Great Motorbike Adventure #2
Trip Start
Aug 21, 2003
1
15
22
Trip End
Ongoing
Northwest Vietnam,
Vietnam
Friday, December 5, 2003
The first two days of our journey were plagued by serious construction. There was essentially no road to drive on, just one long rock quarry to drive through. It was hard to see the distant scenery due to all of the dust and haze in the sky. We were constantly having to pass huge trucks on a one lane dirt road, with so much dust you couldn't even see if anything was coming from the other way
01 - Hilltribe children
. Not much fun. Both of these days, we didn't arrive at our destination until dark, because we had to stop and wait several times for bulldozers to clear landslides and tear down hills. The first night we spent in a Thai (not as in Thailand) minority village in Mai Chau, where we slept in a bamboo stilt house. We didn't get much sleep, as the locals stayed up really late and got up really early. The third day of our trip was fantastic. No more construction!! We drove through spectacular mountain scenery and tiny farming villages. As we drove deeper into the North, we could see the results of isolation on minority villages. The ones closer to Hanoi look and dress just like ethnic Vietnamese. The communities farther away have their own unique styles of dress and ways of living, and also have very different physical features.
On the fourth day we finally arrived in Sapa, wet and cold. As we got closer and closer to Sapa, the weather got drastically colder and foggier. We crossed over Tram Ton Pass, the highest mountain pass in SE Asia. By the time we arrived in Sapa we couldn't see a thing or feel our fingers. It was also very difficult to find our way through the town as you couldn't see 5 ft in front of you. Finally some girls on motorbikes found us took us to their hotel
02 - Tram Ton Pass
. We got a room with a bathtub and fireplace, which we sat in front of for most of our time in Sapa. Sapa is touted as the premier tourist destination of NW Vietnam, but is really a prime place to see the devastating effects tourism can have on traditional communities. The Saturday market is the biggest draw, and in the old days was called "Love Fest", because it functioned as the weekly social gathering of the area. Now it is a market for tourists, and has lost most of its original charm. Not only has its functioned changed, but the hilltribe people are still terribly poor, despite the influx of tourism. Watching them try and sell their handicrafts to rich tourists with camera craze is a pretty sad sight. Needless to say, we took off before the Saturday market and headed for the small town of Bac Ha.About 20 km from Bac Ha, we realized that we had left our passports at the hotel in Sapa. We knew this would happen at some time in Vietnam, because the government requires all foreigners to be registered with the local police every night, and so the hotels always take your passport. We dreaded driving back into the cold and fog of Sapa, and headed on to Bac Ha. Finally we were able to get in touch with our hotel, who sent our passports up the next day.
We came to Bac Ha to experience the Sunday market, which is full of hilltribe people from the surrounding areas all packed into a concrete market infrastructure
03 - Bac Ha Sunday Market
. Things you can buy at Bac Ha market - water buffaloes, puppies in burlap sacks, leopard pelts, hand embroidered clothing, bags, aprons and scarves, ruou gau (horse shit wine) on Skid Ruou, squealin' for their lives piggies, and of course produce and raw meat, the staples of any market. Bac Ha was a great place to be to witness this long-standing tradition of Vietnamese communities. Most of the people in the area still wear traditional clothing, and live the way their ancestors lived hundreds of years ago. The most striking difference between our Western cultures and those of the hilltribes is the degree to which we roam free, while they are bound so deeply to their communal roots that members of each group don the same intricate costumes, and their Sunday market is more of a social gathering than a venue for commerce. Bac Ha is the perfect place to witness this, as it has yet to be transformed by tourism into a carnival of dealings between locals and foreigners, where market traditions have been swept into the dust. While it is intensely interesting to immerse oneself into local customs and surroundings, it is also unnerving to know that one's presence may be disruptive to the ways of life of communities that haven't changed for hundreds of years. We certainly tried our best to be the least intrusive we could possibly be.So now we are back in Hanoi, and we leave for Laos in 2 hours! We are sad to leave - we have grown to love Vietnam. We are not looking forward to the 24 hour bus ride ahead of us. We are having problems uploading pictures. So we will have to try again later, we know you love the pictures and we have a stack to show you! Hugs and kisses.
