Many tourist pilgrims make the trip to Sapa, in the northwest of Vietnam. Nestled in steep mountains, the town is full of wandering trekkers and backpackers, with a smattering of higher-end tourists, all of whom stay at the 4-star Victoria Hotel.
Can I digress for a moment and say how much I prefer 3-star to 4-star hotels? The 4-stars offer important amenities like clean beds and bathrooms, and that’s perfect for most people.
I’ll take a good lower-range hotel any day of the week, since they are all owned and run by locals. You get the feeling of authenticity, and the rooms, fittings and lobbies are often quirky (or non-functional) in a way I find utterly charming. The rates are more in the $40 range, instead of $140 per night. The Victoria Hotels are comfortable, with great food and lovely locations, but I’m generally too cheap. Give me 2 or 3 stars, please.
Sapa is interesting in so many ways – the incredible scenery with terraced rice fields climbing steep slopes, the ethnic minority villages scattered through the mountains, the cool air driven ahead of the storms barreling in between the peaks and the myriad waterfalls and hidden valleys. It’s also interesting in terms of what happens to a remote area inhabited by ethnic minorities once peace and prosperity brings in tourists, businesses, good roads and money.
One thing that is easy to do is visit ethnic minority villages. You probably have to drive down a bumpy road, and pay an entry fee to a bored-looking clerk at in a dusty one-room shack, and then pull into a parking lot big enough for tour buses.
What’s the attraction? Well, it’s fun to be out in the countryside, but of course the main attraction is the local folks, sporting their colorful ethnic minority clothes. It’s a bit disconcerting to descend from your motorcycle and be surrounded by a group of Red Dau women speaking near-perfect English. I doubt they have been to Oxford, so they must have learned it from tourists. They want to sell you some highly-overpriced embroidered items, but that’s part of the tourist game all over the world.
So you set off, each of you with two or three tour guides. They suggest you come visit their home, point out the local café (which they are not allowed to enter) and wait patiently for you to emerge and agree to buy something. Inside the café is mildly interesting. Of course, it is owned by a Vietnamese non-ethnic minority from the flatlands, as is virtually every business in the area. All the guests are tourists, mostly Vietnamese talking loudly, enjoying themselves, smoking and drinking beer.
Next is a walk out of the town and into the village, scattered huts surrounded by fields – look, over there! Some very picturesque men and women planting rice, up to their calves in mud. One yells, “hey American! Want to come help?” How is it that they all speak English? The six or seven impromptu tour guides stand in the sun and suggest good angles and subjects for photography. Near-naked and very dirty kids tumble around their ankles.
So far, it’s a bit odd but very charming in a low-budget kind of way – as you can tell from the start of this blog, that’s what I like. But now it’s show time; time for the hard sell. What do you mean you don’t want to buy $30 worth of embroidered pencil cases from each of the women? They walked with you on a hot day, they have kids to feed, few tourists came by today, and so on. It can get pretty ugly.
Safely back in Sapa, the sun is setting and it’s getting nice and cool. There are tourists everywhere, in the bars, cafes and restaurants. Locals hang out in the parks, and women selling things accost you every ten steps with the refrain, “you buy something from me?” Of course, lots of people do, which is why the women continue to come into town every day. Many of them have babies strapped on their backs. You can have a beer on a restaurant veranda and look out over one of the most spectacular vistas in the world.
You have to wonder, however, what the people who have made this land their home for many centuries think when they look out over what are called the Tonkin Alps. Do they miss a time when things were simpler and poorer, when it was clear what a girl would do when she grew up? Do they resent the intrusion of Vietnamese people from the lowlands, and tourists from all over the world? What do people who make $1 per day feel about people who spend $100 on dinner?
I posed these questions and many more to a young Hmong woman, about 20 years old, who is a friend of my wife. She really didn’t know any answers, but she admits to being very confused about what to do with her life. All the old rules are changed, but the new ones are so hard to understand.