Trekking with the Hill Tribes

We have spent the past two days based in Sapa near the Chinese border, trekking in the mountains with the hill tribes. And when I say trekking, I mean it! Today, we walked about 14 kilometres in really rough terrain, descending from the mountaintops into the valley below. (Yesterday we only did 8 km). Sometimes the track was mud, sometimes rocks and sometimes a creek/river bed. (After several years, my Tevas have finally come in handy!)

The countryside here is truly spectacular with mountain peaks devolving into sculpted hills of terraced rice paddies, amongst which the people live in their small villages. And you can't get much more rural than this: the people here live amongst pigs, water buffalo, chickens and ducks and subsist off the land and from money that tourists bring in.

In fact, tourism seems so important here that without it, the poverty people live in would become absolutely abject. On our trek yesterday, one of the Red Dzao village women asked us what it cost to fly from Europe to Vietnam - when we told her and after her initial amazement subsided, she told us that such an amount of money would be enough to eat for several years here.

On the other hand, the hill tribes seem quite happy with their lot and enjoy interacting with tourists. Yesterday we were amazed to observe one of the hill tribe women translating from Vietnamese into English for a Vietnamese person trying to speak to one of the people in our group! Today we were helped down the mountain by a group of H'mong hill tribe women (help which was needed, given the incline and the muddy state of the track we were walking on!) who we chatted to along the way about our families, names and ages. And once we got to their village, they had some local crafts to sell us for a small sum.

But possibly one of the strangest things we have experienced here is observing the use of modern technology in these remote areas. Yesterday, we saw village houses with satellite dishes mounted on their roofs... and today, we were amazed to observe that there is mobile phone reception out here!