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.
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Comments: 20
Amazing photos!
Thanks for sharing.
Merry Christmas to you wherever you are in the world right now.
Joel, what do you think is the most important part of your visits? Do you ever travel with a goal, or rather, principle in mind? At times, I wonder if I've offended locals with my camera. I'm not trying to be voyeuristic--I'm just curious.
Karin - you're question is a very good one, and I'm glad you asked. On the 14-month trip during which I took the pictures in this post, I was traveling to write a book about the people who live in Asia, where 60% of the world's population lives. So on this trip I had a very clear goal: writing a book that would help bridge the peoples of West and East. As for the camera, there are SO many pictures I've wanted to take but didn't because I know it would have irritated or offended someone. Then there are photos where I did my best to intuitively guess if the subject would mind or not (such as the ones above). When taking photos like the ones in this post, I'm usually behind the camera smiling, and occasionally I'll remove my eye from the viewfinder so that the subject can see both my eyes and, hopefully, sense that I'm not just using him/her for a photo shoot.
But yes, I try to always travel with this conviction: that whatever action I'm doing, it should somehow be an act of building a bridge rather than a wall. Travel should never be about "me" and "my adventure"; it should be about "us" and all we have to learn from one another.
In my attempts to travel "light", I usually end up traveling without our best camera which is obviously a mistake.