Sapa and comments on Tourism

The beautiful view down the valley from Sapa

Tourism does wonderful and horrible things to a place. Last weekend we visited a beautiful little mountain hill station called Sapa, in the northwestern corner of Vietnam, and while the scenery was absolutely breathtaking, both Meg and I had a difficult time with some of the people we met there.

Women selling items to tourists at the BacHa market

Read the rest with lots of Sapa photos...

Sapa is a French Colonial town in the midst of local indigenous people (minority people). These folks, like the other minority folks we've met, have lived almost exclusively in the isolated mountains between Vietnam and China and consequently have cultures that are unique to themselves. These regions were more or less closed off to the broader world until about 1993, when suddenly foreign tourists were allowed to come in. And how they came in. Sapa is now one of the hot spots of Tourism in Vietnam, with thousands of people visiting on the weekend (because there are several large markets in the area) and a decent number of people during the week as well. Sapa's fame really draws people in as they come to see the beautiful views and the local tribes in their traditional clothes, which are quite unique. We took the night train from Hanoi to Sapa last Friday, arriving in a fine drizzle and enjoying a day of relaxed coffee-drinking and journal-writing before venturing into local villages.

The traditional dress is one of the amazing things to see in the hill country. This photo shows clothes out to dry along a village fence.

Sapa itself is a simply beautiful place. It literally is this idyllic small town located at the top of a ridge looking down onto a valley of stepped rice paddies. It is often cloudy, rainy, and cold there (yes, I was actually cold for about 5 minutes!) because clouds roll into the valley and then slowly creep over the ridge. When the clouds break it is simply breathtaking, and even when it is overcast there are still these wispy clouds crawling through the mountain side. It is, as one guide book puts it, "A justifiable tourist trap."
Josh and some local women among the stepped rice paddies

A boy taking goats to the market

Now the problem of Sapa is this: there are a variety of local peoples who have lived in (relative) isolation for several hundred years but were suddenly introduced to Tourism when the floodgates opened and they, like all good entrepreneurs and people who find themselves on the other side of a tourist trap, find ways to make it work for them. This changes their traditional way of life in many ways as they slowly begin to work and function as part of this tourist trap. For example, most of the women no longer work in the fields but spend their time making hand(ey) crafts for tourists. Many children no longer go to school because they will make more money peddling to tourists than they will in other jobs. We even encountered a random ticket booth along the road- we had to pay just to walk through a village! Not that these changes are inherently bad (though I find them disheartening) because they bring some much-needed revenue to an otherwise poor region. But I think it changes the make up of a place. Whereas before tourists went to Sapa to see these (untouched)people and go to markets, etc... now it almost felt as if there was a performance set up everyday by the minority peoples. I know this isn't entirely true, but it certainly wasn't the visit to "traditional" villages of minority peoples I had expected.

A women sews traditional embroidered clothe into bags for tourists at the Sapa market

A number of women carried babies with them as they sold (see the items hanging from her neck?)

Another, more unfortunate, side effect is the kind of sellers these woman have become (more often than not). They walk around the streets pressing everyone they meet into a sale (which isn't an overly uncommon selling technique in Vietnam though they reached a new level of persistence). Unlike many of the other places and sellers in Vietnam, these women were not rebuffed by simply saying "no" several times but would walk with you and continue to try and convince you why you should by their bag, necklace, pillow cover, opium, etc... Sometimes after we had said no to a seller several times she simply would follow us around, not asking anymore but just to watch and see what we did... or perhaps to be there just in case we felt inspired to by 5 new embroidered pillow covers. The women in the "I'm huge!" post for example walked with us for over a mile. They met us en route to another village and they asked us to buy things. We politely declined and continued on our way, wherein they decided to follow us. Three kilometers later we reached our destination and then they began to try and sell us stuff again, now using the phrase, "Me walk with you long time, why you no buy from me?" They also had excellent English and would begin a conversation with kindly questions about country of origin, name, siblings, age. etc. This would seem so nice until they asked you to buy something, making the entire pleasant conversation seem suspiciously like a sell-tactic.

I guess more than this being an undisputed problem, I just find this progression rather sad. People left traditional ways of life to meet the desires of rich travelers and this move strikes me as a perversion of their previous lives and of what I want traveling to be. I don't know if I have the right to say such a thing but it just feels wrong to pimp your culture out for cash (I come from the richest country in the world and where we don't just pimp out our culture we export it by the truck loads). More than anything I was just sad that I found myself becoming aggravated by (otherwise sweet) 20 year old women who are just trying to get by.

A man preparing a field for planting. He is wearing Western clothes, but we DID see many women (far outside of Sapa) wearing traditional dress while working in the fields. It was somehow a relief knowing that they didn't just "dress up" to sell to us tourists.

I should quickly add that we did meet some very nice women. They asked the typical introduction questions (name, age, siblings, married, children) and then we asked them the same ones- without getting asked to buy something. They even remembered our names and when we saw them the next day they ran up to say hello and chat. We also encountered less selling out in the countryside. We walked 9km to a village, a bit disappointed by the final destination, and decided to walk back to Sapa through the stepped rice paddies along the river. Not only was it a beautiful walk, but the people were also exceedingly helpful- pointing us in the right direction and yelling something in their language to get our attention when they saw us heading the wrong way. The hike turned into a 25km one, but it was our favorite day. The next day (Sunday) we went on a day trip to the BacHa market, a supposedly huge market with a few different people-groups attending. However, we were frustrated when we encountered more of the aggressive selling there. (We did happen to see the friendly women from the day before in Sapa. Apparently they had never been to the BacHa market and were visiting also as "tourists". The local people, being from a different people group, stared at their costumes- funny how groups of people we associate with each other are still so distinct amongst themselves.)

Che and Lan, the nice women we met at the Sapa market and then saw again in BacHa.


Along the walk- far from any tourist spot the people were very friendly. These children helped us find our way on the confusing paths. You could tell their mom or someone had said, "don't go beyond this river," because they took us all the way across their property to the river and then pointed and waved goodbye. When we went the wrong way further up the hill, we heard them yelling and turned to see them watching out for us and pointing us in the right direction!

I don't know who is at fault in situations like these, or if any individual group is culpable. I am quick to point to ourselves as the incoming tourists, who have created this problem. It is because we will pay exuberant amounts of money for common items in these villagers lives, consequently changing the value of goods, that these minority people abandon their previous work. We are the ones who came into their villages to gawk, point, and take pictures. However, I don't think its fully genuine to place the blame solely on us. They are the ones who have chosen to do nothing but sell to tourists. They are the ones who choose to sell in such an abrasive manner, that I find myself defensive towards most women I met there. Ultimately I think that the present situation is what it is because... well... people want to make a buck and the method they've developed is the quickest way to do that. Why simply farm rice when you can sell a cheap pair of earrings for a dollar? It seems like an inherent aspect of tourism and while I'm sure someone somewhere has begun working on solutions for it... I'm not sure what they are.

Our muddy shoes after that long but beautiful hike- we were exhausted!