Sapa, Vietnam Slide Show

Here are more photos from our time in Sapa, which we wrote about HERE and HERE. This was early in our trip, but it was one of the best  opportunities to learn something about the culture and the changes that were going on in Vietnam.  If we got something wrong, let us know; we learned so much we probably got at least some of it wrong.

Minorities

Vietnam is 85% ethnic Vietnamese, the remaining 15% made up of 56 different “minorities” ranging from the Chum (a group that for 1,000 years was dominant politically in much of southern Vietnam and Cambodia), to many various “hill tribes”. In northern Vietnam, in or near Sapa, we saw Red Dao, Black H’mong and Flower H’mong people.  Each group had distinctive native dress, and many of the women continue to wear the traditional dress. Like elsewhere in the world we’ve traveled, with the exception of Morocco, the men all wore western attire.

When speaking to ethnic Vietnamese, there was a clear sense of superiority over the “minorities”, and when speaking to a member of a particular minority, there were strong stereotypes, often negative, of other tribal groups.

“Touched By Tourism”

“Touched by Tourism” was a phrase we heard a lot in terms of describing a location or village.  This term was used both to reflect that local customs had been influenced by the presence of tourists, but also with a generally positive connotation, in that tourism brought money.  We were also told  that some areas and even individual villages were “not touched” because they were uncooperative with or resistant to government policies.

Touched by Modernization

We heard a lot about the rapid economic development that has taken place since “normalization” with the U.S. in 1995.  After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, Vietnam lost its’ patron that had subsidized the regime.  Five years later after much economic hardship, the government normalized its relations with the US, and opened the country to foreign investment.  Much has changed, and in the view of those we talked to, mostly for the better since then. Government control remains of the communist variety, but the economy is clearly more capitalist.

One change which we  saw just the beginnings of was the impact of the increased use and geographic availability of electricity.  We drove along the hillsides around Sapa, looking down the steep valley walls at the rice terreces and rivers below them.

We were told that 5 hydroelectric dams were being built.  So in 10 years if we were to come back, we would see large new lakes down the hillsides, the result of the dams. It would be easy to adopt a preservationists attitude from the comfort of our life style, when thinking about the lost landscape and displaced villages, but the people telling us these stories seemed to regard it as something positive in terms of the dam’s future impact on their standard of living.

With that, here is the slideshow. Hopefully the background will add some context to the photos.