We're now in Sapa, the main city in the Northwest corner of Vietnam. It used to be a resort area for the French, then fell on hard times during Vietnam's wars with the French, the Japanese, the Americans and one another. Only recently has it made a comeback. So many of the hotels are old French-style buildings. The setting is gorgeous, steep forested hills covered in mists and terraced rice paddies. There are many ethnic minorities here, the largest number being the Hmong. The women and girls wear shorts covered by a long apron, cloth strips wrapped around their legs, little black hats and lots of silver jewelry. Their dress is very picturesque. Other groups still wear traditional costume as well, like bright red turbans and yellow skirts. The Hmong vend various products in the street, like homemade cloth, clothes, and silver jewelry. Their sales tactics, like everywhere in Vietnam, are persistence and dishonesty. The little children attempt to pick your pocket under the guise of hugging you, and tourists can be followed down the street by 4 or 5 vendors, all talking at once. But I really like Sapa; it's very scenic and it's interesting to see all the different cultures still persisting so strongly. Today we visited a couple of Hmong villages. They are quite poor and live in tumbledown wooden shacks, but the scenery is amazing.
I enjoyed Halong Bay very much. Cat Ba Island is in the center of Halong Bay and we went hiking there. However, our tour was a rip-off and although we bought one priced two times more than most, it was no better. Oh well, we enjoyed ourselves anyway. We also went to "Halong Bay on the rice paddies" which looks like Halong Bay without an ocean (the rocks rise directly out of the rice fields) and were rowed down a scenic stream for several hours, by a woman using her feet to row. People here are very dexterous with their feet.
Women in Vietnam have a terrible position. All the heavy and dangerous work, which in the US is generally done by men earning a large salary, is done by very low-paid women (I guess they are more disposable?). Men ideally are supposed to sit and lead a life of leisure, supported by their wives, who in addition to earning all the income also raise the children, do all household chores and never rest. So if there's an unpleasant job to do, you can bet a woman has to do it. Men will hand all the baggage to their wives to carry and stroll along comfortably instead. Women aren't supposed to spend any money on themselves either: for example, smoking is very popular here, so 70% of Vietnamese men smoke but only 5% of females. This is not for health reasons, needless to say. In one restaurant, I ordered a beer and Peter didn't order anything. This was extremely upsetting to the waiter, who kept trying to serve Peter at least part of the beer by bringing another glass, pouring him beer, etc. When only Peter has ordered something, though, there hasn't been any problem.
We have met a fair amount of other foreigners here, although very few Americans, perhaps because of war memories. Tons of French people come here, which is sort of surprising as they were very brutal colonizers and thousands of French troops were killed during Vietnam's independence struggle. The Japanese were also cruel to the Vietnamese. During WWII, about 20% of the population in Japanese-dominated Vietnam died of famine as a direct result of Japanese policies.
I have been reading a very good book called The Girl in the Picture, about the life of Kim Phuc, the subject of the famous photo of the naked Vietnamese girl burned by napalm, screaming and running down the road. I was surprised by the book though, I always thought the Americans were horribly brutal during the Vietnam War (or American War as they call it here). But actually they were just sort of inept and clumsy, without understanding anything very well. The South Vietnamese government was horrible, corrupt, brutal, and deliberately losing battles to keep American money coming. The North Vietnamese were no better, but were constantly dragging people off to "reeducation camps" and then banning their relatives from holding employment, owning land or going to school. Once they reunified the country, Vietnam experienced precipitous negative growth and by 1980, was the world's third-poorest country. Since then, things have improved a lot but per capita GDP is still only $300. Yikes.
We are still eating delicious food, but no dog. However, we did pass by the dog meat restaurant area in Hanoi and sure enough, outside many of the restaurants hung an entire dog corpse but with no hair, just like a duck outside a Chinese eatery. It was really gross. Peter was especially disturbed.
Tomorrow we go for an overnight trek through the mountains surrounding Sapa, where we will see more ethnic minority villages and spend the night in a family's house. We will be flying out of Hanoi for Taipei on the 20th of August.
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