== Northen Vietnam 2 ==

Sapa's Love Festival

We came back from the trek just in time to see Sapa's known love festival. Each Saturday night, the naighboring young single villagers come to Sapa to participate in the festival, in what is essentially a tribal dating ritual. Different tribes have different rituals, but all of them include a lot of drinking, and some sort of game between the boys and the girls.

The H'mong tribe's boys play a traditional flute while spinning endlessly around themselvs. Every few minutes they form some pattern in the dance, and every break they take they drink another Rice Wine cup. The girls stand near, and pick the boys by their ability to withstand the dificult and long dance, and still produce a coherent sound with the flute:

The Red Zao tribe's youth stand in two lines - boys against girls. Each turn, one side sings a single note together, and the boys have to guess how to continue the song. It's a complicated competition, and we didn't understand all the rules, but it includes a lot of drinking. Once in a while a boy gives a girl a rice wine glass and vice versa. This can last for a couple of hours, and then (when all are certainly drunk) the boys suggest with whom they would like to continue to the next phase with, and the girls get to pick the boys out. The next phase is not a public one and the ad-hoc couples get some privacy to talk to each other. And then everything starts over and another cycle begins. As we understood, if a couple decides to get married, they can go home together the same night and lose their verginity, the next day the wedding schedule is discussed...

The reason the villagers date in this fashion is quite obvious, once you get to see how they live. Greate mountains seperate the villages, and almost all of their time is consumed by daily chors as working the land, taking care of the small children, cooking, caring for the farm animals etc...

It isn't compulsory to choose someone in the festival. some attend many festivals until they find their companion.

Bac-Ha Market

The tribes are scattered all over Vietnam's north west mountain range. Once a week there's a market in the local central village. Most of the women in the nearby villages come to the market to sell and to buy - everything. Here are some pictures from the intense, very colorfull and quite muddy Bac-Ha market. Most women are from the Flower H'mong tribe.

* Riddle: in which of the following photos Tali appears?