30 km of hiking with backpacks up and down mountains, literally through rice paddies, getting dirty, sleeping on the floor, eating local foods, talking to local people, and allowing for our eyes and minds to expand with each step. It was an amazing (and exhausting!) few days. We took lots of pictures, and want to remember all of it. So this post may be longer than most. We apologize in advance. :-)
We took the overnight train from Hanoi and arrived in Cao Lai the next morning. John, our 24-year old trek guide who smoked cigarettes throughout, but never seemed to tire, picked us up from the train station and brought us to Casablanca hotel in Sapa. Sapa town is a cute town in the north part of Vietnam. It's in the middle of an absolutely stunning mountain range of subsistence rice paddies: sapa region. Val had a baguette and oily delicious eggs for breakfast and Jacob had a hearty noodle soup and we set off with John for our trek. Within 20 feet of our hotel, 2 local women from the ma'hong tribe, started following close behind. It was weird. They were really close, and were clearly following our tracks, as we were the only ones out there. Their "shtick" is to follow tourists and eventually sell them homemade wares. Soon enough, we started talking (they learned English by speaking to tourists and had learned remarkably well!), and they became our walking sticks/helping hands/second set of guides throughout. (Of course, we bought stuff from them. Their plan was very smart, because we felt compelled to buy from them but ignore the 20 other women that came up to us at lunch).
The first few minutes were incredible, with new sights and views at every minute. We saw our first water buffalo (although it looked like an ox) pulling a plow and a shoeless farmer through 2 feet of muddy rice fields and were in awe. (Video wouldn't upload, sorry!).
The farmers in the region were all at different stages of planting, depending on how much water their individual paddies had gotten so far. Unlike the south region, which gets much better water and has a better climate (allowing two harvests a year), the farmers in sapa can only get one harvest each year. The soil isn't great for that one harvest either, so the rice is "poor quality" and they can't sell it on the market. (Note: at dinner that night, we had a tourist from south vietnam at the homestay with us. When the family fed us the rice, she humbly told them to take it back and keep cooking it because it wasn't done. They told her, "yes it is. That's our rice").
Most farmers we met or saw were growing only for their families to eat. The farmer we were watching and video taping had 3 rows of rice paddy for his family. He was doing the first leg of work: plowing the grass covered dirt and breaking it up so that it could turn to mud and then water paddies once the rains came and were trapped. It looked like awful hard work, but he did it in style, and was friendly to us.
We were amazed throughout at how generous the locals and farmers were to us tourists, watching and taking pictures as they sweat and worked for their food. Even the people who seemed to have nothing to gain from us and were just focused on their farming were super kind and gracious. Tourists started visiting Sapa 20 years ago and the industry has boomed since then. It was interesting seeing how tourism has slowly become integrated into this region still deeply entrenched in old chinese/Vietnamese values (most vietnamese people are from
Chinese heritage. They look Chinese and Sapa is only 20 km from the China border.). The farmers welcomed us and guided us onto more sturdy ground on their rice fields as we trudged right through them. Many of their wives leave early in the morning to follow tourists in hopes of making some money. Many of their children sit in English classes hoping to communicate with tourists. Some couples decided to open their homes and start homestays where tourists live with them almost every night. The villages have become bed and breakfast towns. The men continue to follow their water buffalo through their few terraces of rice paddies.
As we continued our trek, we saw another family building a tent. We saw many more like this along the way. Most families live 10-30 km away from their paddies, so they build a new tent/house for them to stay in while they work the harvests. It was amazing to watch them build it with skill and care, and all out of natural bamboo from the local forests (except for the blue tarp, probably from Home Depot). :-) (see pic).
Farmers also had livestock. Even though they are all poor, and we think of poor as meaning having no meat, they all seem to have plenty of meat. They keep their own animals. The animals, like many of the people, looked smaller and more malnourished than we were used to. But still interesting. See the little piggies milking from their mama.
Jacob claimed he never had sugar cane, so we tried some. We did not brush our teeth with it.
As we walked into the town of our homestay, we passed the village market. They had a baby pool of catfish. They use catfish in a lot of places. For a fish to be kosher, it has to have fins and scales. Catfish, Jacob remembered, are not kosher. But then Val pointed out that these catfish had both fins and scales. So we looked it up, and apparently, to our merriment, while most catfish do not have scales, some do. We were amazed to have found ones that, by our understanding, should be kosher! We shared with John. They were also the largest catfish we'd ever seen.
After walking through a street lined with homestays, we arrived at ours. It was a one story wooden structure that had a wooden balcony addition for the tourists. The only thing on this addition were 18 (one inch thick) mattresses with mosquito nets hanging above each one. The best part of this house was the incredible view. We joined the 3 other tourists at our homestay (a jovial 40 year old dutchman and his vietnamese girlfriend's mother and brother (she was stuck at work so she sent them on a tour of the north)) and settled in. It was beautiful, and we decided we were starting a new travel log, where we track our steps with a picture of us with our feet up at each country). Installment two is attached.
