May in September

May is a lovely girl from a tiny H'mong village near Sapa. I happened to read stories about her hosting tourists in her house, with her family, just for the sake of talking with strangers, learning some English and get some good meal in return. I eventually contacted her and decided to go and spend a night in her village. That happened to be an out-of-the-world experience.

Unfortunately the weather is not with us today, the main road is quite muddy and when we leave for the small path leading May's village things get worse. The usual 3-4 hours trekking eventually becomes more than 5 hours plunged into the fog or hit by the rain.

Sapa is famous for its nature, its crops and mainly for the rice field. We can barely get the idea of how beautiful must be look this place on a sunny day. Anyway, the trek is extremely pleasant and the foggy day returns us a kind of mystical scenery.

There are a lot of minorities here in Sapa, tons of villages are spread around the region. Each minority has its own habits and they wear different clothes.

Their native tongue is not Vietnamese, every tribe has a different language (actually H'mong one is closer to Chinese), they only learn official national language at school. Luckily there is at least a primary school in every village.

Those tribes seem to mainly rely on women. They walk all day from their villages to Sapa to the market, to accomodate tourists, to work as trek guides or to sell handy-crafts. Men usually stay at home to watch the kids and prepare the meals. People get married very young - around 15-18 - and have their first child by 20. All the family own a field of rice - always present in any combination of food - yet strangely most of them do not sell it, just take care of the harvest and get feed by it. Spending 24 hours with a real family outside the touristic area is worth. Even though the rain, even if we got wet and we didn't sleep comfortably on May's wooden bed, even if we didn't catch a word of their H'mong discussion (yet we managed to count till 10) it is still a night we won't never forget. Thank you May, see you next time.