How to find tour guides in Sa Pa?

Most of them are girls. They have great advantages to work as tour guides: they know all the paths to the villages, they know the ways to every corner in the town, because they have got familiar to them since the day they were born.

The thing they need to learn to work as tour guides is to learn foreign languages to communicate with foreign travelers. However, this is never an obstacle to them.

The children here have high capability of aping others. Especially, their H’mong ethnic minority language is a language of spirants. A linguistic has also noted that no any elsewhere children can learn English better than the H’mong children in the land.

H’mong girls undertake the job of tour guides very spontaneously. Those, who have good health, who think they are fluent speakers and who have good English enough, would go to the downtown, visit restaurants or guest houses to make acquaintance and say “hello” to foreign travelers.

In SaPa town, it is estimated that tens of girls are seen working as tour guides in a professional way. Besides the girls in the downtown, there are also the girls staying in hamlets and communes.

If someone goes to Sapa these days, he may see two or three small girls standing next to samu trees, or wondering at the market with a brocade bag, a jungle knife in hands. These could be the mountain girls - tour guides. If so, he can meet the girls and say to them he wants some tour guides and receive the answers if they can help him.

This is the way tourists and tour guides can meet each other so easily in the land. Not only Vietnamese, but foreign tourists as well, have got familiar to the method.

What the local tour guides do?

The job of tour guide has become more demanding, because trekking tourists now want more than visiting nearby villages or tasting some local cooking.

Cat Cat, Cau May villages, Ham Rong or Ta Phin mountains – the short day tours have no more attracted the foreign travelers who want adventurous trips. They now want to travel to further villages and take week-long trips.

Hang A Sinh, a tour guide in Xin Chai hamlet, said this is really a hard job. Tour guides have to spend weeks with travelers, lead them to the targeted destinations, help them wander up hill and down dale, carry luggage for them. Especially, tour guides need to buy good and necessary things on the way, and prepare meals.

Therefore, tour guides always have to think carefully so as to arrange the trips in the best possible way: how many pots to bring, how many legs should be in the trips, how many meals to have and what to do in emergency cases.

Sinh recalled a day when Sinh met an Australian student, who asked to help lead her to San Sa Ho, a very deserted land. Suddenly, the girl suffered a serious stomachache. Sinh had no other choice than carrying the girl on back to a Sinh’s friend nearby.

Sinh only could carry the girl to the friend’s house in late of the day, where the girl was treated with the herbs found in the forests. Luckily, the girl recovered the next morning, backed to Sa Pa then and returned to Australia.

Sinh said that the Australian girl paid $500 for the trip, a big sum of money, but Sinh fell sick for three days. However, Sinh did not regret the day spent with the girl, because Sinh had a new good friend, who usually returns to the land with her husband and invites Sinh to Australia one day.

Dai Doan Ket