We went for 10mile run today through the mountains of Sa Pa. The scenery here is amazing. Thousands of rice paddies hug dramatic mountain scapes. The paddies are terraced and emanate out of the hillsides reiterating the initial geological contour of the mountain. It's a truly stunning sight. Here in Sa Pa one can observe rural life as lived in relative prosperity. It's been nice experiencing a bit of rural Vietnamese life, especially when one considers that an overwhelming number of the country's 83 million people live in the countryside. I imagine Sa Pa is as authentic a place to experience pastoral Vietnam as anywhere else in the country. Here, however, things are strikingly beautiful and there is, both to our advantage and at times annoyance, a rather well developed tourist infrastructure.

This idea of "authentic experience" circulates widely in the marketing of various tourist activities. Every tourist operator in the village advertises trips to "real ethnic-minority villages" where you can go take pictures and buy the wares of the Hmong (silent H) people. It's kind of disturbing that these minorities, ethnicities not entirely integrated into the dominant mode of cultural organization, are treated like animals in a zoo. There are clear imperial overtones to this type of tourism. The mere existence of the infrastructure that enables people to become objects of tourism in this way already illustrates the fact that their "traditional way of life" is anything but traditional. It is supremely modern in the sense that it has adapted to, and is reflexively determined by, western tourism and the global economy. A great example of this was when we were on Olhkon Island, in Lake Baikal in Siberia. There was for sale a day trip to a "traditional Buryiat village". A German couple we met who went on the trip commented on just how awkward and fabricated they found the experience when, upon arrival, the women in the village started changing out of their western clothing in order to dress up "traditionally" for the Westerners!

While we recognize that all "first" to "third" world travel has imperial overtones to the extent that it takes enormous advantage of structural economic inequities, the whole marketing people and their way of life as a commodity for western consumption takes things to another level. It's hard to tell which is worse: the desire to observe people this way or the marketing that attempts to make this desirable.

With this said Sa Pa has been a welcomed changed from Hanoi, both in terms of weather and pace of life. Although people here are just as aggressive on the road and equally ready to indulge use of the horns, there is less traffic volume and this makes things more tolerable.

Tomorrow we are off to Dien Bien Phu -- the famous site of the French defeat in 1954 which effectively ended their colonial presence in Indo-China. From Dien Bien Phu, which is tucked away deep in remote NW of the country, we will cross on Wednesday to Laos. We hope to find a boat some 40km across the border that can float us downstream to Luang Prabang.