A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Our Sapa Trek

The computers here at our hotel in Sapa, in the mountainous Northwest region of Vietnam, are painfully slow, so I'll keep this brief. Can't post photos because I can't use my laptop (which, incidentally, has been working absolutely fine the past week--completely mysterious), but a brief story from this morning on the streets of Sapa is too good not to share. So we're killing some time before our afternoon trek to a nearby village--having breakfast, shopping for the usual crap, taking in the sights. As if I have to point this out, as we walk we are constantly barraged by relentless peddlers of tourist crap, this time members of the Hmong hill tribe, who have discovered the pot of gold at the end of the tourism rainbow. All along, I'm training Sarah on how to be cold and mean, which is the only way to discourage them. "No. No! We don't want to buy anything. Please stop following us, or we will definitely not by anything from you!."

So we end up on a park bench, looking out over a small lake, the cloud-shrouded mountains in the distance, and the colorful buildings of Sapa just beyond the lake. As we're sitting there, an old Hmong woman walks up to us and starts offering us various drugs--and not the prescription type. I'm telling her "no" forcefully, and she pulls out a razor/knife with a handle, and even though she's quite old, I'm thinking, "Do I have something to worry about here?" I tell Sarah we need to get up and move, and just as we do, she realizes her backpack, which was sitting on the bench, opposite of the old woman, is gone. We turn around and see another much younger Hmong woman walking away with Sarah's bag. Naturally, I chase her down, tell her to hand it over, and grab it from her as she's smiling and laughing the whole time.

In other words, we were nearly mugged at razor-point by an old Hmong woman and her younger accomplice. This is stuff you can't make up, folks.

Anyway, our day of trekking (with our private guide, a 25-year-old Hmong villager named Mas, who lives an incredibly hard life filled with trek guiding, bamboo gathering, and caring for her mother-in-law) was wonderful, and tonight we picked up a couple of great lacquer paintings by a local artist before having a delicious Italian dinner at a restaurant down the street from our hotel. We hit the trail with Mas tomorrow morning again, this time for about 9-10 miles of hiking through several hill villages.