My weekend in Sapa

Vietnam (in case anybody hasn't seen a map for a long time) is really skinny in the middle with a bigger bit at either end. In fact, if you look at a map of Vietnam by itself and put in some, um, bridges at the south end and an oil rig leaning off the coast at the north end, it looks exactly like a whatchimajigeroo, the kind of thing that has been studied at great length by the venerable Dr. Seuss... Anyway, Sapa is about three inches up and to the left of the ear (if there were an ear) of the, yeah that, in the northwest corner of the top bit of Vietnam.

We took the train from Hanoi to Lao Cai, which is pretty close to the border with Yunnan province of China. From what I read, when China invaded Vietnam in 1979 they came in here and knocked over the whole town of Lao Cai - not that this fact made my three hours in that spot any more interesting, but it was something to think about while waiting for the bus. And sleeper trains in Vietnam are, well, sleeper trains are the same everywhere (except in America where they aren't...). It was kind of funny for me to be travelling with my fellow students, most of whom had never been on a sleeper train at all, after spending half my month of January on trains in China I had almost forgotten how fascinating they are!

So we get to Lao Cai Friday morning at five o'clock or some other dark hour, and take a 'bus' (a van, really) going south, up a lot of hills to Sapa. Spent an hour or two there, eating breakfast, then we start going down what I can only presume to be the other side of the hill. This time I got to ride a Jeep, hurrah! It was a Russian Jeep. You can tell the Russian ones because they say 'Vodka' on the gas cap – ha. Actually, you can tell the Russian ones because they have no AC and the windows don't roll down, not broken just nobody made a crank for them. It wasn't too hot up there anyway, so it didn't matter, but I don't think I'd want to ride one in the summer!

So we go down a long dirt road following the side of a valley full of rice paddies on mountainsides, waterfalls faraway at the bottom of the valley, little villages of bamboo houses and general vast intense green-ness that looked much like a postcard. Eventually we stop and the driver says we can't drive the rest of the way because the road is too bad (some of us were in a van, a van of significantly less stomach than the Russian jeep I was in) so we walked down a path from there to this little village along the river. The walk was nice, amazing views, but it was also down a very steep hill for a very long time.

I noticed something – water buffalos are really ugly! From a distance they look cool, they are the same color as a rock, and have a certain majesty or calmness that accompanies things that don't move much (ie, Buddha, Mt. Rushmore, my VW Van...), but up close they kind of lose that. I guess I've seen too many cows. Con Trâu (yes that would be Vietnamese for water buffalo, see I am learning something) are like cows but they have hair like a pig, horns like, well, a water buffalo, and they can walk on those little paths between rice paddies without destroying them - which I can't imagine a 'normal' Holstein cow doing, in fact I had a hard time doing it myself! They also have pigs here – Vietnamese Potbellied Pigs like I'm told people have as pets in America. They were frankly a bit more unfriendly than the buffalo, and even more ugly.

Anyway, we stayed in a house this village built for tourists I guess, it was pretty cool. We slept in a kind of loft on bamboo floor that bounced whenever anybody walked on it, and our guide showed us around the village - not much to see other than some waterfalls and the bridge which was of the 'sketchy suspension' variety, ok except when somebody led their row of donkeys across it when I was in the middle where the suspension cable is about six inches above the rotting boards - a fine height for tripping. We spent most of the time just kind of absorbing the peace and quiet. It reminded me a lot of the place I stayed in Thailand (Maesuwai, or some such name) only it was in the mountains.

After a day and a half of watching ducks, etc, we hike back up the hill and head back toward Sapa. Saturday night I walked around Sapa, which is just big enough that you can see all of it that you want to see in 45 minutes or so. The last day in Sapa we walked out of town down another side of the hill to a village called Cat Cat - no 'Cat' in Vietnamese doesn't mean cat, I don't know what it means, but 'mèo' means cat, and it sounds like a cat, only with a tone. I don't think cats talk with tones. Anyway, Cat Cat was really just a waterfall, which was cool, and more green-ness, only with more tourists. Sapa itself had a lot of tourists, and a lot of ethnic minority people selling stuff to tourists. The village we stayed in did not have a lot of wandering salespeople, but most other places we went did. That village, incidentally, was ethnic Thai (I tried to theorize about how that was what reminded me of Thailand, but we also went to Hmong village and the houses looked about the same to me, and I don't think I could tell the difference between a Thai person and a Hmong person except for their clothes). I like parenthesis, they make me feel organized! In the Hmong village there were lots of people selling stuff, shirts blankets jewelry bags and, funnily enough, little instruments that are some Southeast Asian variety of the jaw harp. And I met a couple French tourists and got to practice my French, felt all intelligent when I asked if they were French, they said yes and you? I said American, they said - but you speak French! They soon discovered that I didn't speak much French, but anyway that was fun.

In that village there was the cute little girl with a whiny voice who followed me all the way through the village going "You buy shirt you buy blanket you buy music you buy chapeau (they usually spoke a few English phrase but somehow they picked up 'chapeau' which is French for hat, and I didn't hear anyone selling 'hats') you buy from her (not true) why you no buy from me? you American (true) you have million dollars (not true) why you no buy from me? you have money you no buy from me you bad man!" At that point I had to start laughing, which was nice because she kept saying that, all of that, over and over and over until I got back up to the road and into the van and waved goodbye to her.

In Sapa I found a hotel/restaurant with a patio with an amazing view overlooking the valley, and I sat there drinking mango juice and writing in my journal - and borrowed a conical straw hat from the waitress to keep my head from getting sunburnt, and all the staff laughed at me and I felt right at home. I bought a shirt from a nice old lady who was about as tall as my elbow. The funny part about the people selling hats was that they always tried to plant a hat on your head, but usually couldn't actually reach that high.

Back in Hanoi, I have started sleeping through the morning announcements. Oh, the government says that all good citizens should get up at 6:30 am, (I GUESS the government says that, somebody does) and they have loudspeakers all over the place (they even had one in the little village we stayed in, although it was pretty quiet from where we were) and at 6:30 am, as well as a couple other times through the day, they start blasting some kind of propaganda to the world as a whole. It was a bit startling at first but I don't think about it much any more. Not like I understand it - that probably helps me to ignore it! I guess that noise will help me remember Sapa, the quiet place in Vietnam!

Dots Lines and Squiggles

I have begun studying Vietnamese. The people who first wrote Vietnamese down in Latin letters were Portuguese, and some French. So, you have all kinds of variations of what we know as english letters - an 'a' and 'o' with a 'hook' on the top right corner, then you have the 'hat' and 'smile' (those are thoroughly unofficial names) above some vowels like in french, only they really change the way you say them, plus tone marks above that. They have six tones, Chinese has four, and the way you mark them is pretty funny - one is a dot underneath the word, then you have a couple that are lines above the word like when writing Chinese in pinyin, then you have something that looks like a tilda in spanish, and you have to kind of make your voice do a little dip, then actually stop the sound for a tiny bit, and go up at the end... (it's not quite as hard as that makes it sound, but takes some getting used to) and another tone with a question mark looking thing (only smaller) above the vowel. Thus most Vietnamese words are surounded by various dots lines and squiggles!