Trekking in Sapa

A few days after arriving in Vietnam we took off on one of the coolest adventures we’ve been on yet.  We went on a trek in the hills of Sapa and had two nights in homestays.

The adventure began with the journey to Sapa from Hanoi.  The first part of the drive was uneventful.  In a small van on a big highway whizzing past green rice fields, stops at highway rest stops and using google translate to explain “little boy has to pee, outside is okay”.  This went on for a few hours until we arrived at the town of Lao Cai and started the journey upwards.  Think twisty, turny, no guardrails, green mountains rising up across the valley, terraced with hundreds of rice fields.  There were spells of breath holding as our driver passed cars, trucks, buses, all while on a turn.  

Having survived this part of the drive we were spat out into the teeming chaos that was Sapa town on a Saturday night.  It was congested with more tourists than we had encountered in our entire time in Hanoi (or so it seemed).  The streets were narrow and steep and twisty.  There were local children from surrounding mountain tribes (that is what they call themselves, and are groups such as the Black Hmong, the Flower Hmong, the Red Dao) selling trinkets in the street.  Young girls had babies on their backs, the mothers hanging back so that tourists would feel compelled to give the children money.  There were lots of flashing lights on signs advertising treks, massages, restaurants and more.  It was all just too much.  We retreated to our hotel that was a bit on the outskirts of the main town.  We were thankful for the quiet and settled to sleep.  Which is when the Karaoke at a neighboring restaurant kicked up.  It went on and on.  It sounded like the same man singing over and over, and he could not carry a tune to save his life.  I decided it was a particular form of torture to be lying on a hard bed in a hotel room in Sapa listening to Vietnamese men sing karaoke.  But all things, good and bad, must pass, and silence eventually settled over us and sleep came.  

Sapa town was not a favorite place, as it has the feeling of a town created in a rush of development to serve tourists' needs.  There was no soul to the place and plenty of neon signs and hustle and bustle.  However, Sapa Town is a necessary stop on the way to the mountains and valleys that lay beyond it.

The next morning we were met by our guide, Mu.  Mu is a remarkable 29 year old woman.  She is from the Black Hmong tribe and grew up in the countryside.  Her parents did not think she should go to school as she was needed to tend to their water buffalo and help with her younger siblings.  At 10 she started going into Sapa with her mother to sell their handicrafts.  It was then that her world began to crack open and she became interested in learning to read and write and to speak English.  By 13 she was speaking English well enough that someone who knew her from the market hired her to help guide trekking groups.  That was 16 years ago and now Mu, who is fluent in English, has her own company and is entirely self taught.  Paired with this remarkable sense of drive and intellect is a warm smile and gentle spirit.  Mu was simply delightful, and we were so fortunate to spend 3 days with her. 

Before we set off.

Our trek started with deciding what route to take, the 12 km or 15 km option for day 1!? Day two was going to be at least 15 kms to get to our second rest spot.  The third day had some optional hikes and then the return to Sapa.  Gulp.  That was a lot of ground to cover.  We opted for the 12 km option on day one, especially because it would bypass the first very touristy village and take us on less traveled routes.  At first we were high-fiving ourselves as we made our way through the incredibly congested streets of Sapa.  The streets leading out of town towards the village of Cat Cat were virtual gridlock.  Cars, buses, motorbikes were in a standoff between those heading down the tiny twisty roads and those heading up.  

Gridlock

Weaving our way between bikes and buses and cars.  It was intense!

All the traffic was heading to and from Cat Cat which is a town that had been developed as a tourist destination.  Mu told us how the government had displaced the villagers out of their original homes further out into the hills, leaving an inauthentic village that now exists purely to serve the visiting tourists.  In the village there are flower gardens and man-made waterfalls.  It is a very popular spot with Asian tourists.  Mu explained that, in general, Asian tourists like man-made things while North American or European tourists prefer more natural nature.  Interesting difference.  We were definitely keeping to script and were happy to skip the congested throngs down in Cat Cat, and instead we headed for the quiet of the hills.  And that is where it got hard.

