A Most Magical Christmas Morning: Nine Pictures from Vietnam

On Christmas morning 2003, as dawn struggled to break through the soup-like fog that had the small town of Sapa thoroughly enveloped, I struggled out of bed.  I had been up late the night before, thanks in part to the happenings in a church courtyard, where several dozen Hmong villagers were gathered around a television set, watching a dubbed recording of Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments.  As Moses watched Jethro's daughter dancing in a tent in the Sinai, I stood shivering in the nighttime cold of Vietnam's far north.  The daughters danced nicely, and they spoke in dubbed Vietnamese.  And I marveled at twenty-first century globalization.

With blurry memories of this previous night, I stumbled from my bed to the shower, walked from the shower to breakfast, and then took a motorcycle taxi from the hotel to the main highway.

My bus would prove to be considerably late, and so I stood for some time in the fog in a town that was nearly deserted since it was still so early.  The fog was beautiful and Vietnam was beautiful, and I hadn't felt this sense of wonder on Christmas morning since I was a small child.  When a lone bus swung around a bend, it broke the morning silence and spilled out a score of colorful village women and children.  Their arrival splashed color into the black and white morning.  Their backs were bent, pressed down by sacks going to market, and with this posture they disappeared into the fog, leaving me to wonder if I had just seen a mirage.

Vietnam is home to 54 minority groups, and I believe the people shown in these photos are from the Red Dzao.  I could be wrong about that though.  Several minutes after their bus dropped them off, mine arrived to pick me up.  I was headed 10 hours to the southwest to the town of Dien Bien Phu.

About 20 minutes into the journey we broke through the fog and looked below us.  Sapa, a town I had come to love, was gone.