In Vietnam’s northern mountains, tourism has expanded opportunities, raised incomes, and given visitors a rare window into local life. But as the country modernizes, some fear the communities that built Sa Pa’s tourism industry could be left behind. Joshua Zukas reports.
Lurking in the tangled undergrowth are four diabolical faces crowned with sickle-like horns. Behind them loom bodies that bulge like hairy coconuts. Their eyes, unblinking polished cannonballs embedded within leathery skin, are fixed on mine.
“Do you know why they’re looking at you?” asks Lý Thị Cha, my H’mông tour guide.
“Because I’m a clumsy foreigner?” I offer.
“No—because you smell,” she quips, dancing up the hill giggling.
Fighting the urge to sniff my armpits, I spot a woman emerge from the trees. With a sharp shout, she coaxes the water buffalo into a wooden shack. Behind it, a dozen flooded rice terraces cascade down the hill, reflecting the jungle-cloaked mountains and cloud-speckled sky beyond. We’ve been hiking through the northern Vietnamese highlands for most of the morning, so Lý is probably right, but an earthy musk seems a trivial sacrifice for an experience like this.
Since beginning the hike, I’ve rubbed indigo leaves between my palms to reveal the deep blue dye used to color clothes. I’ve foraged for medical plants, tasted mountain berries, and fashioned toy animals from wild fern. Most fun of all, I spent an hour barefoot and shin-deep in mud planting rice under the cackling supervision of Mẩy Linh, a Dao grandmother who knows these mountains better than I do my balcony garden.
Lý and Mẩy Linh are tour guides for ETHOS, an organization that has arranged hikes, homestays, and cultural experiences in the mountains surrounding Sa Pa since the 1990s. Without them, this experience would hardly be possible.
Sa Pa is a mountain town 186 miles (300 kilometers) northwest of Hanoi, with a population of around 10,000. Since the early 20th century, when the French colonial administration established a hill station here, it has been a magnet for tourists—first, Europeans, then Vietnamese, and now everyone else.
Today, Sa Pa suffers more from overtourism than perhaps anywhere else in Vietnam, with over five million visitors a year. To put that figure into perspective, Dubrovnik—a European overtourism hotspot—receives a similar number of visitors, though its population is four times larger. In Sa Pa, rowdy restaurants, clattering construction sites, and maddening traffic jams regularly overwhelm the tiny town center, especially during public holidays.
“People come here to learn about our culture—and for the terraces we built. Guides from elsewhere shouldn’t really be leading tours here because they don’t know Sa Pa like we do.”
- Lý Thị Cha, H’mông tour guide
The countryside surrounding Sa Pa, however, is still largely untouched: An Arcadia of jungled peaks, clear rivers, wooden hamlets, and terraced farms etched into the mountains by highland communities. This is one of Vietnam’s most ethnically diverse and culturally rich pockets, home to Dao, Giáy, H’mông, Kinh, and Tày peoples.
For many visitors—me included—the mountains and valleys capture the imagination, but it’s spending time with local people that leaves the lasting impression. “Without the locals, there is no tourism,” Mai Thanh Hoa, co-director of ETHOS, tells me after the hike, speaking from the organization’s welcome room, where fabrics from northern Vietnam’s ethnic groups cover the walls from floor to ceiling. “In an area with so much development and change, you still find those core elements of what makes the H’mông and Dao who they are. And they’re proud of those things.”
Local pride is a theme throughout the tour. During the hike, Lý and Mẩy Linh pluck ferns, leaves and medicinal herbs from the hillside. That evening, in a 50-year-old Dao house and my lodgings for the night, Mẩy Linh uses the herbs to prepare a traditional bath—a practice for which the Dao are especially well-known.
Afterwards, we sit down to a feast of our foraged greens alongside purple sticky rice, grilled chicken, stir-fried bamboo, spring rolls, and a type of tofu soup, all sourced from the surrounding farm and forest. In between mouthfuls, we knock back glasses of home-brewed rice wine and banter in Dao, H’mông, Vietnamese, and English.
“Your Dao pronunciation is quite good,” Lý laughs. “Your H’mông needs work.”