We stepped off the road and onto a small mud path.  This path would lead us up and down through rice fields and corn fields, next to water buffalo and stands of bamboo.  And the path was rugged.  Sometimes only a foot wide, other times steps cut into a hill.  It took attention and care to ensure that ankles remained intact and the person above remained upright.

After a couple of hours of this I think we were all wondering “what have we gotten ourselves into!?” Imagining two 15 km days of this kind of walking was daunting.  Luckily that was not the way it would be the entire time.  Certainly there were times when we were on small dirt paths winding its way up or down a mountainside, but they were interspersed with wider gentler paths and some time on pavement.  Our two days of walking took us through bamboo forests, on water buffalo paths through rice fields, down into valleys, across rivers, up mountainsides, on roads and through villages.

That trail cut in the hillside was one of our paths.

There were bridges of varying sizes and widths.  This was a more sturdy one.

We even walked through road construction. 
Safety standards are bit more lax than home.

We were frequently amazed by the sheer scale of the terraces, imagining each one carved by hand.  The scale of person-power we could observe in these valleys was humbling.  Again and again we remarked at how hard people worked.  It was burning season which meant the air had a haze from the smoke and we could see people high up on hillsides clearing their fields for corn. 

Fires in the fields created a heavy haze in the air.

We walked through villages and tiny owns.  Our nights were spent sleeping at homes that were deemed “homestays.”   The first night was in Mu’s brother’s home.  The house is next to the home she grew up in.  Rice fields surround the house and we had water buffalo as neighbors.  Her village has only been given permission to host homestays in the last couple of years, so it still felt authentic.  We ate our evening meal with Mu’s family and slept on mattresses on the floor under mosquito netting. A neighbor, who is a sister-in-law, dropped in during the meal asking for a flashlight for her walk home and was invited to pull up a stool at the table.  We shared plum rice wine (in shot glasses … it isn’t a sipping drink) and enjoyed listening to the riotous noise of friends sharing a laugh.  

The North American giants, with our hosts and Mu.

This is the view from the front door.

This guy hung out in the rice field in front of us.

Lounging under the mosquito net.

Our beds.  The mattress on the floor was remarkably comfortable.

Vios taught Mu how to play the card game "Sleeping Queens"

This guy had so much fun with Mu.

The second night was in a traditional Tay house.  The Tay are another ethnic minority group in the Sapa region.  Their homes are traditionally large and elevated off the group with space underneath for livestock.  Today the kids huddled on a sofa watching cartoons on their big TV held in an ornately carved wooden hutch that was in the open space space historically used for livestock.  Out front grandmas and aunties hoe the earth of the garden and rooster caws into the early morning air. 

This is our second homestay with the garden in front.

What was incredibly unique about our experience was not only were we seeing great beauty in the landscape, but it felt like we were able to get a glimpse of how others live. With Mu as our guide it felt like there was some level of permission to be where we were.  We could relax knowing that she wouldn’t take us somewhere we weren’t allowed to go.  She answered all our questions and we learned loads from her about traditional Hmong culture and families. True it felt like at times we were invading the villagers’ space, but this too sparked great conversations with the kids about what it must be like to have people walk by your house or your school taking pictures as you went about your regular life and the double edged sword of tourism for rural communities.  We learned from Mu the importance of not buying trinkets from the children we met on the paths or in the towns, as it would reinforce for their moms that they should be taken out of school to earn money.  We learned that the president of Vietnam showed up a couple of years ago in a village next to Mu's and decided that there was too much development happening, so all building was halted immediately.  He then died.  But still construction is stalled and there are many half finished houses that families are not allowed to complete. 

Walking through a village.

Indigo is used to dye fabrics shades of blue to black.
These beautiful fabrics are used in creating traditional Hmong dress and the colours for which the Black Hmong are named.

Indigo puddle.

Trail of indigo.

Mu showing us how rice is ground into flour.

