The Grand Tour

Treading lightly

I know I've said it before, but the last few days have been absolutely crazy and busy for us. Last Friday evening, Toli had just enough time to administer the final exam to his students (he called the test "easy" but no one managed to finish within the allotted four hours), grab a motorbike ride home, and scarf down some dinner before having to join our group on the night train to Sapa. There, he spent every spare minute grading the finals (and his computer battery dying out didn't help). Then, after the night-train ride back to Hanoi, he skipped out on the trip to the Perfume Pagoda to finish grading his assignments and assign final grades. Even now, it's 8:30am, and my poor sleepless husband still has to meet with the director of the program and press a CD before we can catch up with the group to leave at 10:00am. Maybe I should just say, it's been a crazy and busy week for him rather!

Anyway, Sapa was indeed a worthwhile trip. It's a little town nestled in the mountains that border China and Vietnam, where the landscape and scenery are absolutely breathtaking. There seems to be this misty fog that constantly hangs over the area which makes it even more mysterious. More than the scenery though, the area around Sapa is where about a dozen or so minority tribes live. Each tribe has its own special dress and customs, and most also have their own language. They live in very harsh and primitive conditions up in the mountains, but the people seem so strong and so beautiful. Like out of a book.

But then there's another side to Sapa - the equally harsh reality of modern tourism. In the last decade, the tourism business in Sapa has been just exploded. The entire old quarter of the city has been converted to hotels, restaurants, and shops, and many of its residents have moved (or been moved?) to the outskirts of the city to the so-called "New Sapa" which is noisy with new construction. The nearby Ham Rong ("Dragon jaw") mountain, which boasts some amazing views has actually been landscaped with orchid gardens and other flowers. The streets are filled with people from minority tribes clamoring around tourists to sell embroidery and silver jewelry. Worse than that, the nearby minority villages now charge an entry fee to visit and then aggressively hawk their handicrafts to visitors. And until this year, the minorities were being pressured by the Vietnamese government to put on their "Love Market" (a unique sort of mating ritual where the youths of all the tribes come together to flirt and possibly mate) every Saturday evening for the tourists to watch. (This year, they've moved it to 2:00am, and Toli and I decided to respect their privacy and sleep instead.) Seeing all this just filled me with so much sadness - it's a such a beautiful and special area, and I worry so much that the influx of tourism is going to take that all away eventually. Toli made the comparison to the Greek islands and how in the past, each island had a unique local color and character that eventually eroded away under the commercialism of tourism.

What also made me terribly sad is that it is the Vietnamese people, not the minorities of the tribes, who are truly benefitting from the tourist boom. They are the ones who own and run the restaurants and hotels, and they are the ones who run the local tour companies. The main market in Sapa is all Vietnamese vendors, except for the top floor which is reserved for minority handicrafts. But even up there, the Vietnamese are the ones who are selling the substantial pieces of silver jewelry. I bought purses and silver bracelets from the minority women, but when I wanted to buy a silver circle necklace like the ones the minority women wear, I had to suck it up and buy it from a Vietnamese seller. It especially hit me hard when we went to the food area of the marketplace and saw dozens of minorities in their colorful dress sitting at the stalls eating Vietnamese food sold by Vietnamese vendors! I suppose one could take a more positive outlook of that - it *was* a Sunday morning when everyone goes to the market, and perhaps like any one of us in the States, the minorities also like to eat out every now and then and enjoy something different from their own cuisine.

Even when it comes to the prices, it feels so wrong that buying a can of Coke in a Vietnamese restaurant is equivalent to the purchase price of three bracelets or a small purse sold by the minorities.

I can't help but think of the minority tribes in the Sapa area as the Vietnamese equivalent to the Native Americans in the States, or the Tibetans in China. They are a unique people with a separate culture, but because they habitate valuable land, they are otherwise pushed aside by the dominant culture and have to either assimilate or be forced under. I've never liked having to read about Indian reservations in the history books or Tibetans in the newspapers, but it's just so much harder swallow watching it happen right in front of your eyes and feeling helpless about it.

Unfortunately, the only thing I can think of doing (besides become a cultural ethnologist and live among them to document their culture in case it disappears) is to stay away. I love love love travelling as most people know, but visiting Sapa has really driven home (no pun intended) the fact that as a tourist, no matter how lightly I tread, I am affecting the people and environment around me. My presence in a country continually encourages the development of the tourist industry at the expense of what attracted me there in the first place. What a terrible paradox! Anyway, Toli and I did promise each other that if we do go back to Sapa, that we will either camp or arrange homestays in the villages and do our best to patronize the minorities directly if we require goods or services. And maybe in a way, it's better to be a "green traveller" than to stay away because if the tourist industry is going to develop anyway, we might as well try to steer it in a direction we're happier with.

P.S. Due to some technical difficulties, Toli's log entries have been removed.
:(

Posted by Christine at April 5, 2004 08:40 PM