Ba Cha Market – Flower Hmong
I woke up in the morning in the first horn of the traffic before sunrise and after packing and a quick breakfast where I was joined again by the Aussies. I left for the market. The market was a little slow at 8:00 am but started to get animated a little latter and around 10:00am was bustling with activity. The tourists were in a row with lots of cameras and tripods and early in the morning it looked like a shooting stage with lots of Flower Hmong women on one side and photographers on the other side. Latter on the number of Flower Hmong exceeded the number of tourists by a comfortable margin so the westerners and local photographers were lost in the crowd. The market sells everything, there are blacksmith making hoes and carpenters making the plouws, Flower Hmong buying and selling embroideries, Vietnamese selling dogs, pigs, cows, water buffaloes, horses, etc. I took lots of beautiful pictures like everybody else and I tried to find vantage points for great shoots but most of the time I admired the hustle and bustle of this magnificent market. The Cancau market was smaller but it had the advantage of being almost completely populated by Flower Hmong, here you find all sort of other vendors. I saw also Black Hmong but very few because most of them live in Sapa on the other side of the mountain. At 12:00 I left the market, I met Bang at the hotel and we left in the afternoon for a trek to see a village that is very close to Ba Cha. The village has all the mountain cut in terraces for cultivation and the landscape looks very interesting. We were able to get inside a house, something that the agency has arranged with the locals in advance, and the owner, who was Flower Hmong, gave us to drink something that he calls corn wine but is actually a very perfumed corn brandy, very strong, a sort of palinka, that I could not have thought that you can do from corn. Also, he played for us from pan flute a traditional song and dance and gave me a tour of the house, the major production being the corn brandy. After that we continued to another part of the village where there were houses of another minority named Tai.
We returned to Ba Cha for lunch and we left at around 4:00pm with the jeep to Sapa on winding roads crossing rice fields where people were working their fields with water buffaloes or planting rice. Great views! The road takes about 2 hours from Ba Cha to Lao Cai and another hour from Lao Cai to Sapa, crossing the mountains that they were still covered in clouds and when we arrived in Sapa the fog/clouds was extremely deep that we could see only at 3-4 meters. I got a room in Green Bamboo Hotel and I went for a walk in town, a stark contrast to the other villages, with lots of sleek stores catering mainly for tourists, selling nice weaving all priced in US$. The people did not looked so friendly, probably fed up by the number of tourists and Black Hmong women were pacing the streets and asked everybody if they want to smoke ganja. A sort of Jamaica in the mountains! I went a little to some of the stores, had my dinner and tried to find a internet store to make a phone call home. Tomorrow I will leave in a trek that will end up with a night sleep in a village house watching what the local family does in the evening and morning. So no internet at least for tomorrow, if not for the other day also when I will take the night sleeper train to Hanoi. The tourists that travel Vietnam are a different crowd that the ones in Burma, Tibet or even Cambodia. There are backpackers and travelers but most of them are on tourist groups. A lot are French looking very bourgeois and their age is the best in the 50s but mainly in the 60s, comfortable tours with all inclusive. Travel in Vietnam is organized very well and I think that exists tons of tours offered in the Western countries. So the interaction with other travelers, caused also by the magnitude of the two main cities and the main attractions that are around Hanoi, is smaller, not like it was in Burma or in the village of Siem Rep. But still I was able to find lots of people I interact with and Sapa I think is such a place where you can make contacts. I am now in this Internet cafe called Traveler Cafe, surrounded by travelers that just chat, exchanging all sort of travel stories.
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