We talked a bit about the role of urban governments keeping rural areas rural, for the benefit of tourism, and what that means and how we may be contributing to the problem.  Mu showed us different traditional ways of dress (still used today) that distinguish one group from the other.  We learned that the Red Dao are the only group who don’t eat dog because to them the dog is sacred as it was dogs that led them to safety when they fled China. (This region is mere few kilometers from the Chinese border).   And yes, the idea that dogs are food was a hard one to reconcile, especially since they seemed to hang around houses like pets and were cute.  Somehow I thought dogs for food would be mangy, not fluffy and cute.  Were the dogs we saw pets? Food? Both? Hard to know but probably both.

I can't bear to show pictures of the cute dogs we saw, who may or may not be pets, so here are pictures of the bamboo forest instead.

We learned that each village has a bamboo forest and one day of the year the entire village goes to the forest to cut the bamboo they need for the year.  You are not allowed to cut bamboo at other times, without permission.  The village also elects guardians of the forest for the year.  Fascinating.

We learned that the usual age for Hmong girls and boys to marry is about 14.  This gave our kids lots to ponder and wonderful questions such as, now in modern life “why can’t they wait even a few more years?”   We all noticed that women seemed to be the ones always working.  We learned that most families in the valley have land on both sides of the river, one side for rice and the less fertile side for corn.  We were awed to learn that rice requires an inordinate amount of water and a lot of intensive work.  Rice is planted twice, first, after being germinated, it is cast in the field, then the sprouts are picked and replanted carefully by hand.  Farmers harvest enough rice for their own families which led to the question of  "if they are busy farming to feed their families, how do they make money for anything else?"  The traditional answer is by farming cardamom in the forests.  Today of course many supplement their income through tourism.   

We were surprised to learn about the common practice of stealing livestock (chickens, pigs) from neighbors and even diverting water from the rice fields if not carefully watched.  Information like this challenged our preconceptions of what life in a village would be like. 

We saw two big dams that are being constructed and the raw gashes in the earth where new roads and construction have moved in.  It made me think about the scale of displacement and destruction that the huge dams in China must have wrought.  It also made me pause every time I thought “oh that vista has been ruined” how complicated the question of “progress” is.  Who is to say that the views should remain rice terraces? Who gets to decide when old traditional ways of living are abandoned, and how does tourism contribute to both the maintenance of old ways of life and their destruction?  Should people remain rice farmers because the fields are picturesque and tourists like to come see them? Who decides? But does “progress” have to happen at the cost of ravaging the earth?

One of two large dams we saw.  Note the raw roads and landslides around the areas of construction.
Apparently this dam was not even sanctioned by government before it was started.

All this learning happened as we walked, and talked and walked some more.  The kids were champs, the seniors were champs.  It was not easy hiking but it was engaging and exciting.  Mu and Vios had a special connection and walked side by side for many hours, enjoying each other's company.  He was her “helper guide”.  

We enjoyed seeing some of the snippets of life in the couple of small towns we walked through.  Our favorite observations usually had to do with industry, safety and ingenuity.  Another reminder that scarcity is the mother of invention.  Take note of the following welding shops:

Face shield made of a piece of cardboard, with a pair of sunglasses over the eyes.
We couldn't help wonder if a spark would cause the paper to burn, defeating the purpose...

Down the street this guy is using a dustpan as a shield.

Our last day was hilarious because we had a few hours in the morning to go out on a quick day hike.  Everyone was feeling a bit weary from the past 2 days but thought we might as well go for a stroll.  Okay, that is a lie, the kids clearly voted to NOT go for a “bonus” hike and at least one adult agreed with them.   Mu reassured us that it was an easy walk “little bit up, little bit down”, so we went.  It was a lot up.  Which meant it was a lot down.  And it was hot, the sun finally breaking through the clouds and the haze.  There was some good natured grumbling, by all ages.  But we did it and smiles prevailed in the end.

We figured the "gentle" part was that the path leading us up was relatively smooth, but the incline was steep and sustained, nothing "gentle" about it.

"Silver Mountain" in the background.  Lots of silver was found on the mountain after the war, as locals hid their silver there for safe keeping.  Now people actually farm rice at the peak.

Our time trekking in Sapa was a unique and wonderful experience for all of us.  We all felt invigorated by the combination of physical exertion and emotional and intellectual stimulation.  I was proud of all seven of us.