Trekking in Sapa

Market sellers in Sapa - photo by Rob McFarland
Market sellers in Sapa - photo by Rob McFarland

Teetering down steep stone stairs in inappropriate shoes and tight white designer jeans is a young, affluent Vietnamese woman. A multicoloured umbrella protects her from the sun and a private guide leads her carefully by the hand.

Coming up the other way is a young girl from the local Black Hmong hill tribe, dressed in an embroidered jacket and wearing the tribe’s trademark black hat. Her face is creased in effort as she struggles with a large basket of sticks strapped to her back. She stops to let the descending woman pass and they exchange a sideways glance that speaks volumes about the extremes of modern-day Vietnam.

Read the rest of this story here.

Published by Rob McFarland

Hi! I'm an award-winning travel writer who divides his time between Sydney, the US and Europe. I regularly speak at travel events and have helped hundreds of aspiring travel writers, PR professionals and tourism operators through my writing courses.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: