None Shall Know Me: "People of the Mist."

"The mountain remains unmoved at seeming defeat by the mist." -Rabindranath Tagore From Laos, I took a 26 hour bus ride to Hanoi, Vietnam and spent a few days there meandering about, visiting the presidential palace and Ho Chi Minh's Mausoleum. It was a crazy, overcrowded city packed with thousands of scooter driving locals oblivious to pedestrians. I spent a couple days there before taking an all night train to Lo Cai, a town at the tip of Vietnam bordering China. From there I caught a mini bus for a 90 minute journey to Sapa. It was raining, and as we drove the curving mountain roads through the mist and mud, I cleared the condescension from the windows with my sleeve and stared out at rice terraces steeping down the mountains and peeking out from the fog. We rose and rose through the green of trees and rice sitting soaked in water as the rain fell on the mud of dirt roads. I grabbed a room in a guest house and climbed the many layers of outdoor brick stairs. to my room on the top floor above the city. The room was quaint with wood floors, shutter windows, and a small wood fireplace. I wished for wood that night, to burn and feel the heat of flames reaching out beyond the mountain air to breathe upon my face and hands. It was a night for cuddling up in to the warm body heat of another, instead I lay wrapped in the comforter of a soft bed. There are moments in my travels I sometimes wish to share. Sapa, had those moments. It is a city nestled in the clouds high in the mountains, surrounded by small villages of hill tribes. Yes, I had such moments there. I walked the small streets graded through the mountains and watched the countless tribal people in their traditional clothes and costumes. As they trudged and traipsed I would sometimes catch the glimpse of one smiling as she turned, and at moments, with their costumes, and the lighting, and the creases in their skin, and contrast of teeth and face, those were such moments, the smile from a Hmong girl, or a young tribal gal not more than eight years old with a baby strapped to her back and wrapped up in a woven blanket, or the moment sharing the music of my Ipod with one who walked beside me down the street, the ear phones sticking out from under her colorful head robe.

I had moments standing on my patio as the fog momentarily lifted to showcase the mountains surrounding the small town. The best moment of all was an indescribable moment riddled in simplicity. I was walking the streets and down an alley. The fog thinned and for some small moment, light escaped through small tunnels in the clouds to glean down on a building standing in the dirt. It was a scene that cold not possibly be real, how light and darkness and colors all played part in a harmonic visual tune. It cannot possibly sound beautiful, but that moment made the day worth it. I tried to grab my camera, but the moment was only a moment. The best moments, the best views always come without a camera. Will I remember all those moments? I have had many, and so many all on my own. I am a man too entrenched in solitude. So many moments sublime and glorious and no one will ever know them. I will never look to someone and say "remember that time when..?" Oft I like having thse moments of my own, knowing the moments belong to only me, and cannot be carved out by anyone else. My experiences cannot be taken. They are mine. I have them carved. I carved them. These moments are religion of my body, sacred and spiritual, and sometimes it is best to keep sacred things inside you. Sometimes, it is nice to share the sacred.

One morning I went down the back side of the mountain into a valley of hill tribe villages. I joined a small group and walked miles down and across and up and over. We descended down below the clouds and could see the whole valley with the tops of the mountains still covered deep in the clouds. The valley was rich in farm-land green, dark and deep. Rice fields covered the valley floor and terraces staircased down the steep mountainsides. Cabins dotted the valley and a few schools built by the government stood as mighty centers to the town. We walked small trails of slippery mud up and down steep hillsides, led by a young Hmong girl, 18 years old, but looking more like 15. Various other local women in their traditional wear would join our group and walk with us for long stretches, some staying for the whole journey. The whole valley was a postcard, with the treed mountains rising tall to the clouds, the river that curved and darted through farms and the fields and terraces swamped in water. The village people carried on about their lives, working the field, planting, plowing, weaving, and playing. We stopped for a lunch at a small hut and enjoyed our noodles topped with eggs and continued walking. It was a great trip, and I loved Sapa. I loved the small, but touristy city built high in the clouds. I loved the hill trip people at the markets and the hill tribe villages. Sapa was worth the venture north. that night, I walked around the city in the dark, loving the air and the thick fog that turned my hair wet walking through. I loved listening to the locals play their flutes and watching the fog race past at jet speed. It was a glorious night in town tasting local treats and seasoned meats and watching the city alive in a gray darkness.

On Sunday of that week I took a bus down to Bacha for the Bacha Sunday market. Bacha is 110 KM from Sapa and is known for its Sunday market when many of the hill tribe villagers come to sell and buy goods. They have the typical tourist items and also rows of moonshine alcohol, dogs, pigs, chickens and ducks, horses and water buffalo, all up for sales. Mangy dogs roamed the streets, scabbed and bony, and hill tribers bartered and sold, and sat in Sunday morning gossip. I also visited another of the hill villages, not nearly as impressive as the valley from the day before and the many different minority villages of Hmong, Red Dzoa, and others all scattered through it, but still a beautiful land of fertile soil and sun.

Sapa was amazing, the city that stood high in the mountains dense in clouds and dipping in to valleys covered in the green of farms and fields and red-brown mud and the drizzle of a constant sog, gray but beautiful in a silver fog. The air I breathed, the very fog sifted in to my lungs in a wet calm. Oh, I did have my moments there, silly in simplicity, silent and solitaire. I walked small markets and side streets, rice fields and terraces, hills and mountains, and through a small mountain cemetery with candles and flames burning by headstones in graveyard gardens, painted in the blush of metal colored moisture of an omnipresent fog.