We're in the beautiful town of Sapa. The town is nestled partway down a valley surrounded by cloud covered mountains. Cascading rice terraces hug the sides of the mountains in every direction you look creating a patchwork quilt of every shade of green and brown. Rice, corn and sweet potato is grown on the curved terraces (where in past years opium was grown). It blows me away to think of the original hard work put in by the tribes people people who dug out those terraces on the steep hillsides. Now their families work hard, backbreakingly to produce food for themselves with a little left over to sell. We watched them use handplows with buffalos or shovels (like the SL mammatys), bent over in two in mud upto their knees preparing the ground for the seed. An amazingly hardworking lot.
There's a mind-boggling variety of tribes in this area - the Black H'mong, Red Dzao, Zhai, Red H'mong and the Flower H'mong as well as the black Thais. They dress in black with beautifully coloured embroidery all over and it's usually the headdresses (amazing variety of scarves and hatlike things) that tell them apart.
The women in these tribes not only work the farms alongside their men but they do the most exquisite embroidery which they have for the last 20 years been selling to tourists. Blankets, clothes, wall hangings, purses you name it they'll pull it out of their baskets and bags! They dye hemp black and then embroider patches of it then patchwork it with beautifully dyed pieces of blues, greens and yellows and create these gorgeous pieces of work.
A common sight is an enormous group of Black H'mong women and children surrounding a hapless tourist yelling out "you buy from me"!
I tried to explain to a group yesterday that I really can't buy from EVERY SINGLE person I meet! They just keep repeating "you buy something from me"!! They are so good-natured about it though - a gorgeous people, especially the very regal Red Dzao - that you tend to end up buying something. I have already purchased 3 bedspreads (at about $20 each!), handbags, mobile phone holders, cushion covers!! Sigh.... another bag needs to be purchased! Glad that we leave soon so we don't have to cart it all around with us!
Their english is very very good - all learnt over the past 20 years from tourists! So they can't read or write it but the kids especially - the most beautiful young girls of about 8 - 14 - speak it very well!
We've been on two treks - the first was about 7kms and took about 3 hours with a stop for lunch. The other was a full day trek about 17kms following very rural tracks that followed the edge of the rice paddies, through forested areas, past the doorsteps of tribal people's homes, across rivers and waterfalls! amazing, breathtaking scenery.
Watching the people go about their daily business was humbling in a way. The children work hard too - tending the buffaloes, driving the ducks to water, carrying their younger siblings on their backs in slings and the girls learn the embroidery from their mothers. The girls marry at 14 so there's not much schooling as it's more important for them to learn skills from their mothers prior to their marriage. The men sometimes get hooked on the opium and beat up their wives using up all their earned money on their habit. It's a sad life but there's not much we can do. The United Nations money tends to find it's way into the pockets of the bigshots in the cities.
We've been lucky with the weather too. The first day the clouds, deep in the valley and shrouding the hills, put on a show for us as we had breakfast. then the next day the sun was shining and the views were magnificent as we trekked - hot - but it was worth every second, and every ache and pain!
We leave Sapa on the night train today... and it will be sad to go...
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