After a while, Val got antsy and wanted to explore. So she did what she does, and walked the streets of the village, talking to every person in town. We met a really cool couple from Berkeley (shes a nurse, he owns a fly fishing store), two young frenchman (a physical therapist and a "commercial" guy) and a cool younger couple who live in bangkok. We were waiting for dinner, so we hung around and our new bangkok friends taught us a card game called Crib.
When we got back to our homestay, dinner was ready and the entire table covered with delicious smelling foods! John had gone back to town and picked up that catfish he saw us talking about. (So nice). And the catfish was pregnant! So we had rice, sapa vegetables, (amazing) fresh spring rolls, local salmon, fresh local (kosher?) catfish, and catfish caviar pancakes. It was amazing. (Everyone else also had pork, beef and chicken. The neighbors, we heard, also had a duck that the family slaughtered when they arrived). Oh. And we also had a little bit of "local white wine". Allow us to explain:
One reason why the farmers may not sell their rice may be because so much of it is used for "white wine!" (Ie rice wine). So before, during and after dinner, we were introduced to the local custom of finishing a day with rice wine. "I promise, no hangover!" (He was right). "Moh, hai, ba, yo!" (One, two, three, cheers!). Dinner was fun. Lets say that. Pic attached. And Jacob was feeling it as we stumbled out after our meal to go find our friends and finish our crib game.
We did not get to finish our crib game. Our friends were in the middle of moh, hai, ba, yo-ing themselves. And it would have been rude for us to make them stop on our behalf. So we joined. An hour, countless shots, and two fake weddings between the Vietnamese tour guides and the two Frenchman (we don't think the tour guides wanted it to be fake), and we stumbled home. (Jacob may have stumbled more than Val, as he chivalrously drank many of her shots for her. Good guy.)
When we got home, everyone was drunk, so Val showered and Jacob sat with the other tourists, listening to anh's album (the vietnamese tourist) (he has his own band) and staring off into the mountain range. It was awesome.
The next morning, we set off for our hike. 18 km of harder terrain. (Aren't they supposed to make the harder day first???). And Val didn't sleep a wink the night before. Apparently sleeping in hot rooms on the floor with doors open to the outside is not her ideal sleeping set up. She fought through like a champ though.
Val kept saying, "we want the hard hike". So John kept giving it to us. We went through the bamboo forest (where he made us surprisingly sturdy bamboo walking sticks with his machete), up and over steep mountainsides and into amazing views. The second day, we picked up (ie started being followed by) three young girls/sales people. (This time, our guide suggested we not buy from them so that we don't encourage them to skip school. We didn't. But they were cute and fun and they stayed with us for about 7 km, all nimbly trekking in slippers while we huffed our way through in gear).
We met more fun tourists along the way, including some Macedonians living in Australia (Val decided she wanted to be like the world traveling mom), and a fun French family living in Malaysia. We saw many buffalo and rice paddies at different stages of growth. It was fascinating. When John offered to sleep in the hotel that night we strongly considered it. When he mentioned the no-see-em bugs that are famous in the village we were headed to, following Val's 170 earlier bites, we said, "yes, please!" So we finished our long hike, drenched, exhausted, and better for it, and got a ride back to the hotel. Just for our own vanity, we will point out that while we hiked 30 km in 2 days, these were not normal kilometers. With twists, turns and mountains, it took the car 50 minutes to travel the 30 km (18+ miles). So we tell ourselves we get browny points for terrain.
We had a quick dinner and then both slept extra well that night.
The next day, John took us by scooter to the local waterfall. A fun ride, a nice waterfall, and a good experience. Jacob bought two machetes (Jacob calls them knives) cause he loved how everyone had one, but we left them at dinner by accident (so Val claims) in our exhaustion. We also passed two dogs that had just been butchered and were for sale. John offered us to go back and look. We screamed no and told him we were moving on. The topic of what people eat was a frequent one. John claims that Vietnamese eat anything but rubber. His personal dietary conquests include snake, dog, cat, tiger, frog, and anything else someone will offer him. "It's a different culture", he says. "It's not weird". We respect his choices. Just one of us prefers not to see it (guess which one).
For our final exploit in Sapa, we decided to spend a few hours in the town's many North Face stores. We aren't sure if the real North Face is made in Vietnam or Bangladesh or somewhere else in Southeast Asia, but we do know they have an excellent knock-off factory near Sapa. Everything looks the exact same as North Face sold in the US and its a quarter the price. The two things that are slightly different is that Val found a puffy jacket she loved, but couldn't bargain it down enough to validate owning a jacket with "The North Fface" written on it. The other thing that's different (and obnoxious) are the sizes. Val is apparently an extra-large in Sapa's North Face clothes. (When you see the size of the average Vietnamese person, you'd understand). Once she got over that, she bought a red ski jacket and long underwear for her (hopefully) new ski-filled weekends ahead. Jacob bought another red ski jacket (actually he bought his first and Val copied him) and a huge blue backpack that can hold all our presents.
We took the overnight train back to Hanoi and prepared for our halong bay adventure.
