City in the Fog
“Fog this morning with showers; dull and dreary,” the forecast read. It sounded disparaging. They weren’t wrong about the morning fog, but I wasn’t as embittered about the weather as the meteorologists seemed to be.
I’d arrived in Sa Pa on a mini-bus early the previous afternoon. I knew little about the place but I must have mentally constructed a humble mountain town, because when I entered a sprawl of hotels and construction sites, I was rather taken aback.
My guesthouse was somewhat out of town, thankfully, on a muddy side-street fringed with greenery. But it was also next to a building site. I was soon to discover that every morning at around 7a.m., the tradies started pumping Vietnamese pop music.
Although it couldn’t mute the thumping beat from the worksite, I was grateful for the fog. I had mostly come to Sa Pa for an extended period of writing – a sort of self-imposed retreat – and there is nothing quite like foggy days to make a person turn inwards, plumb their own depths, and focus on putting shape to their emotions and thoughts.
It was sure was foggy though. Wandering to the centre of town, visibility reduced to a few metres. There is a Catholic church near the main square; when I stood on the opposite side of the square, the Church of Our Lady of the Rosary was invisible. I felt like I was walking through milk.
It wasn’t until after I’d already arrived that I began to do my research. “The land of mist,” one guidebook called it, “the fanciful town in fog,” said another, and one more headline read, “Sapa, lost in the mists.”
At the guesthouse I was told that it would be foggy for the next two weeks. That was how long I planned to be in the area. “Every day, fog,” the caretaker told me in a sing-song voice, smiling. “Maybe rain.”
In the centre of town, there’s a big sign attached to an ugly sculpture. The signs reads, in English and Vietnamese: “THE CITY IN THE FOG.” I had struggled with the Vietnamese language, but in short time I would memorise this word: sương mù, meaning ‘fog’.
Sa Pa is geared up for a curious variety of tourists; many of the visitors I met throughout my time in the town were in fact from elsewhere in Vietnam. The restaurants on the main streets are piled up several storeys high and all have huge, brightly-lit signage. The glow from these signs in the fog was ethereal, the orange light blurring around the edges. It was like having casinos downtown.
Many people come to summit the highest mountain in the region, Phan Xi Păng – or as it’s more usually styled, Fansipan. At 3147 metres, it might be too formidable for your average tourist but for the fact that a cable-car runs to the top of it. I would’ve been put off by so much infrastructure anyway, but during my first days in Sa Pa, a mountain journey didn’t cross my mind for another reason: there was simply no sign of such a landscape whatsoever, just a big white wall that circumscribed the town.
With typical churlishness, I enjoyed the advertising that focused on views. Having paid the entrance fee for a local park, for instance, I followed the signs to “Fansipan Best View”. No mountain. Instead I had a good, clear view of droplets falling from the needles of a pine tree.
But such is the nature of fog. You are wrapped up in a colourless shawl; your head is tucked under the material, all is white. It invites introspection, which exactly what I was after. I am not exactly on holiday: I came overseas in order to write.
In the middle of Sa Pa is a small lake – you can walk around it in about 20 minutes but on first appearance, it might have had the dimensions of the Black Sea. The atmosphere became more opaque with every passing minute. Squinting, I faintly made out a yellow sign on the shore: Palm Tree Hotel, it read. Then it vanished.
The thick murk that covered the lake was like an empty page. I am not the sort of writer that fears a blank piece of paper. I see it as open space, a playground for my imagination. Likewise, I began to feel a frisson of excitement at the thought of what might lie behind the misty curtain that defined Sa Pa.
If it is not introspection, it is close inspection. You cannot see the broad vista, so you focus on minutiae. Sa Pa has an abundance of mosses and ferns, which are nourished by what was evidently eternal moisture. Insects are everywhere, even on the wettest of surfaces: emerald-green and cobalt-coloured flies, squat and dour beetles, leggy spiders hanging in glistening webs.
When I focused on the surface of the lake, I could see that countless insects made impressions on the surface. Ghostly fish appeared, vague and transient. There were also several elegant butterflies that had been swatted by wind into the water. The beautiful creatures struggled valiantly, creating artful patterns as they kicked and bucked, trying to get back into a position from which they could flap their wings and take flight.
A swallow dived onto some unseen prey. It looked like it might crash-land in the drink, but it suddenly banked, turning its belly to the water and doubling itself with a speedy shadow that was in turn gobbled up in the mist.
