While Sapa was an ok little town in its own right, we spent most of our time hiking around and exploring the surrounding areas. The countryside around Sapa is the gorgeous lush green valleys and terraced rice paddies that you see in photo books. Little children played in the river with their water buffalos and local women sold the vegetables that their husbands farmed in town.
The area around Sapa is also home to a number of "minority tribes", with the Black Hmong and the Dzay being the two we spent the most time around. While the tribes have in many ways converted from their traditional way of life to surviving via tourism, they have retained their langauge, dress, and a lot of their social customs. We spent one day hiking on our own down into the valley from Sapa town to Cat Cat village, a Hmong village about 3 km from Sapa. It was a really cool hike, down a long winding path towards the town which was built by the river that runs through the Sapa valley.
Our second day in Sapa we joined a small group and hired a Hmong tour guide to show us around her town and lead us on a day trip through the rice paddies and bamboo forests. Ironically, my second weekend after quitting work in 2006, I spent three days and two nights hiking through northern Thailand and staying in Hmong villages. Now, in my second to last weekend of b-school travel, this hiking adventure made the Hmongs a surprising bookend to my past two years of travels.
Our Hmong guide - Cha - was a really smart 20 year old girl who spoke Hmong, Vietnamese, and pretty good English too. And, since Lizzle speaks Vietnamese, we got some extra insight into Cha's life. She met her husband at the "Love Market" in Sapa town at age 15. He is also Hmong, but from a neighboring village. They were married after two months, she moved in with his family, and they had a daughter when she was 16. Now, at age 20, she works guiding tourists while her husband farms part-time and finishes school. I am not sure how much of this was a sob story designed to elicit tourist dollars (I actually think it's not, but you never know) but she complained to us that her husband drinks and gambles away all their money. She wants to leave him, but she is so old now (almost all Hmongs marry in their early teens) that nobody else will marry him. And since he paid a dowry to marry her, she would have to pay a fee of 5 million dong (~US$300), 40 pigs, and 80 liters of alcohol to his family if she wanted to divorce him. She was also eager for her daughter to start school. Almost all Hmong boys go to schoool but many Hmong girls do not. And most Hmong girls who do go to school are not taught to read or write, they are just taught to speak Hmong and Vietnamese.
While her story was really sad, it was an interesting backdrop on the villages and countryside that we walked through which were stunningly beautiful. We hiked for a few hours in the morning, had lunch in a Hmong town (sandwiches, not Hmong food unfortunately), and then hiked for a few hours in the pouring rain in the afternoon. The trails became super muddy and by the end of the hike I had slid down countless slick patches and was absolutely covered in mud. Still though, I was not complaining - it was a really cool adventure.
Hmong women by old French church in Sapa town
Girl drying some corn on the side of the dirt road
water wheel by river in cat cat
children bathing and playing with water buffaloes
Me and our Hmong guide Cha by waterfall
1 comment:
Your blogs and accumulation attracts me to arrive rearward again n again.
poconos romantic getaway
Post a Comment