Sapa: Good Morning Viet Nam
Trip Start
Sep 24, 2008
1
32
132
Trip End
Jul 21, 2009
Sapa,
Vietnam
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Swarmed by moto taxi drivers, I took a page from Greg Mortenson and found the least interested individual for my first moto taxi ride with Big Bertha on my back and my small pack up front (not an easy endeavor to ride a motorcycle with the equivalent of three kids on you), I was in the Viet Nam border town of Lao Cai. Waiting for my minibus to Sa Pa to arrive, I met Lane and Sarah - an American couple who were motorbiking around Northern Viet Nam and had rid themselves of their worldly posessions in the US to tackle the world. Sounded a bit familiar. Lane was discussing an interesting development opportunity to provide cheap bikes to people in Rwanda, hope to stay in touch with him in the future. Minibuses the world over are identical - way too many people getting dropped on and off everywhere and all seemingly traveling with all of their and their extended families' worldly possessions. I finally made it to Sa Pa in the late afternoon.
Sa Pa is a major tourist hub nestled in the Northern Viet Nam mountains and surrounded by hill tribe villages, rice terraces, absurd lush greenery and the highest mountain in all of Indochina, Fansipan (3,000m). However, being a major tourist hub, you are mobbed by vendors, village women and hotel hawkers as soon as you get off the minibus. I ended up at the Pinocchio Hotel, a 5USD room on one of the main streets with panoramic views from my room's balcony of Fansipan and the entire lush valleys below Sa Pa, hot water and a private bath. Sa Pa, just as in Yunnan province, is significantly colder than the rest of SE Asia, particularly when the sun goes down. As soon as I arrived in Sa Pa, I met two hill tribe women, Tai and Cho, who were selling their crafts, but were satsified with a conversation with me and presented me with two friendship bracelets, for free. I would find out in the coming day that there are two sides to every coin.
That night at the hostel, I met a bunch of travelers - Jim (Seattle), Olivier (Montreal), Arielle (Humboldt County), Linda (Australia), Manouk (Rotterdam) and Heidi (UK) and we all had a good meal at the Nature Bar and Grill. Olivier is a filmmaker and he highly recommended riding a bike in Laos. I would soon take this to a whole notha level, but that is for the entry on Ha Noi. Jim attended UW, so we talked some west coast love. Heidi and Manouk would soon become two of my favorite people (I miss you guys already). Heidi just graduated and will soon work at E&Y and is taking a gap year, so I had loads of advice over the coming days on approaches to a career and the importance of passion for what you do. Manouk is in med school in Holland (Wup, Holland, Wup!) and wants to be a plastic surgeon (not a cosmetic surgeon) and work in the developing world for some time.
The following day, Heidi, Manouk and I took a one-day hike through the rice terraces and hill tribe villages outside of Sa Pa - stopping at Cao Chai and Tao Van villages. The Black-Hmong are the ethnicity in Cao Chai and the Dzay (prounounced Zy) in Tao Van. There were a bunch of Black-Hmong ladies who accompanied us the whole time, making us a huge posse, but they were really sweet and friendly and it was implicit that we would have to buy some crafts from them down the trail. I befriended a beautiful 26-year old Black-Monz lady name Gau who was married when she was a teenager and had three children. All of the village women were fairly young, married even younger and had several children. They all loved my beard, a trend that would continue and that I witnessed in Li Jiang, and said it was very pretty. We took a wonderful mostly downhill trail through the lush rice terraces, rivers and farms, every picture taken was postcard perfect. The village ladies reminded me of the Andean porters, running downhill in plastic sandals - providing a welcome and fun challenge for me to follow them at top speed down the steep trail. Along the trail, we came to a clearing with cloudless views of mighty Fansipan. While only 3,000m, the mountain towers over everything in the valley. Richard, a Frenchman living in Australia who was on our hike, and I joined in a chorus of "Allez Les Bleus" as I was wearing my Zizou national team jersey. BTW, thank you Rohit for giving me the greatest, most beloved and most recognizable jersey on the entire planet - served me well in Turkey and every stop along this trip thus far.
At our lunch stop in Cao Chai, we learned the other side of the coin. All of the village women hounded us to buy their wares. The girls and I agreed to buy one each from the ladies that had helped the girls down and chatted with us the most. The other women would mutter vicious words, in Vietnamese, at us for not buying from them. It was bittersweet as I know this is their business and a part of their livelihood, but there is no need for a lack of integrity in business, wherever you come from. My girl, Gau, was really sweet and took some pictures with me and offered me a friendship bracelet before heading up the hills to her home in the sprawled out farming village. We also learned that, similar to the separation of castes in Indian villages, people from different ethnicities are not allowed to enter the limits of different villages and they actually hate each other - as demarcated by natural boundaries such as rivers. I tried to spread my one love and explain that and Indian American and a Black Hmong became friends, why can't villagers of different ethnicities, but I would need far longer than five minutes and a lot of luck in order to break age old (and wrong) traditions.
In my time in the villages, I learned that the socialist government provides schools in each of the villages in this remote and sprawled out area. This is great, however, he kids are only in school for half a day, six days a week. On top of that, the government does not provide uniforms to emphasize equality of all and opportunity for all, and many of the village children lacked pants and shoes and all constantly had colds/sniffles in a tough and cold climate. The schools teach multiple subjects, english language being one of them, and the regional high school is in Sa Pa. I did not get a sense of how far most kids go in school, but it seems as though most are provided with and attended upto at least a primary level of education. Not a man was in sight during my whole day down in the villages as they were either tending to the fields/rice terraces or had moved on to the cities, as most men of any moderate education and upward mobility tend to do in developing countries. Going back to "Three Cups of Tea", this is why Greg Mortenson emphasizes schooling for Muslim girls in the villages in the Karakoram and Hindu Kush.
