A stranger with
an air rifle appeared
out of nowhere in
the mountain valley
where Lang and
I were standing.
This should be
interesting, I thought.
“Hi. We’re lost,” said Lang, who wore a hand-
woven traditional blouse over her spandex
trousers and rubber boots. “Have you seen my
relatives? Seven men and two women?”
To get here, we’d spent a day riding motor-
bikes over a bumpy mountain pass, fording
knee-high rivers, winding our way up switch-
backs, and even sidestepping a poisonous snake.
Now we were close to our destination—a black
cardamom forest on a nearby peak—but couldn’t
find the approach trail among the shrubs and
wildflowers. Lang’s husband, Duong, had just
wandered off to look for it.
As it turned out, Lang and the hunter were
from the same village, not far from Hoang Lien
National Park. He had been farming cardamom
in the park for years, he said, and knew exactly
where her family was camped.
We had entered the park, a collection of rugged
mountains and valleys near Vietnam’s border
with China, to see cardamom being harvested
in the wild. Giang Thi Lang and Nguyen Danh
Duong are trekking guides in the nearby town of
Sa Pa; I had befriended them years earlier while
living in Hanoi, the Vietnamese capital. Lang’s
family has cultivated cardamom in the Hoang
Lien Mountains since the 1990s, and now her
younger brother, Cho, who leads the family’s
annual harvesting expedition, had agreed to let
me tag along.
Even in a country with exceptional biodiver-
sity and natural beauty, Sa Pa stands out. The
mountain town sits beside Vietnam’s highest
peak, Fansipan (10,312 feet), and on the doorstep
of a national park that’s more than twice the size
of San Francisco. It’s a great place to hike and to
experience the customs of the ethnic-minority
groups who have lived in Sa Pa and an adjacent
river valley for generations.
The trip was both a grand adventure and a les-
son in Vietnam’s recent environmental history.
Black cardamom was first planted in the Hoang
Lien Mountains in the 1990s as a replacement
for opium, a banned crop that once helped prop
up Indochina’s colonial economy. The national
park, meanwhile, is a symbol of postwar Viet-
nam’s efforts to protect plant biodiversity. Hence
this conundrum: How could a forest be a haven
for conservation and cash-crop agriculture at
the same time?136 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC