From Lao Cai, where we arrived at 6 in the morning, we took a public minivan on an hour-long, completely nauseating ride up narrow, serpentine mountain roads to Sa Pa, a remote frontier town that has become something of a tourist hotspot due to both its amazing landscape and its large population of Vietnamese ethnic minority tribes such as the Black H'mong and the Red Dao, many of whom still live subsistence-lifestyles in traditional villages.
Here's a view of mountainsides terraced with rice paddies and a river running through the valley that we caught on one of our hikes - the sort of sight commonplace in Sa Pa.
It was a strange visit that left us with mixed emotions, too complicated to lay out right now (you should know that I'm typing this blog in my hotel, outside in the jungle of Cambodia, where I just got bitten by a mosquito, and Maya's deathly afraid now that I just contracted the dengue fever... Basically, I'm literally risking my life for your entertainment). But here are some standout moments from Sa Pa:
- On our first day we hiked through the village of Cat Cat, where dirty children stared at us from the doorways of their familes' huts, and men and women glanced up at us - somewhat hostilely, it seemed - as they worked in their rice paddies. We passed a waterfall (which is where most tourists turn around) and then walked onward into the jungle. We had been trekking for maybe an hour and a half, when we ran into some people who told us that there was a village "maybe 5 kilometers away." That didn't sound too far, so we decided to go for it. Another hour and half - and two river-crossings - later, we found ourselves on an ever-narrowing dirt path, in the thick of the jungle, trudging up and down the muddy mountainside, with a dwindling water supply, and no village in sight. We had already turned back once when the path seemed to vanish - temporarily, it turned out - then decided to forge ahead. And we had run into a number of villagers, some carring insanely huge loads on their backs as they sped along the precarious path in their flip-flops(!), and some even seemed to encourage us, pointing us deeper into the forest, smiling, and saying "Village." But I'm sorry to say, we gave up - we were almost out of water and definitely out of time - since the sun would be down in the 3 hours it would take us to walk back to whence we came from. Of course, as soon as we actually turned around, the friendliest villager of all came up the path toward us, pointed in our original direction, smiled, and said, "Village," as if inviting us to follow him, but by that point, our minds were made up - mostly just to make ourselves feel better about abandoning our mission, we joked that the village was probably full of cannibals who were just pretending to be nice to lure us into their soup pots - so we politely declined and hurried back to semi-civilization.
- As we walked down to Cat Cat, we were assailed by the motorbike drivers all offering us rides back to the hotel once we got to the waterfall. Each of them asked us to look for them once we got there - and they all turned out to have weird, instantly memorable pseudonyms ready so they'd be easy to identify. One guy, in particular, stood out: he took off his baseball cap and showed us the moniker he'd scrawled on it in marker. "Look for me," he said. "'Penicillin.' That's me." It was such an awesome name, I actually ended riding back with him (for the fee of $1).
- Our first night in Sa Pa, we walked out into town and were assailed by young and old women and little girls selling all sorts of tribal goods - mostly, jewelry and enbroidery. One of them came up to us: "Earrings?" she asked, holding out a pair. "No thanks," we answered. "Do you smoke?" she quickly moved on. "Opium? Marijuana? Hashish?" It became a theme of our visit. We were offered drugs by, at least, four or five people, most of them middle-aged-looking ethnic-minority women in full tribal dress!
- On our second day, we went trekking through the mountains and through some villages with an 18-year-old H'mong guide named Zi (pronounced "Zah"). As soon as we set off, we found that a pair of "shadows," as we came to call them, had joined our little group: a little girl, maybe 9 years old, and a young woman with what looked like a gold tooth but turned out to be copper, who looked to be maybe 34 but turned out to be only 24. (As we would discover, village life does not age people well.) Here's our little crew (minus me, who shot the pic):
Our "shadows" followed us for a good 3 hours as we hiked by rice paddies, through creeks, and over hills, talking to us in what little English they knew. (Our guide told us that this was how she had learned English - by following tourists around and talking to them - which was impressive, considering she spoke the language better than almost any Vietnamese person we'd met in Hanoi). But Maya and I both had a feeling that as nice and friendly as our "shadows" seemed, they were really just trying to sell us shit. And that proved to be the case as soon as we arrived in their village and were bumrushed by at least 10 people selling the exact same stuff. The "shadows" then made it personal: "You're going to buy from me, right?" said the little girl, trying to use the fact that she'd walked with us to get the upperhand on the competition. Thing is, it kind of worked. We didn't buy much from them - just a small handwoven bracelet from the girl, who looked like she was going to cry if we didn't - but we felt guilty and weird and kind of used but still sad and really just all confused and conflicted as fuck. The trek had been cool; the landscape, beautiful; but we felt like shit.
