Sapa
The crowd from the Trekking Cafe was very interesting: Daniella was from Australia and came in Sapa several days ago. The moment she was hitting Australia’s land she was getting bored right away so she traveled almost continuously for the last 10 years living 4 years in India. Roelf was from Amsterdam and he was the third time in Sapa. Mongolia was his preferred country of travel and in Sapa he was doing some voluntary work with the minorities who knew him very well so they invited him the next day to a wedding. Abas, or something like that, was Moroccan living in Switzerland and studying in Laussaune but mainly he was traveling and was in lots of places. I chat with them till 11:00pm when I had to leave and go to sleep. The plan was to leave in the trek early morning but I wanted to visit Sapa, so I woke up again before sunrise. The room I had was magnificent, covered in windows on two sides, like the entire hotel, The Green Bamboo. I had breakfast and I left for the market. Saturday and Sunday were market days in Sapa but still the market had plenty of Black Hmong and Red Dzao who were pounding the streets. I got inside the market where the local people sell and the view was fascinating with lots of materials embroidered and beautifully decorated dress, like I did not have a chance to see with the Flower Hmong, who may be a show in themselves but their taste is far from the European style. I bought more than I wanted to do and I kept walking the market and taking shoots. These tribes are more aggressive, being in constant move to sell and they harass foreigners to buy and also they ask for money to have their picture taken, so the task was not so easy but with the lot of experience I had in snatching pictures it worked in the end. I spent in total about 2 hours in the market and around and I was at 11:00 am at the hotel where I was supposed to meet Bang.
We left for a walk, a trek they call it because the range of tourists/travelers is very large, and after a short walk on the road we started to go through rice paddies and beautiful landscape. The weather was sunny and the views were magnificent, with terraced valleys and hills covered in mist. We walked very slowly because I took so many pictures. On the same road we met an American woman from Seattle, whom I will meet latter in the village, and lots of Black Hmong who were going to and from work. Around 2pm we stopped at a beautiful hut located on a river cross and we ate some cold cuts and a beer that there costs more than in the most expensive restaurant in Saigon, 25000 dongs. We continued after lunch to the same slow pace and we arrived in the village. Meanwhile we crossed two villages of Black Hmong, in one of them I bought a water holder. The Black Hmong are very good artists but they are dirty and illiterate, based on what Bang said. They do not have electricity and are pretty impolite and aggressive. Basically they come after you and they keep pestering you to buy stuff from them, mainly cheap souvenirs. This is the reason they are not liked by the guides and all the accommodations, home stays as they call it, are done in the next village that is a Dzao village, another minority very industrious who send their children to school so they are smarter and better educated. The school is free for the minorities but not for the Vietnamese who pay a pretty hefty tax. The moment we got home, around 4:00pm, the guide and the hosts started to cook and the dinner that happened around 6:30-7:00pm was a festine with about 5-6 dishes. Obviously they are very generous and their tradition probably obliges them to cook so much but most of the travelers cannot eat the astronomical quantities they cooked there. Before dinner I went for a walk in the village in sunset and I kept thinking about our quick and constrained life in cubicles and theirs, outdoor. Obviously they would give it up easily for more cushy jobs but the atmosphere of the village was so idyllic that I could not stop thinking about this comparison. I sat on top of the hill and watched each household with its own flurry of activities, working in the garden, bringing back the water buffaloes, or planting on terraces and listening to the barking dogs or at one point monkeying with two girls from the village, a 13 year old that was as tall as Victor and the other of the same height being 8. I thought that the first girl was 8 but she was very mature for the age. After the walk I went for dinner and we ate, four of us, the owner of the house with his son, Bang and me, and drank a couple of glasses of Happy Water, the corn brandy they prepare in house. The dinner happened in the kitchen, on very low stools, maybe two inches from the ground and the kitchen was roamed by the house dogs and cats they were shushed outside when they were expressing their desire to have a bite. The after dinner tea is always a moment of relaxation in Vietnam and I had a long chat with Bang about all sorts of issues and about his travel groups and experiences he had with them: the most difficult by far are old Germans and Israelis. Germans are demanding and very impolite and Israelis want to get everything possible for the least amount of money paid. It was very interesting to hear this from a Vietnamese guy and to match in a way my impressions of travel, these two categories being the most difficult for me also to deal with. Of course there are exceptions, but they are just exceptions and not more than that! I had to cut short the discussion with him because I passed by before dinner to the nearby home stay where was a large group of travelers of all nationalities and I promised them I will join after dinner.
When I arrived the discussion was in full swing with Kristin, a journalist from Seattle perorating about the American domestic policy and journalism in the USA. There were also two Danish boys who just finished high-school and they were traveling for the first time in life for 4 months, the last one being in the USA, so I obliged to give them some hints for which they were in desperate need, a very funny Spaniard from La Rioja whose dream was to go in the honey moon to Las Vegas, a guy from Manitoba who was going to teach English a month in Cambodia, a girl from England and two girls from Switzerland, all of them, except Kristin, traveling the following night with the sleeper train back to Hanoi. After Kristin gave up the podium, the others started all sort of more mundane discussions and I chat a little with Kristin. She came with her mom to Hoi An to make her wedding dress (it is very inexpensive there) and she was getting married soon but her boyfriend had to work so he could not come with her in Vietnam. The discussions run late and at 11:00pm I went to sleep. The beds for the guests are in the attic, a sort of “duplex” apartment but basically like a barn. On this second floor there were about 15 mattresses each one with blankets, pillows and a mosquito net for the summer time. It was very clean and you have to take your shoes off when you got there. I slept till 6:00 but I heard all night the dogs barking in the village and in the middle of the night it became very cold. The walls are made out of lumber but not tight fit so you can see outside.
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