There've been small changes in the environment here — mostly from fires, some caused by carelessness on the part of locals; the last big one was in 1999. There's also damage from wood cut for firewood or building houses. We only patrol the nature reserve areas, like around Fansipan, Vietnam's highest mountain, where cutting wood is forbidden — but people keep doing it anyway.
Trekking up Fansipan is technically still illegal, though it's entirely possible to do it, and it's likely to become legal soon. If we come across tourists up there, we send them back, but it's hard to enforce — it's a huge area, and there are only eight of us rangers. There's no checkpoint at the entrance, so anyone can walk in. Tourists themselves don't get fined; their guides do, around two to three million dong, roughly $135 to $200, for leading a group of five or six. There aren't proper standards for any of this yet.
There are just eight of us, there's no checkpoint at the entrance to Fansipan, so everyone can enter — tourists won't be fined, but their guides will, around 135 to 200 dollars for guiding a group of five or six people up there.
Tourists have a fairly small footprint — some garbage left behind, plants taken as souvenirs, fires built for warmth. There aren't any real guidelines available to them; the few signposts that exist are only in Vietnamese, so only guides can read them. Other areas open to tourism fall under a different authority, the People's Committee, which collects the benefits from visitors but doesn't take responsibility for the damage — that job lands on us rangers instead. So far, luckily, no major harm has been done.
We advise guides on what guidelines to follow, working through the government, trying to limit the impact of tourism here. Guides won't tell their groups that the climb is technically illegal, since admitting that would mean less work, and less money, for them. We're hoping to have full English-language guidelines ready once there's more control over how tourism develops in the region — but for that, we need more support from the government itself.
If more and more tourists keep coming, it will only get messier and harder to manage. The level of crime here is very low, but there's a growing problem with young girls working the streets because of tourism — hill-tribe girls from nearby villages who come to sell handicrafts, with no real parental oversight. The boys from those villages, by contrast, stay home to work the fields.
Eight rangers, one mountain, and a rule that everyone quietly agrees to work around.