- It didn't help that the villages and the villagers seemed so damn poor. At one point, we stopped for a break at this little canopied area, where many other tourists were already assembled, having cold drinks and eating snacks. Of course, all the guides and locals weren't eating or drinking, just chewing on pieces of sugar cane and standing on the outskirts (a few locals would occasionally step in to try and sell something). Maya and I sat there uncomfortably, and I noticed a little boy, maybe 4 years old, dressed not in the colorful tribal clothes of most the villagers but in filthy and torn western clothes; he was carrying what I presume was his baby brother on his back, who was wearing just a dirty T-shirt, no pants or underwear, and was crying his head off. Their parents were nowhere to be seen. I definitely didn't feel having a snack.
- Early in our trek, Maya mentioned to Zi, our guide, that a lot of the locals, particularly the young girls, seemed to be staring at me because of my big buffalo-bone earrings, which I had thought the tribal people might relate to since they also wear oversized jewelry through stretched ear piercings. She explained that in the culture of the various ethnic minority tribes of Sa Pa, men do not wear earrings, only women. The next morning, as I waited outside our hotel for the van that was going to take us the Bac Ha market 3-hours-plus away, a large group of adolescent H'mong girls started pointing and laughing at me: "You are man but you wearing earrings!" they tittered. Later that day, at the market, as I sat inside a restaurant, a teenage H'mong girl passed by, glanced at me, and snickered, "Nice earrings. Hehehe. Lady boy."
- During the neauseating rollercoaster ride to the Bac Ha market, winding up and down the mountain roads, veering past motorbikes and water buffalo, and through jungle-entangled villages, our guide - a 20-year-old H'Mong girl named Cha (with a copper tooth and big smile) - mentioned that I would probably look very hansome if I cut off my beard. She explained that right now I "look at bit like Ho Chi Minh." Personally, I don't see it, but you tell me...
- During the same ride, I pulled out my iPod at some point and started listening to the Pantera song, "5 Minutes Alone." Cha tapped me on the shoulder and asked if she could listen. "English song?" she asked. I handed her the headphones. She listened for a while with a rather inscrutable expression on her face, then handed the headphones back. "It was good," she said, "but do you have the song, 'Hello, Is It Me You're Looking For?'?"
- Coming back from the market, our van approached a large group of people standing around something alongside the road. As we got closer, we could see that it was a motorbike laying on its side, still smoking. And as we passed, we saw the bike's driver, laying on his back, not moving, his head covered in blood. The guy looked dead. Everyone in our van was silent for a while, then Cha explained that just two days before - our first day in Sa Pa - a man had died in a motorbike accident in the vicinity of our hotel. (In Hanoi, we'd seen a kid totally wipe out on his motobike in the middle of the street - amazingly, he'd jumped up and rode away, apparently not seriously injured. And Eveline's friend Ann had gotten into a accident while riding on a motorbike-taxi when she was in Hanoi a few years ago.) We already had been wary of riding on motorbikes - and had only ridden on two (Max's, then Penicillin's); now Maya and I vowed to stay off the damn things.
- One night as Maya and I strolled through Sa Pa at around 10:30pm, we passed three white tourists, 1 guy and 2 women, around our age or a little younger, skipping arm-in-arm and giggling with large group of prepubescent H'mong girls in the streets. "Who does that?" we wondered aloud, feeling a little dirty as we walked away. Sa Pa is a strange place... and tourists are strange people...
- Our last day in Sa Pa Maya and I were approached by this cute little old H'mong woman who didn't really speak any Engish but this didn't stop her from eagerly trying to sell us shit. (A little H'mong girl, who turned out to be a shark of a trinket-seller, also approached us at the same time - but that's a story for another day). She grabbed Maya by the arm, and as we walked, she walked with us and talked to us in her H'mong language while producing various wares from her satchel. Maya was saying "No thank you" and shaking her head to make sure the point was getting across - but it wasn't. The old woman kept walking with us, and when she noticed that her charms, as they were, weren't getting the job done, out of nowhere, she pinched Maya's ass! Maya started laughing hysterically, completely shocked, and the old woman started laughing hysterically, too. I thought she sounded stoned, so I started laughing, so we all stood there in the middle of the intersection and laughed. Maya said to me, "Ï have to buy something from her - she pinched my ass. That's, like, going beyond the call of duty."
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