Sin Ho, the market in the clouds

When we leave our Tuan Giao Guest House, the surrounding mountains are still shrouded in fog and the first light of dawn makes everything more surreal. Today my destination is Sin Ho, the small village lost in the mountains of North Vietnam a few kilometers from the Chinese border.

It is located at over two thousand meters above sea level on the scenic road to Lai Chao, I would go there anyway, but I decide to stop at least for one night, to attend the weekly market that takes place every Sunday.

The inhabitants of the nearby villages, belonging mainly to the Flower, Blue and Black H'Mong ethnic groups, come down from the mountains with all kinds of goods to put them up for sale.

No souvenirs and no tourists apart from me and a few backpackers looking for a strictly low-cost adventure trip.

Nobody here speaks English, least of all my language, but I don't struggle to make myself understood, using gestures or my diary on which I draw scribbles that often trigger great hilarity. Like when, in search of the buffalo market, I try to draw a generic bovine with large horns and it takes a while for someone to guess what I'm looking for.

They are all very kind and intrigued by this foreigner who goes around the market and stops to admire everyday objects that are as unknown to me as they are fascinating. Purchase of small bells, whose original function is to signal the movements of the goats that wear them around their necks, but which I will give to my friends by suggesting that they be used as key rings.

Given the availability of the people, I dedicate myself to making some portraits of older people. The wrinkles on their faces are the map of a life, no one asks me for money, as often happens in other parts of the world now besieged by mass tourism.

They ask themselves to be photographed, as if my interest flatters them, but it is when I take out my little portable printer that I am literally mobbed.

Most of them have never had a photograph of him and they roll their eyes when the small Polaroid-sized photograph comes out of the printer.

It is really nice to see how simple things and now taken for granted for us, are appreciated here and give a little happiness.

I think it is precisely the purity of what happens in a tiny Vietnamese mountain market that draws my attention and vice versa that keeps away the masses of tourists who prefer to devote their time to the more instagrammable Sapa or Halong.

Roberto Cristaudo

NP Febbraio 2022