Sapa Sampler - Sapa, Vietnam
Sapa, Vietnam
From Luang Prabang, we flew to Hanoi (uneventfully), got our visa through a somewhat intense process, and then we met our driver who would take us to our Hanoi hotel. The drive started off fine. Hanoi has nice, well-lit highways, with nice digital bulletin boards. Things quickly went south. Rules for driving in Vietnam: 1. There are no rules. 2. Lanes are meaningless. Drive in your lane, drive in my lane, drive between lanes. Who cares. 3. Feel free to take your child anywhere on a motorbike. Have them sandwiched between 2 parents on the bike for "protection" or have them hold the handlebars and drive for you. 4. The biggest thing on the road has the right of way. Busses honk and cut off cars. Cars honk and narrowly miss motorbikes. Motorbikes try to hit any stray pedestrians. 5. Horn should be used constantly to announce your presence and to terrify anyone who dares walk near you (on the narrow roads that have no sidewalks or sidewalks full of vendors/"restaurants"). 6. There seem to be no stop lights. Go into the middle of the intersection, blare your horn, look angry, and ultimately play chicken. Now imagine all of these rules applied in a city of literally millions of motorbikes. Millions. There are 30 bikes squeezing around vehicles/people at any given time, jostling for position. The driving here is probably the biggest culture shock we've had since arriving in SE Asia. Each time we have to get in a car/bus in Vietnam, we buckle up and clutch each others' hands until we make it through. Don't ever rent a car here. We took a nice bus 5-6 hours north from the city of Hanoi to the small mountain town of Sapa, just south of the Chinese border in wVietnam. As our bus dropped us off, a group of about 10 Black Hmong ladies lined up outside, looking through the bus windows. They elbowed each other, obviously fighting over which tourists each would get to follow for the day, trying to sell their handicrafts. Our new "friends," So So and Me Me, trailed us to our hotel, asking questions about our names, ages, origins, and family trees. We ducked into our hotel to freshen up and thought perhaps we had seen the last of them. When we emerged again, our Hmong friends quickly found us and continued our "conversation" which mostly consisted of "Shopping? You buy from me? You promise? You buy from me?" We ducked in for lunch, and they waited outside the restaurant, calling up to the 2nd story balcony where we ate. Ryan suggested we sneak out the back of the restaurant, and I googled how to best discourage these very persistent salespeople without being mean. In the end a very firm no without any promise of future interest seemed to work. For a while. The purpose of our trip to Sapa was to trek (Hike) for 2 days/1 night with the Ethos trekking company. Most people come to see the rice paddies and the beautiful mountain country of the Hmong people, but what they don't realize is the strong undercurrent of racism that runs through this tourism industry in Vietnam. Almost all businesses in Sapa are owned by ethnically Vietnamese people, who make up over half the population of Vietnam. The Vietnamese will often not allow the Hmong to work in their restaurants, shops, or hotels. As a result the Hmong's only possible sources of income are subsistence agriculture and selling handicrafts on the street in Sapa (after Patti and I learned this we felt a bit guilty about ditching SoSo and MeMe). Ethos is one of the only trekking companies in Sapa that actually employs Hmong guides and allows tourists to stay in Hmong homes overnight. The Vietnamese companies usually take tourists to Vietnamese restaurants and have them stay in Vietnamese hostels, all while trekking on Hmong land. We found Ethos, spent a bit more, had a Hmong tour guide invite us into her family's home and were reassured that our tourist dollars helped alleviate some of the poverty caused by institutional racism. We met our guide, Ker, who was dressed in traditional Black Hmong garb: black cotton and hemp jacket, pants, and shin guards with lots of pink, blue and green colorful embroidery (all done by hand) Ker first took us to the open air country market to buy lunch. At this point we are kind of numb to strange Asian markets, but they are still really intense: strange fruits and veggies, ALL parts of large animals in various states of dismemberment, and large live fish struggling to breath in shallow basins of water. This one had a live porcupine in a cage...for eating and "medicine".... Wow. We took a 5K walk uphill through the rice paddies to Ker's house where she made lunch using the items purchased at the market...bamboo shoots, susu leaves, homemade tofu, chicken, pork, mango, tomatoes, rice. She cooked crouched over the fire in her small, concrete kitchen and whipped up the best meal we've had in Vietnam in just under 45 minutes. Ker's house included a few things of note: 1. Patti's 1st experience with an eastern toilet (I didn't pee on myself!) 