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We found a good tour guide (Manh), in Hanoi, and decided to hire him and a
driver (Thanh) for a 6 day trip into the north of Vietnam. Our first stop was
Mai Chau. Thanh dropped us off on a dirt road and we began our hike to Ahn Que
village. We walked by endless rice paddies and stilt houses...everyone waving
and saying hello as we passed. Manh was serious about sustainable tourism. We
ate at local places and did as the locals did to the best of our abilities. We
would stop from time to time in various huts along the trail and Manh would talk
with the locals. He was a master at small talk. He told us about growing rice
and all the other local vegetables that grew in the area. Tonight we would stay
in a White Thai minority village.
The hike was relaxing and extremely scenic. After climbing over a small mountain
ridge covered in forests with men cutting timber by hand, we dropped into the
Mai Chau Valley. As we dropped into the valley we passed locals carrying wood
and grazing water buffaloes.
I enjoyed the water buffaloes. We joked with the locals as we went...I even
carried a large log for a while - in an attempt to help a woman out. The wood
was heavy and dense. People were working all over in the valley - tending
pumpkin patches and rice paddies. When we arrived at the stilt house where we
would stay for the night the sun was dipping over the edge of the hillside. It
reflected on the water in the rice paddies and made for great pictures. Our host
family welcomed us in and invited us to shower off in the shared facility in
front of their house. The water was diverted from springs in the hills into a
holding tank. We dipped buckets into the tank and cupped cool water over us to
clean up. Unsure about modesty issues, Kelly inadvertently washed her only
change of clothes while showering. By the time we were finished, the wife and
daughter had come in from the fields and were hard at work on dinner.
Interested, we joined them in the kitchen in the preparation of pumpkin leaves,
rice, peanuts, spring rolls and soup. The daughter taught us a song about the
Mai Chau area. We sang it for days. Manh later told us it was a popular love
song. Before we ate, the husband brought out some local rice wine. Manh
explained that we couldn't eat any rice until we were done drinking the rice
wine. After many shots we were allowed to dig into the rice. The meal was one of
the best we'd had in Vietnam. We all sat on the floor of the house and ate the
meal in typical Vietnamese fashion - family style. We giggled and smiled as
dinner was finished and we relaxed on the hardwood floor - while Kelly struggled
to maintain her modesty in a bath-towel skirt. The family had an interesting
assortment of things hung on the walls of the house. There were paintings with
the dates the house had been finished, a picture of Ho Chi Minh, various clips
from western magazines, a cuckoo clock, wedding photos, family photos and a
calendar. They had a radio and a TV as well, but the village generators turned
off at 8pm. So, all was quiet except for the cows, pigs, dogs and chickens
roosting under the house. The family was very proud of their house. The husband
had built it himself. After a few more shots of rice wine and some tree bark
tea, the husband pulled a guitar down from the wall. He played it for us for a
long time. He had learned to play while in the army. As I lay on the floor
listening to him play I could imagine a group of young army men singing love
songs somewhere in a distant forest around a fire. It had been a day to
remember. When he was finished with the guitar he passed out a few more shots of
rice wine and then moved on to the flute. We tried our turn at it, and couldn’t
even make one note sound through. He made it sing. As he played the wife sat by
and smiled while the daughter studied in her bed about 5 feet away. Eventually
the concert was over. We clapped and thanked the family for a wonderful night.
With our heads full of rice wine we climbed into our mosquito nets and floor
mats and slept silently.
The next morning we hiked through to the other side of the valley and Thanh was
there to meet us. While hiking Manh gave us a history lesson on Vietnam and the
complete story of Ho Chi Minh. It was nice to hear it from a Vietnamese
perspective. After lunch, we drove on to
Cuc Phuong National Park. It was
raining when we got there. We had some dinner at the lodge and watched Who Wants
to Be a Millionaire - Vietnam. It’s not hard to be a millionaire in Vietnam as
there are 16,000 VN Dong to a dollar. Manh and Thanh were into it. They tried to
translate when possible. In the morning we stopped by a monkey rescue center.
After the rescue center we checked out a cave where bones of prehistoric man had
been discovered. The forest was lush and thick. From Cuc Phong we headed off the
Ninh Binh province. Along the way we were pulled over by police officers at a
road stop. Thanh was freaked. They checked all his paperwork, then took his
paperwork and told him to drive back to the station up the road. He was really
worried. It had been a random stop…he certainly wasn’t speeding. It turned out
they thought the truck was gray and the registration said green. Thanh snatched
the paperwork from them when they said he could go and got out of there fast.
But not too fast….he still drove pretty slow. |
