MAY 2023 · ESCAPE

Eco hotel, Sa Pa, Vietnam

Sa Pa area, Lào Cai Province

The eco-hotel sits above the valley on a cleared slope. Wooden structures, open on two sides, the building designed to face the view. The view is the reason you're here. Curved rice terraces step down below the building, flooded at this point in the season, each tier a slightly different plane. In cloud and mist — which is the usual condition — the water in the paddies goes flat and pale.

Arriving in May, the terraces were already being worked. You could see the paths between the paddy walls from the hotel, and on those paths, workers in coloured clothing moving between fields. Not as spectacle. As work that was happening alongside your being there.

Wooden eco-hotel overlooking misty terraced fields on hillside — The building faces the view — the view is the reason

— First view

The mist is not ambient. It moves. One hour the valley is visible to the base, the next the middle tier has gone. By late afternoon on the first day the hills on the far side had disappeared completely and there were only the nearest paddies, the hotel buildings, the thatched structure further down the slope half-dissolved into white.

One hour the valley is visible to the base, the next the middle tier has gone.
Sa Pa area — May 2023

Woman trekking on path above terraced paddies with figures working below — Paths between paddies, workers alongside

— The mist moves

A woven palm basket hung from a thatched roof with the valley behind it. The basket was weathered, functional, not placed for the photograph. The building it hung from was part of the eco-hotel complex. Below, paths connected house to house through the terraces, and women were moving along them.

Flooded rice terraces with water channels and green crops in mist — Water and mist, flat and pale

Curved terraced rice paddies rising through fog at altitude — Curved walls rising into white

— Below the hotel

One image: curved terrace walls rising through fog, the water-filled paddies catching what light was available, no sky visible above the top tier. Just the terraces and the mist and the shapes they make together at altitude.