2. SIx 6-week-old fluffy puppies 3. A rambunctious kitty about the same age 4. Goats, pigs, chickens, cows, etc. 5. Ker's 5-year-old daughter Zo, who first looked at us nervously from the corner while playing/torturing her kitten. She was soon climbing all over us and became our friend for the day. She wants to be a guide like her mom when she grows up, so she is learning English from her mom. She frequently yelled some of the only words she knew to us ("For you" when giving us flowers and more importantly "Be careful!" As we embarked on a somewhat treacherous hike. Now we knew going into the hike that we would be faced with something that the Ethos owner called "the hill of doom." Did we feel intimidated? Yes. Did we have a choice? No. It had been raining all day, turning the muddy mountain we were headed down into a slick ski slope of rocks and rice paddies. About 10 feet into the hike, as I walked slowly, catching my balance every few steps, Ryan said "I got this...don't need a walking stick." And proceeded to mock my careful pace. Seconds later, his legs flew out from under him and he landed squarely on his butt and hip, completely covered in mud. Unfortunately this was just the beginning of the hill of doom. It took us over 1.5 hours to complete our descent and get to Ker's parents's house. As we trudged, slid, and cursed, Ker and Zo trotted down the mountain with ease, giving us strange, sad, impatient looks as we moved gingerly with each step. At one point, Zo changed out of her rain boots into ill filling flip flops and still ran circles around us. Hmong people must have special mountain goat powers, immune to slippery mud. Or else we are just failures at walking. We made it down the hill of doom, after dropping in on a few other members of her family, to spend the evening with Ker's parents. Her mother is the village medicine woman with a garden full of herbs used to treat most common ailments. Her dad is the village shaman. Yes, you heard that correctly. Shaman. the main room of their modest wooden and dirt house contained a large altar where Dja "did shaman." The man himself was a bit intimidating, smoking a lot of tobacco out of a homemade pipe (really a bong) and offering us shots of rice wine ("happy water") at dinner. He had several village men come asking for him to "do shaman" while we were there, but alas he was not taken by the spirit and was too tired. Ker explained to us that their people believe someone can be sick of the body (things her mother would treat with medicine), but you can also be sick of the spirit (problems with your spirit, evils spirits interfering, etc.). Shamans help to identify the cause of your spiritual problems as well as determine the best way to solve them. That night, we sat down to a big dinner with Ker's family. As soon as sun set and it became pitch black, the power flickered and shut off (a common occurrence), and we had little choice but to go to bed. The house is made of dirt floors, wooden planks for walls, and all of this is surrounded by barn animals (buffalo, pigs, and roosters. Lots of roosters -- no they don't just crow at sunrise). There is no insulation to speak of, so the bugs that live outside also live inside. Patti's nightmare. Luckily, I had a cocktail of tranquilizers and Benadryl that eventually got me to sleep despite the moth that fell in my rice bowl during dinner and the giant roach crawling on the wall next to our mosquito netting and bed. We woke up with the roosters early, had some breakfast with the family, hiked down to the valley floor, and eventually took a taxi back to our hotel room for long showers and a nap in our fluffy white bed. A the next day was a travel day spent mostly on a bus to Hanoi. This morning, we boarded another luxurious bus to Halong Bay. Now, we sit in a our nice cabin on the Dragon Legend junk cruise, eager to see more sites and make more memories. More soon. Pictures later cuz I have bad internet.