One foot Can-Can, Sapa style.

TGL – High in the mountains near Sapa, don’t expect to find skaters nailing downhills or a soapbox derby rounding the chicanes. Look for a group of hardy kids rolling different wheels. 

Since time immemorial, little boys have insisted on hand crafting some sort of wheeled board device, the purpose of which is to send themselves flying down steep slopes and off curbs in an attempt to define the exact limits of their mortality. 

Some boys never really grow out of this. Oh sure they do get “the fear” which stops them being able to throw themselves down stairs and leap of second floor balconies, but there are those that never really grow up either. 

So what little surprise it was to find a crew of kids grinding a drainage ditch on home made scooters in the mountains near Sapa. 

Their vehicles were reminiscent of those nasty two wheel scooter with the long handles that have been responsible for smashing the front teeth out of kids the world over for about seven years now. Of course they were hours of fun for suited types who like to “discover their inner kid (read idiot)” by hammering along downtown curbs. 

These vehicles were made almost entirely from wood, and it looked like a bone jarring hard wood with little to no flex. The wheels were, well, no even wheels, but were actually bearings most likely sourced from the guts of a motorbike. 

These mean machines were constructed as a flat board that can be sat or stood on, with a handle bar running through the front to a single front wheel. The rear end featured a wide wooden block that housed two separate wheels, making the thing a kind of low rider trike.  

Four of these nasty machines were keeping a bunch of six kids on a downhill path front a small cluster of huts out in the wops. Rattling and nasty these mean machines were put through their paces when the kids got to their fave grinding spot – a cleared section on the curb of a concrete drainage ditch a little further down the road. 

Riding down then walking back like a team of snow boarders the boys successively nailed the curb, at first treating it respectfully by riding in a sitting pose before working up to bigger stunts, which included standing on the board, trying to smack another kid in the head with your board and the ever impressive riding standing one handed with thew other hand out for money from the rich foreigner move.  

Look forward to the Mountain X-Games featuring the low rider trikes, competitive rice wine drinking and H’Mong girl demonstrations of collections of swear words in both English and French.  

The Good Life