We saw indigo plants dotting the hills and the process of mixing the crushed leaves with salt/lime in water in a wood barrel in order to dye clothes the denim blue that the whole world enjoys. The dyeing process is done five to seven times and dried for three days to color hemp clothing. One of the village women was kind enough to show us her wood thatched and mud floored house in Cao Chai, and had satellite, a DVD player and a TV. Her kitchen comprised of a minimalist amount of pots and a mud firepit dug into the floor. There were bedmats for the adults and small cots meant for children and sick elders. It's amazing the world over, whatever the minimal level of affluence, that mobile phones and TV/satellite/DVD players have such deep penetration rates.
Most women marry from 13-16 and have 6-16 children. The large families are needed for the harvest in the predominantly agrarian-based rural communities of Viet Nam. I was torn by my experience in the villages. They live in a beautiful area and all of the villagers work EXTREMELY hard, all the time in order to provide for their families, by doing backbreaking work in the fields. Most of the women, of the previous generation at least, make crafts for a living and sell them to tourists in Sa Pa or in the villages, but none of the women that we spoke with liked what they do. It would be a perfectly acceptable livelihood for these women if they enjoyed their work and truly had a cottage industry that would allow their products to reach Ha Noi, Sai Gon and world markets, as the SEWA initiative does in Gujurat, but that is not the case for these women. However, I would later find out that by comparison, the average poor person in Ha Noi makes maybe 25,000VND (17,000VND=1USD) per day, while we each bought 30,000VND or more bracelets/crafts from these women. Additionally, not a soul in the villages goes hungry - living off rice/grains and perhaps a little bit of meat - while I do not know whether the poorest people in the cities go hungry. Livestock is not owned by all as compared with the villages I saw in China and there is no grazing land as the amount of rainfall, hilly territory and value of rice causes all arable land to be converted to rice paddy terraces. They are comparatively better off, but I hope that the children are able to utilize the education they receive to make for higher yielding and returning agrarian lives or can find better opportunities in the cities. I met this little girl Kao, who was adorable and caring for her baby sister. Without shoes, she had a huge smile and confidence and proudly told me she was studying in school and liked science the most. However, if she's married in her teens and has to start pumping out kids, will she really be able to make the most of the opportunity she's been given? One thing I've noted in my whole time in Viet Nam, is that both men and women work exceptionally hard. There's no concept of a single income breadwinner and a homemaker. This may be as a result of Uncle Ho's revolutionary concepts or simply because it is necessary, but women do the backbreaking work that you see in the developing world, but will never see a woman do in the developed world.
With a perspective on the life of a farming village in a socialist nation, I was mired deep in thought as Heidi, Manouk and I returned to Sa Pa. I would bid farewell to the girls as I was taking a night train from Lao Cai down to Ha Noi that night. I was supposed to meet the girls at the train station when they arrived in the morning and accompany them on a two-day tour of Ha Long Bay, but alas it did not work out. No worries, I would meet them again in a classic and beautiful travel encounter, so all was forgiven.
In leaving the hotel, I met these two young Australian guys Justin and Anthony who were traveling around. We enjoyed some good conversations on the annihilation of their cricket squad by the Indians in the tests, Aussie rules football, futbol, the NFL, rugby and it was nice to talk sports after being so out of the loop and with a couple of girls who were not such huge sports fans (thought Manouk and I shared some time discussing my beloved Oranje). While we were discussing some good sports, we were witness to another chaotic minbus journey. Our driver took out a motorbike moving forward and the stoop of a house reversing, before leaving Sa Pa in near darkness on a winding ride down to Lao Cai. In addition, we picked up every single person and bag known to man and we were jammed packed in the vehicle. While the hotel arranged for the transport, knowing that I had an 6:45pm train, leaving at 5pm on an hour ride, the driver had other ideas. In picking up every single person, driving a bit too slow initially (and then chaotically fast when he found out we would almost miss our train), and dropping off all of these random Vietnamese in Lao Cai, I made the train by three minutes. That's not an exagerration.
In my train compartment, I met the two other people who bombed down the hill with me, a French couple named Francois and Chloe. My buddies for the night, we would witness some interesting events. The three of us were sharing many a beer, as what else do you do before falling asleep on an overnight train, in between the cars and getting to know each other. Chloe, the master of languages, speaks French, English, German, a bit of Japanese and some really broken Chinese. Francois speaks French and some not-so-bad English and I speak a bit of French. Forced to pull out my French, I was impressed at my ability to communicate (tenses aside) extremely effectively and in French we were able to have discussions throughout the night on Obama, the election, politics, socialism vs.
Village kids all with colds
capitalism, anarchy, French politics, etc. Soon after we were downing beers, a very inebriated Vietnamese guy came stumbling buy and stopped to "speak" with us. He was enamored with Chloe, who is quite attractive, and then we learned an interesting bit of Vietnamese culture. Tapping both Francois and me below the belt, he would emphatically hold up his fist. He did this several times, confusing us, but not scaring us. He would then tap himself below the belt and hold up his thumb and forefinger a mere inch apart. I'll let you figure out the rest. Then, every time the train conductor and his assistant would come by, they too would tap me below the belt and rub my chest. More than feeling violated, I was curious and confused as to these customs. They also all rubbed my beard and were extremely jealous at the ability to grow some solid facial hair. Classic train journey and we all slept nicely as the train rolled through the night to take us to Ha Noi. 0
Comments
good blog
good chatting with you! so what did you find out about the touchy feely custom?