Beacon sighted through the fog, or I can see clearly now the rain has gone

N 22 19.963 E 103 50.598 1504m - Sapa, Vietnam - 23 November 2008

Well, the fog has lifted, ok only slightly. I can see that there are trees over across the street and there is the hint of a valley and some terraces down over there. Wait, spoke too soon, looks like the fog has covered everything up again. Having been here for two days, I'm not quite sure what I've seen yet.

Yesterday was an interesting day, trying to come to terms with things, seeing things in a new way. Once we have gotten to Asia, Mongolia, China, and now Vietnam, things have changed a little bit. It is so much more obvious that I'm a tourist, the locals are much more colorful and strange. In Europe, you could mostly blend in except for not being able to speak the language or understand their language.

So, there is much more a feeling that I'm gawking at people, wow, look at those colorful costumes and things like that. And on the other side, I'm much more of the tourist who you can pester and sell you things. At times, it gets a bit overwhelming and feels like the Simpsons' persuasion method, "Can we go to Splash Mountain?", "Can we go to Splash Mountain?", "Can we go to Splash Mountain?". Then some of them engage you in conversation, where are you from, what's your name, etc. Sometimes it is sort of a proper conversation, you can vaguely get a sense of them, but in the back of my mind I'm always waiting, ok, when are they going to produce the pencil case or silver bracelet or whatever and see if we want to buy it. It feels like a strange dynamic, locals to gawk at and take pictures of and tourists to swarm around and extract as much money as possible.

Yesterday, we were walking around the market, looking for something to eat. There were a number of long wooden tables, different sorts of restaurants serviced each of the tables, all beckoning us to come over and have noodle soup or whatever else they were serving. A western woman sitting at one of the tables gestures that this one is good, so we sit with her and order what she is eating. Hannah seems good, from Camberwell in London, been here for a month, has met a lot of people here (the cook at the table teases her and keeps teaching her Vietnamese words and calls her honey) and has been learning to sew for the last three weeks with one woman from the market (one of those who keep showing us blankets and things on the street asking us to buy one).

Don't get me wrong, the blankets and all the rest of it are really pretty beautiful, very colorful and really cool patterns and each of them represents months of really detailed delicate work. She takes us to the stall in the market and introduces us to Lyta May (I think that's right, it was pronounced something more like Taam May) who is working on a really amazing piece of needlepoint, for her new outfit, which has taken her a long time and she expects it to take her like 6 months to finish it. We have a nice chat and get invited to stay at her house off in a nearby village, a few kilometers walk there and her husband can take us out walking in the woods for a day while we are there too.

We also see this exhibit in the tourist information center. It is a project that gave lots of local kids cameras and they took pictures and wrote some commentary for them about their lives, their villages, their families, and in a place like this, their interaction with tourists. It is a quite nice presentation. I liked the caption from one kid saying she liked taking pictures of their people because their clothes are very beautiful and she liked taking pictures of tourists because their clothes are not very colorful but that the people were beautiful. The families farm in the villages and have lots of vegetables. Some of them go into the big towns to try and sell things to tourists while the elderly take care of the children. If they then sell something, then they can buy some meat too.

It is funny having your perceptions shifted, at least have new information introduced into the equation, and having what has felt like an adversarial relationship humanized to some degree. I'm excited to stay with a family for a few days starting tomorrow. It feels like a much more interesting side of Vietnam than the normal temples/markets/etc.