One of the main characteristics about the landscape in Northern
Vietnam are the terraced rice fields. The irrigation works
around Sapa (North Vietnam) extend like huge flights of steps
far up along mountainsides. These terraced fields have been
built since antiquity and maintained at a extraordinary cost in
human labor and toil. As we trekked around the mountains and
down in the valleys, we could see these terraced fields for as
far as we could see. The hill tribes around Sapa are subsistence
farmers who live off their land and the livestock they own. They
do not pay taxes, but they also do not receive any government
pensions or other social services. They grow rice for their
families, which is backbreaking labor and in a bad season the
land does not provide enough rice to feed them. In that case the
Vietnamese government helps by distributing 300kgs of rice per
family to the villages. Terrace building and water control,
reputedly the "eighth wonder of the world," is a distinctive
cultural phenomenon of Asia.