After dinner, when we hear the thump of music drifting up from the valley below, the conversation turns to the tensions created by tourism. “The karaoke bars are owned by Vietnamese for Vietnamese,” Lý says, referring to the Kinh, Vietnam’s ethnic majority. “It’s a problem for us H’mông because we sleep early and wake early, but we live with it.”
She’s less tolerant of the Kinh tour guides. “I’m from Vietnam, but that doesn’t mean I can guide in the Mekong Delta,” she says, referring to a part of the country she barely knows. Lý, a tourism college graduate in her early 20s, will be able to lead tours anywhere in the country, but she chooses not to. “People come here to learn about our culture—and for the terraces we built. Guides from elsewhere shouldn’t really be leading tours here because they don’t know Sa Pa like we do.”
Usually, leading tours in Vietnam requires a tour guide license, but in Sa Pa, local guides can also work with a tour guide card, which they obtain by attending workshops held every few years. This system, introduced in 1994, enables guides like Mẩy Linh—the generation above Lý, illiterate but with clear English and an encyclopedic knowledge of the mountains—to work legally.
“There are rumors they [the government] will stop the card system, but nothing official yet,” Nguyễn Trung Kiên tells me the day before the hike in his company office a block away from Sa Pa’s central lake. Nguyễn is project manager of Topas Travel, another tour company that has been operating here for decades. Nguyễn acknowledges the system’s flaws, but believes the benefits of legal, unlicensed local guides far outweighs the pitfalls. “They do the job well,” he says. “They walk through sun and rain, wake up early, and work very long hours.”
“If I were a local guide, I would be worried about the future.”
- Nguyễn Trung Kiên, Topas Travel
Tourism, despite its drawbacks, has improved livelihoods for many people in Vietnam’s northern mountains, but the industry, like the country, is changing fast.
Vietnam is pushing to become a high-income country by 2045, and it sees tourism—around 10 percent of the economy—as a driver of growth. Recent policies reflect the country’s appetite for moving fast and breaking things in pursuit of rapid development: Last year, the government introduced a stricter tax policy before backtracking; while this year, large parts of Hanoi were demolished for infrastructure projects that, according to local media, will relocate 860,000 people.
When the government turns its attention to the country’s lucrative tourism industry, will informal programs like the tour guide card also face the wrecking ball?
“If I were a local guide, I would be worried about the future,” says Nguyễn.
“Everything seems to be okay until something happens,” ETHOS’s co-director Phil Hoolihan tells me in the cozy, colorful welcome room. “Then there’ll be consequences.”
Hoolihan agrees that the tour guide card system is inadequate, which is why ETHOS invests time and money in additional workshops that don’t require literacy. “We do the training visually,” he says. “It’s very easy to show a scenario, talk it through, and they [the participants] are able to explain what they would do.”
Yet many guides work independently or with companies that provide no additional training. The concern is that if a serious accident involving a guide only with a tour guide card were to happen, authorities could respond by making the program more restrictive—by introducing literacy-based testing requirements, for example. They may even abolish it all together.
The next morning, I wake groggy and slightly hungover, but the sight of mist rolling across the valley clears the cobwebs and restores my appetite for the hike home.
Before leaving the valley, we pass a hydroelectric dam under construction. Once completed, Lý says, it will bring electricity to nearby villages while flooding generations-old rice terraces in the process. It’s hard not to view the project as a metaphor for Vietnam’s push to develop and wonder how that transformation might reshape Sa Pa.
The mountains will certainly endure. The rice cycle will continue. Buffalo will still roam the hillsides, staring blankly at sweaty foreigners. But the way visitors experience this landscape—and who gets to guide them through it—is on shakier ground.
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Prioritizing depth over breadth, Joshua Zukas writes almost exclusively about Vietnam, a country he first visited in 2007 and has called home since 2013. In addition to writing his own Bradt Guides guidebook (published August 2025), he has co-authored more than half a dozen titles for other publishers, including Lonely Planet, Fodor’s and Hardie Grant. His bylines have appeared in The Economist, Wallpaper and Michelin Guide, and he operates VoiceMap audio tours in cities throughout Vietnam.
