Sa Pa

Walking on the thin strip of soil at the edge of a mountainside rice paddy, before the terrace drops to the next level, is like tracing one step on a living ladder that connects the earth's bounty to humanity's kitchen. On our recent trip to the alpine town of Sa Pa, that's where Scott and I found ourselves – hiking the steep and recently harvested slopes where the rice we'd eaten the night before had first emerged from the soil.

Traditionally, Sa Pa is a trading post where inhabitants of the surrounding ethnic minority villages gather to sell crops and to search for a spouse at the weekly "love market." The vibrantly dressed minority people, especially the Black Hmong with their calves wrapped in intricate leggings and Red Dzao with their elaborate headpieces, often still walk the better part of a day to hawk their wares in Sa Pa, only now they're more likely to be targeting tourists for a sale than fellow villagers.

As a result, the hill people, who only recently started having to learn Vietnamese in school, speak amazing English, through which we could glean tidbits about their way of life. A 34-year-old mother of five showed me how she walks around running hemp through her fingers all day, preparing it to be woven and dyed with indigo into a traditional Hmong jacket. We saw the way they'd siphoned water from a waterfall to power a see-saw like rice husker and watched a rowdy group of boys take turns riding down a hill on a bicycle made all from wood.



We also saw the way tourism is changing the area – making it common for women who must have been in their sixties to offer to sell us hashish, but also providing young Hmong girls an opportunity to push marriage back from the customary age of 14 to 16 to allow them to work as tour guides for a few years.

Not far from the Chinese border, Sa Pa is also located near Tram Ton (Heaven's Gate) Pass, Vietnam's highest mountain pass at nearly two kilometers tall. Promised a decent road, we rented motorbikes to drive across it, only to find the road under construction that stopped all traffic for half hour periods while impatient drivers revved their engines ready to roar out in a chaotic pack as soon as we were let through.

Driving between wobbly minibuses and a precarious drop off was worth it, however, for the views of mountains that alternated between being bathed in a honey sunlight that showered glowing beams over the trees and being swallowed by a looming fog that hid the crags and made the scene seem so big that surely our little motorbike would be lost in the eternity of dips and lifts of earth forever.

Because we went late in the year, the fog was a constant presence in Sa Pa. For our final day hike, we traveled down into the valley and finally saw the river cutting through the rice fields and the villages tending them that had been sunny under the fog layer the whole time. While we carefully picked our way up and down the terraces, next to tiny women in plastic shoes skipping down the slippery trails with no problem, life went on around us. Children danced to music blaring from loudspeakers in schoolyards, women pulled bamboo three times their size down impossibly narrow paths and waterbuffalo grazed.

And as we came back chilled from the day, we'd open a bottle of wine, light a fire in the hotel room fireplace and then open the windows to let the smoke billow across our room and out into the night.