Vietnam - Sapa

Sapa - one of the places which I was very excited to go to way before I boarded the plane for vietnam. Scenic places have always interested me and there is often nothing more rewarding than hiking into the valley for a glimpse of nature at its best. In this case, it's nature and it's manipulation by the indigenous tribes which I was looking forward to see. The travel that we had to undertake to get to Sapa was one of the rougher ones on the tour. An overnight train to Sapa which saw us landing in Sapa at 5am in the morning. Imagine me in my glasses and changing into my jeans in 2 seconds and trying to pack all my stuff in the next 2 minutes and making sure that I was warm at the same time. Sapa in winter can be very chilly. So much for a tropical holiday :P 

Train station at Sapa. Reminded me alot of train stations in Europe, where we had to walk over railway tracks to get to that particular train that we were taking. There were many touts hanging around as well, so one had to be careful

One of the first ethnic villages we visited at Sapa was the Red Dao tribe - very easily recognized by their red headgear. Another interesting feature is that they love to pluck their forehead and eyebrows as it is seen to be attractive to the opposite gender. The moment we reached their village it was like wow we were celebrities or something. The ladies immediately crowded around our bus and as tourists we went crazy with the photo taking. So the thing about stereotypes - our guide informed us that in these tribes, the woman are the ones who do most of the work. They work in the fields and they walk to the markets everyday. Whereas for the men, they used to chop wood but due to the decrease in such jobs, they stay mainly at home and indulge (think alcohol and smoking). In fact, in Vietnam, it is socially acceptable for men to smoke but woman who do are frowned upon and see as bad eggs. As one can see from the photos below, all the tribal people we saw were mainly the woman. However, it is their way of life so no point getting all feminist all their behalf. I'm willing to bet that they are happier poeple compared to us anyway.

Pictures of woman from the Red Dao tribe. They are all very friendly people and very smart - they pick English up very fast and we were able to have conversations with them while exploring their village. Because of their very physically active lifestyle, many of them look older than their age.

The school in the Red Dao village where many of the women's children were enrolled at. While most of the adult women still wear their traditional clothes as part of their daily wear, you can see the influence of modern lifestyles as some of them and most of the children were dressed in modern jackets and pants (sad)

A with the Red Dao women at the school. The splash of colour is amazing...

One of the Red Dao invited us to her house for a drink - aka shot of rice wine (which is very strong!) I noticed these chinese bits of paper on the walls and apparently they are well wishes written by the fortune teller to celebrate the women's son's recent marriage. Vietnamese can't read/write chinese so they have to pay someone else to write these well wishes for them.

After we got back to the main town of Sapa, Iz and I decided to take a walk down to the Cat Cat village (of the Black H'mong tribe) where apparently there was a nice waterfall that we could see at the bottom of the valley. On our way down, we met this young girl and her older friend from Lao Chai village and they walked down the valley with us as we made our way to Cat Cat village. The girl was so cute, she was very pretty and she made this horse for me from the surrounding fauna. At first I was skeptical thinking she was going to try to charge me for it, but she insisted in the words she knew, "Free free! Cadeau!" It took a while for me to piece it together, but Iz, being Swiss realized that she was speaking french and she meant it as a gift.

View of the valley during our trek down to Cat cat village. It's also very common to see wild boar and buffalo among the rice terraces. I should mention that these women from the tribes are very very fit. When talking to the girl, she mentioned that she walked 3 hours from her village to Sapa and she does it everyday... omg... RESPECT.

Me and our companions during this short afternoon trek

Goal accomplished! I felt that the village was quite commercialized simply because on our way down, there were heaps of shops selling tourist gifts like cheap silver jewellary and shawls. There were also ladies selling the traditionally dyed outfits (made from the indigo flowers). A bought one of those and her fingers were stained blue for the majority of the trip. Another thing I didn't understand was that the young boys would run around with no bottoms and with snot flowing freely from their noses....

The next day, our trek to our homestay started proper. This time women from the black H'mong tribe followed us. They do this because they hope to get you to buy some handicraft items from them. The trek was pretty ok but admittedly I did not have the best shoes for them (old sneakers) and there were times I was greatful for those women to guide me along the slippery footholds. There were instances where we were literally walking along the rice terraces whereby any false step and I would find myself sitting in a rice paddy field!

Indigo flowers where they get the dye from...

I took so many pictures of the rice terraces, but in this cases, the pictures do little to translate what we saw in the valley. Terraces and terraces of rice fields - all carved out in the last centuries by the tribes. The scenery was truly spectacular and I have alot of respect for these people and their will to live. Imagine farming in the mountaineous regions with simple tools and having one harvest crop a year - and they've done it for many centuries

It was a delight looking at the children as we trekked along the fields. Many of them do work like carry firework from young! (They're all girls) and the picture of the young child "training" to carry his sibling on his back was quite endearing too.

Iz, D and I exploring the riverside near our homestay

Sights we saw while walking through Lao Chai village. There's actually a church that's been built there and some of the women are converts. The amusing thing is that they did not know the word for catholic so when we walked past, all of them starting pointing and making the sign of the cross in front of me.

Our homestay accomodations for the night. Pretty comfy. My mattress was right at the end and with no lights I was practically crawling on my feet when it came for bedtime.

Our tour group and our kind homestay hosts from the giay tribe. These blouses (I felt) were the closest indication that they had previously lived in China centuries ago with the pattern being very similar to Chinese fashions and the buttons as well.

Vietnamese hospitality - when someone comes to your house, offer them a shot of your local specialty. In this case, it was rice wine. Very strong and we had at least a few rounds on top of all the beers that we had that night. It's a water bottle, but don't be deceived... they recycle alot here.

Sapa was wonderful and if possible, I would like to go back again (possibly in warmer weather). A funny story is that I went to the valley fully expecting to lose signal and be absolutely lost to civilisation during the 3 days. Who knew that in the valley, I would experience the best signal (full bar) that I would have on the tour. Crap I don't even get full signal back home in Singapore. It was so amusing to be trekking and suddenly have the ethnic lady beside me pull out her vibrating cellphone (2G) and start chatting animatedly to her friend on the other side of the line. OMG. A running joke among the group was that we would always ask where was the wi-fi so that we could "check in" Even in the most unlikely of places we would always ask and sometimes we were proven so wrong...