Lai Chau will soon not exist. It will be flooded in the creation of a hydro-electric power plant. Villages are already planning and some have already been asked to move. The family in the house on stilts that we visited is moving in two months already a second town, called Lai Chau II, is underdevelopment.The valley is beautiful but the people are barely getting by. There is no running water to homes and the crops seem to be limited. In the summer, it is the hottest place in Vietnam with the heat trapped between the mountains and it settles in the Valley. Very different from Sapa, just 7 hours away, that is one of the coolest places in all of Vietnam. Photo 1: Man and water buffalo coming in from the rice paddiePhoto 2: The river that will soon flood the valley with the boat used to ferry us across to visit a Thay village.
We've driven west over the mountain pass and the land it jagged dryer than Sapa. Unlike Sapa and other areas we've visited, no one cares that we're tourists. They go about their business and ignore us. This is not a tourist-focused area. New sights includes houses on stilts, horses, tea as a crop, cock fights. Until a few years ago, the tribes around Sapa used horses as their primary mode of transportation and then the motorbike replaced the horse. What happened to the horses? Our guide says they ate them. He's a member of one of the tribes and I don't think he was kidding.
sPhoto 1, view of market from above; Photo 2, the countryside; Photo 3, D?, 27, mother of two, Red H'Mong.We arrived this morning around 6:30am in Sapa, a crazy village built by the French to look like a Swiss alpine village. Mist rolls in and out of town through the day. Lucky us, we had clear skies in the morning; sometimes the skies don't clear for days. We walked to three villages and all along the way had company, woman and girls from the Black H'Mong and Red H'Mong tribes who embroider and then sell their work to tourists. Women older than 20 haven't attended school b/c there were no schools when they were growing up and young girls attend school if the families can spare them, but many don't b/c the family needs them to work - embroider and then sell. Few men around. They are working in the fields, forests, or in the hotels. Sapa and the surrounding provinces are poor, as in no money, but everyone eats, has clean drinking water, and has access to education. Imagine Appalachia in the 1920s, everyone ate and, as one friend of my mother's put it, "we weren't poor, we just didn't have any money", and that's what's happening here. Photo 1, Mimi, Black H'Mong. She's twelve, speaks wonderful English that she's picked up from tourists and has never attended school and can neither read nor write.Photo 2, me and Mom.Photo 3, man back from the mountain who sat down to rest.
