I'm sitting in what I'll call a deluxe luxury van on the road trip from Sapa back to Hanoi. It's deluxe luxury because it's the essentially the size of a 10 person van, but it's been gutted and replaced with huge chairs so that only 7 people fit VERY comfortably. The paneling on my left is made of that "fake" glossy woody that looks impressive on things like fake yachts that you rent for your sorority formal. Above the window is a clock with Roman Numerals and its surrounded by mirrors. It gets the job done I think to myself and wonder how I am going to capture the rest of my Sapa experience.
Sapa is a town in the mountains that used to serve as a city center/market for the Hmong people to trade and sell their goods. About 100 years ago the French started using it for an outpost during the French occupation of Vietnam. Today, it is a mass expansion of development - everywhere you go in Sapa you hear the sounds of construction: brick layers scraping the brick glue, large trucks carrying supplies, shovels digging or mixing cement, and motorcycles beeping as they fly by with their metal panels strapped on the seat behind them.
The streets are narrow there's nowhere to go. In fact on our way out of town in this deluxe luxury van, traffic was held up by a kid pulling up a cart with LONG metal sheets (the kind of metal sheets my brother used to make our chicken coop growing up) on an unforgivingly steep road. He took up maybe only a fourth of a road, but that was enough to block all cars. Our driver leaned out the window and yelled at the poor kid in what I assume must of have been Vietnamese but it could have been any language. It was the harshest exchange I've seen here in Vietnam, any sort of outburst is pretty hush hush in their culture. Later we made the same loop around Sapa three times to pick up passengers from other hotels simply because by stopping once meant you hold up ALL the traffic. The third time we did this the two Australian women sitting behind me said "Christ, this is worst than Ireland." My travel partner laughed, he lived in Ireland for 10 months when he was 22, so whatever that statement meant I took it to hold some truth.
Nearly every 10 feet you walk in Sapa you see a new building go up (or down). It's rapidness of the expansion unlike anything I've ever seen before. The secret of this place is out, well out, people who have money to develop are doing it now, all hoping to get a slice of the Sapa Valley pie. It makes me wonder who are the people doing the developing, is it the Vietnamese, the Chinese, the Russians, others?? One of our Hmong guides told us it will be a big problem in 15-20 years, he was saying the Hmong keep selling their land to developers for lots of money. Although this is ok in the short term, many of these families have several children who will not have a place to live or farm - they don't go to school, they don't know a trade, they don't really make an income, what will they do?
When you ask the people who live here what it was like even 5 years ago, they all say "very different, many things have changed." They don't really go into detail and it's hard to get them to talk about specifics. They say that Sapa is growing and is noisier.
From my own observations (Which could be TOTALLY wrong) this is what I think. First, Every travel thing I read before coming to Vietnam said "bring toilet paper- lots!" I did bring toilet paper and haven't had to use it once. BUT, I will say that the hotel we stayed in Sapa didn't have a toilet paper holder. Again, not a big deal, but makes me think that giving guests toilet paper is a relativity new phenomenon like probably within the last 5 years. Second, our guide told us that electricity got to the Hmong villages 5 years ago via Vietnamese regulation to bring in schools for them. Think about that for a second, until 2011 Hmong villages did NOT have electricity. You know what else (some) Hmong now have? Cell phones. Both guides we had owned cell phones. Imagine you didn't have electricity 5 years ago to suddenly owning a cell phone where you can watch YouTube. I'm sure Sapa itself had electricity and wifi long before the villages, but the Hmongs' lives are changing rapidly within one generation. Third, there are now markets designed specifically for tourists. The Hmong have a long tradition of markets from trading to even "love" markets, where Hmong youth would go find their mate. Now the Hmong are catering more toward the busloads of tourists that come there. It's just so much change!
My final thoughts on Sapa itself is that it will not be be the same place 10, 5, even 3 years from now. I visited it in this short window of time where it began developing. Did I love the the town of Sapa itself, my short answer is "No" it's crowded, noisy, and if I'm perfectly honest, pretty dirty. That being said, the things you can access while being in Sapa is out of this world beautiful and do I dare say it, life changing. This is why I would come back to Sapa and why many more will continue to travel here.
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