Muller Hitchhiking Vietnam Page 121
	I returned to find Sapa awash in concrete construction, mostly catering to the tourist trade. Everyone was getting in on the act; main street alone sported a Bank Guesthouse, a Fansipan Mountain hotel, a Waterfall lodge and even a Post Office hotel, where rooms were available but stamps were not. Along with the building boom had come a glut of entrepreneurial, non-ethnic Vietnamese, who not only looked down on the minorities, but by now outnumbered them. The town itself had once been a French resort, perched high on a mountainside in the cool and comfortable Tonkinese Alps. An old, browning photo in the neglected museum showed wide streets, well-spaced houses, fancy 50's cars and a central green for communal sporting activities. Present day Sapa was somewhat less idyllic. The larger grassy areas had deteriorated into grazing land for skinny pack-horses. Cars had been replaced by flocks of motorbikes-for-hire, the gaps between houses filled in with pigsties and foodstalls, and lawless chickens scratched among the streetside trash. A general air of boom-town money and shoddy, hurried workmanship hung over the piles of homemade bricks and construction materials that littered the sidewalks and backyards. Worst of all, every relationship seemed adversarial. The guesthouse owners disliked each other, the Vietnamese disdained the minorities, and everyone was trying to wring the last dollar out of the transient tourists before sending them back to Hanoi. Even the dogs were uniformly mean.
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