"Buy From Me! Buy From Me!"

Greetings,

Sapa was high and it was deep. 

It is a small mountain town in the northwest. Population around 15,000. Not including animals like water buffalo, chicks and pigs. The chicks come in on the weekends to hustle the hormonal driven male visiting piggies. 

The swine stuff their faces and buy cheap Chinese plastic junk.

The water buffalo labor in the rice paddies before humans plant. The rest of the year they graze and make baby water buffalos. There is the picture of a buffalo on the American nickel. I don’t know of they are genetically related. Probably through some distant cousin who wandered North then East over the Bering Strait 40,000 years ago migrating south for their winter vacation. 

I am sitting down now 24. Mountain air. It will become a deep awareness and this is only the beginning. The first day.

Orientation to the small mountain hamlet; lake, fog, sky, wild mind visions: hotel near Vietnamese bus station. $10 a night. Room 402. No hot water. Clean sheets and a thick comforter. Seeing Eastern mountains, sunrise, rolling clouds. 

Paint a Zen watercolor.

H’mong, Red Dzao and Tay women with their colorful work; belts, beads, bags, detailed embroidery. This is a delightful reminder of travels in Yunnan in early 90’s. Memory. Tribal migrations from the China, Tibet and Laos across mountains, through valleys, along rivers.

Settling in the rugged mountains, then gradually moving down to valleys to farm, this agricultural settlement from the hunter-gather stage of evolution. Animal husbandry. Simple homes made of bamboo, later of wood. Concrete details are missing from this picture of habitat development.

Kind persistent kids and adult have mastered a direct sales approach. “BUY FROM ME! You look at my things?”

They break the ice with excellent English. Kids learned this language from the invading barbarians. The white ghosts. The French were here first.

“Where are you from?” 

“What is your name?” 

“Where do you go today?” 

“Want to see my village?”

I wander past Vietnamese restaurants. Bored girls trim greens, slouch in chairs, sleep with their arms curled around their head, munch junk snacks, chat with their friends and digit their cell phones. They are driving the local economy. They are driving each other crazy.

The central market zone. The ramshackle concrete structure with broken slabs of stone, moss covered slippery stone steps. This ageless, timeless human zone of interaction, multiple languages, a la Tibetan villages.

Yes. Fresh clear clean cool air. A most pleasant shift from the Ha Noi noxious fumes. This is small rural village life; air, attitudes, and energies.

Metta.

(Editors note: as a special bonus, here is Middle Kingdom podcast #81, just released.)