The foothills of the Hoang Lieng Son range are home to an array of communities with different languages, dress and traditions. Learning about this was more enticing than heading to the top of Phan Xi Păng alongside the clamouring hordes, so I looked for someone take me to their villages. This wasn’t hard: there is a sizeable racket in the realm of local guides.
In the end, I bounded down a muddy buffalo track with a Dzao woman named Lina. We overtook various other groups, weaving a path through terraced rice fields. The other parties were apparently content to chat amongst themselves but I plied Lina with questions, eager to learn about crops and customs – the crucial materials of cultures that have grown from these mist-clad mountains.
My guide was funny and sassy. I’m naturally distrustful of guides (knowing all too well how dodgy they are) but I wanted to take the chance to walk with someone who knew the place well. She couldn’t tell me much about birds or insects, but I learned about the cardamom plantations high up in the hills, saw gardens of indigo bushes and tanks in which thousands of sturgeons were being raised, and heard about how tourism has changed the way of life for traditional people in these mountains.
Many years ago, on an eastern European train, I chatted with a philosopher who explained to me that in his language, there weren’t separate words for ‘mist’ and ‘fog’. Consequently, he said, his compatriots don’t see two different phenomena; they see one substance and just use adjectives to describe it as lighter or thicker, as the case may be. As I walked with Lina, I wondered aloud if the local languages had a rich vocabulary to describe the visible moisture in the air – as the Inuit are said to have a multitude of words for ‘snow’.
However, what was more apparent is that the village languages have evolved to incorporate the habits and hobbies of tourists. The village roads are lined with colourful outfits, brocades and bracelets. Already multilingual, the locals – mostly the women – have incorporated English words into their vocabulary. “Shopping,” they say. “Buy one thing? Trekking today? Maybe later?”
I wondered how many nicknames they have for us, tourists now being at least as prevalent as fog.
I had come up from Hanoi in the same mini-bus as a good-looking, fast-travelling couple, stringing a hasty itinerary across the planet. I could sense their spirits sinking as the road snaked up into the thick pea-soup.
They had only one night in Sa Pa; it would be spent entirely in the fog. The pictures for their social media profiles would probably not be what they’d hoped for. I wanted to suggest that they could still enjoy it, but I felt my advice would not be welcome.
I took the opposite tack: I stayed longer than most, watching backpackers come and go from the guesthouse, eager for a motorbike tour or making long-haul trips to the next beach. I admit that I might easily have moved on myself, but I had been keen to set up a home base, somewhere to sit and write at length, for hours per day. The fog did, however, seep into my room (in heavy rain, the walls leaked) and I started to plan what I’d do if my computer conked out from getting wet.
Then the cloud lifted. The tall, grand mountain range became apparent, thick with green almost to the very top. Naturally, the sudden visibility opened up different ideas about what I might do with my trip. Perhaps I could scramble up a slippery mountain track, I thought, through thickets of bamboo and those cardamom plantations I’d learned about. I wondered what exotic butterflies could be seen at higher elevations.
But more than beauty was revealed. For instance, the lake lost its grandeur. I could clearly see all the hotels that lined it, garish and charmless. The mysterious fish were carp and many, I now noticed, floated, pallid and dead, along with lots of rubbish.
Now my mind went outwards to the locals who had once lived ensconced in the foggy mountains, keeping up their own customs, their families, their own sense of time. We traded broad smiles even as I turned down their offers. It is hypocritical to resent what tourism does to a place even as you participate in those changes, but it nevertheless left a shadow over my time in Sa Pa.
As the fog lifted, my perspective became more double-edged. I was sad not to have seen this place, with all its beauty – its moss, its butterflies, its enduring indigenous cultures – long before modern values had so completely affected it. But as I watched the next hotel going up (to the tempo of Vietnamese pop), I felt glad to know it at all, suspecting that the next lot of changes would be more rapid and even more irrevocable, and sensing with a fair amount of confidence that ‘the city in the fog’ is a place to which I will never come back.
One night I spoke with a restaurateur who was scathing about the changes, about how local investment took place, about what it had meant for the local people as well as for the environment – every rainy season, he said, there is another landslip, caused by construction work. The money isn’t shared around equally, my confidant told me; it’s far too easy to make dodgy deals. In two decades, the city has irrevocably changed.
Work has also begun on an airport that is likely to bring about an exponential increase in visitors. When I first heard about that, I smiled, imagining how many days the runway would be closed due to white-outs. But of course, it will be built south of Sa Pa – downhill – so the visitors will simply climb up from the plains below. I hope they like fog.