or some nameless protein sweating under heat lamps. I’ve fought for worse, but never pre-coffee.

Google Maps promised Bibi’s three blocks uphill, across from the Agribank ATM that coughs up three million dong like it’s granting a favor. ($114. Max per withdrawal. Enough for a frugal week, a reckless night.)

Bibi’s smelled of woodsmoke and butter, felt like Starbucks with shorter stools better service and a more welcoming atmosphere where the lighting isn’t as harsh and no one is loud.

I folded my umbrella. No croissants in the obvious spot—traveler’s heart-dip—until the display case by the sidewalk pizza oven revealed them: almond croissants, bronzed, flaky, still warm, as if they’d been holding a spot for the late and uncaffeinated. I pointed.

The girl behind the counter nodded like we’d rehearsed this. One egg coffee, one croissant. Eighty-eight thousand dong. Three bucks. Paid with a grin.

The egg coffee arrived in a thimble riding a saucer. Mine wasn’t the velvet legend people chase; it didn’t need to be. It tasted like sunrise whisked into espresso. The croissant exploded into a thousand buttery apologies. Halfway through, the cup mocked me—empty already.

The couple beside me nursed lattes the size of soup bowls. I flagged the server—same girl, same smile that’s heard every mangled “cà phê sữa”—and pointed again.

She returned with the same sized cup. Forty thousand dong.

While the foam settled, I snapped a photo for my wife in Texas now affected by the government shut down whereby she needed to take a taxi to complete the last leg of her journey. Her reply: a photo ofchips, salsa, white wine that likely cost more than my week here. I fired back a photo of a delicious almond croissant and egg coffee. Eye-roll emoji. Fair.

The rain continues. I could’ve left—should’ve—but the hand-painted BiBi’s above the door glowed like it knew something I didn’t. I nursed the latte and watched motorbikes slice puddles, tourists in neon ponchos, the ATM queue snaking forever. Hmong women in indigo and rainbow headscarves balanced babies or plastic-draped baskets, eyes scanning for a sale—rain or shine.

When I finally rose, BiBi herself—tiny, aproned, bracelets chiming—pressed a red-and-black woven bracelet into my palm. “For safe road,” she said. This part didn’t really happen, but you know me, it makes for a good part of the story.

Outside, the sidewalk was an obstacle course: motorbikes and other items filling up the sidewalk. All that waited downhill for me was clean laundry and maybe a tattoo. I walked on a content belly in my gut and one quiet kindness rattling my wrist.

The ghost of egg coffee lingered, outlasting flavor, rain, even Sapa.

Maybe I I am beginning to feel a little now like Papa—aka Ernest Hemingway—in the sultry Havana dusk, when the writer pushed through the clamor of La Bodeguita del Medio, where the air hummed with lime and mint, and ordered his ritual mojito: crisp, cold, a whispered rebellion against the day’s heat.

Later, at El Floridita’s polished mahogany bar, beneath the slow spin of ceiling fans, he nursed a Papa Doble daiquiri, the tart frost of rum and grapefruit cutting through the haze of cigar smoke, each sip a silent toast to the island that kept his ghosts at bay. “Mi mojito en La Bodeguita, mi daiquiri en El Floridita,” it is said that he always muttered, the words etched into legend as surely as into the bar’s crowded walls.

Bibi’s for me now isn’t just a café. It’s the promise you didn’t know you were after: arrive hungry—any kind of hungry—and leave heavier than you came.

P.S. Written at Bibi’s, latte cooling, croissant crumbs scattered, rain tapping approval on the glass outside.