Sa Pa

It’s tempting to narrativise your experiences (Terry Pratchett describes stories as one of the fundamental materials which compose the universe). Maybe Sa Pa really was north Vietnam in microcosm, which would be convenient since it’s the last part I’ll see (except Hanoi and its airport, doubtless through a thick haze of smog). It’s hazy in Sa Pa too, but this early in the morning it’s nothing more sinister than December mountain damp. There is cement dust and smoke here too, but it would have looked no less eerie before the people came. Through the haze is colour, like everywhere in Vietnam. A mix of red Vietnam and communist flags, the painted plaster and balconies of colonial-style villas, and the more gaudy frontages of technology shops selling Chinese phone brands, overflowing flower boxes, flowers growing from topped plastic bottles dangling on wire, street food stalls with red plastic stools. Dark green conifers and darker green mountains. 

Sa Pa, like much of Vietnam, has a troubled history. How do you write about Vietnam without using the word “troubled”? With great difficulty. First “pacified” by French colonial forces, it was then subject to missionaries, anthropologists, soldiers, and eventually the wealthy, as birds follow the plough. At least until the post-war period, as one of several rolling guerilla wars against the occupying French forced them all out of Sa Pa, burning down most of the colonial buildings in the process. The Vietnamese residents were themselves briefly forced out during the Sino-Vietnamese War in the late 70s, as China launched a punitive invasion in response to Vietnam’s occupation of Cambodia which brought an end to the Khmer Rouge. 

In 1993 it was opened up to international tourism. By 2022 there were 2 million tourists a year. Sa Pa remains one of the poorest regions of Vietnam. 

This makes Sa Pa a difficult and at times overwhelming place. Mass tourism and poverty always make for uncomfortable bedfellows. Tourism warps the local economy. Communities long dependent on subsistence farming are incentivised to become stallholders, working all day embroidering bags to sell to tourists who won’t blink at spending a month of the average wage on an item. Children who should be in school instead position themselves in traditional dress to perform local dances for people with cameras on sticks. Elderly women with indigo dye-stained fingers chase you up the street calling out in broken English, shopping? Shopping for me? During a walk in the valley I was followed for a long time by a group of children who can’t have been older than 5 or 6, repeating in eerie, monotonous concert, “Ten thousand for one. Ten thousand for one”. I bought three. 

This is exacerbated by the disenfranchisement of the local population by the Vietnamese business owners who have bought up the land, the hotels, the cafés and the hiking shops, though they still sell “traditional tribal items” at a sharp mark-up. The area around Sa Pa is inhabited by many distinct ethnic groups, including the Hmong, the Táy, the Dao and the Giay. It is their culture which is being bought and sold. 

All of this is happening at the base of Fansipan (Phan Xi Pang), the highest mountain in Vietnam. The climate, especially in winter, is cold. There is snow and frost. Mudslides are common, visible as long streaks down the face of the valley. The town is accessed by a narrow, snaking road, which can be a little bilious from the top bunk of a sleeper bus (speaking from experience), and a little hair-raising too. This is made worse by the constant flow of heavy vehicles on their way to construction sites.

Sa Pa is, like much of Vietnam, under construction. It is a fraught topic. Occasionally vicious fights will break out on the subreddit. On the one hand, these vast new commercial developments mar the landscape. Half-built they are ugly, all churned clay and concrete shells, spotted with the bright yellow of diggers. Once completed they might be no less ugly, albeit in a new way. The Sunworld Fansipan Legend complex, built around the cable car which crosses the valley to the mountain top, is certainly clean and bright. It is also vigorously tasteless, constantly blasting English-language adverts over hidden speakers, covered in heart-shaped archways designed for instagram poses. I have seen it described several times as a theme park, though it pitches itself as an authentic window into local culture, which is patently nonsense.

On the other side of the argument, the very defensive, “Why don’t you want Vietnam to progress?”. Construction isn’t just for tourists, and the local economy benefits (though perhaps in a more tenuous, “trickle-down” fashion if you’re a Hmong farmer in the valley rather than a shareholder of Sun World Group). To the latter argument, I will only say this: it isn’t social housing they’re building on that hillside. On the list of who profits, the locals are not at the top. 

Whatever the arguments, these are the facts. Walk across the western side of the Muong Hoa valley and look out to the other side, towards the spread of Sa Pa, and you will see the empty eyes of a hundred half-built hotels staring unblinkingly back at you. 

On my first day in Sa Pa I told several friends I was thinking about leaving immediately. I worked out how much I would have to pay to cancel my hotel. After 6 hours on the bus I arrived to find that I couldn’t even see the mountains through the fog. My taxi took me past pavements covered in rubble, abandoned drainage channels, the muddy chunks bitten out of the hillside, smouldering trash fires by the roadside. Waste collection outside of the cities in Vietnam is spotty and usually costs money. Fire is free. 

The next morning I go into Sa Pa town and don’t feel much better. It is thick with the kind of tourist economy I’ve come to recognise. Happy hour “pubs” and rooftop cocktail bars. But then something happens.

The fog lifts, and I am presented with an inescapable fact: Sa Pa is beautiful. Not because of the town, but in spite of it. The valley is sharp and plunging at the Sa Pa end, head-spinningly so from the edge of a balcony, and then spreads out into the iconic scale-patterns of rice paddies which follow the natural contours of the land. The Hoàng Liên Sơn range, of which Fansipan is the highest point, is a massive, imposing ridge. As the sun sets, its shadow races across the valley in indigo. 

I eat sour sturgeon soup flavoured with lemongrass and vinegar, an almost Polish-style braised pork and pickled cabbage dish, sticky rice in bamboo. I drink plum wine. Every tiny child waves and trills a “hello” en route to some sort of scrambling, precipitous adventure (I pass several clambering along a concrete revetment overlooking a dam, accompanied by two dogs). I drink coffee from my balcony and watch the sun come up over the mountains. I stop visiting Sa Pa altogether and eat and drink in the village down the valley instead. I meet five hundred separate dogs. I soundly beat a bar owner at pool, which is very unusual in Southeast Asia, although I suspect he is drunk because he twice mistakes the yellow for the cueball. I have, against all odds, a very nice time.

Should you come to Sa Pa? I don’t know. There are many beautiful mountainous areas in northern Vietnam, somewhere earlier along the development timeline that Sa Pa is deep into. They will be harder to navigate. People will speak less English. There will be no Grab taxis. You probably won’t be able to kit yourself out in knock-off North Face and Patagonia clobber because you didn’t realise how cold it would be and you packed for the tropics. Their mountains will certainly be smaller. Pick your poison. 

On the bus back to Hanoi, where I am on my bunk again writing this, the fog rises up around the windows, and the mountains are lost again.