[This is another Tim entry. No colour-coding due to some blogging work-arounds necessary in Vietnam.]
“Go to Sapa and do the home-stay trek.” that’s what Stefan told us. So we did.
At 8:30 AM in the lobby of Cat Cat Hotel, we were introduced to La. She was a seventeen year-old girl from the Black H’Mong tribe and was going to be our guide for the next two days. She was dressed in the traditional garb of the Black H’Mong (with the exception of a bright pink North Face backpack, which was a gift from another tourist): a dark indigo pleated skirt (technically more “Flower H’Mong, she confessed), black leg wrappings that went up to her knees and a matching indigo jacket with colourful embroidered patterns. She was the real deal – an authentic member of an active tribe that lived in the hills around Sapa and elsewhere. We had looked into a few other options for the trek and apparently you can spend three times as much to get a Vietnamese guide from the city. Why anyone would prefer that is a mystery.
La spoke the best English that we had heard in Vietnam and possibly in Southeast Asia. It was almost unnerving. She learned from tourists, she told us – and television. She used the word “tourist” to describe anyone either not from a tribe or from Sapa – the same way we would normally use the word “foreigner”. Even if you came to Sapa to work, you were a tourist. We spent the morning walking down a paved road to a valley located below the clouds and mist. Along the way we asked a million questions. We found out more about how the Black H’Mong dress, about marriage and other customs, about any rivalries with other tribes (none, not even with the Lao Cai tribe!). We also found out that La was really sixteen. Then later that she was really fourteen (you have to be over sixteen to drive a truck, which she’s sometimes required to do as a guide). She gave us her business card, which was pink and had a big picture of her and an email address – another gift from a tourist, this one an Australian girl that she’d known for a few years.
About an hour in, we stopped briefly at a hut and had green tea and chewed fresh sugar cane. Then the serious trekking began. The paved road ended and we were onto a slippery, wet clay trail that snaked up and down the mountains and through the rice terraces. Along the way, La asked about Western music. She knew a little Backstreet Boys from a CD player her roommate had. She also sang that Carpenters song that continued to follow us around Southeast Asia. I tried to teach her a little Kelly Clarkson, but it didn’t really take. Later, we would agree on “Slow Ride” by Foghat.
We ate some sandwiches and continued to go up, down and around the mountains. By this point, the legs were beginning to stiffen up and the breathing was becoming laboured. Recognising that we were both in peak physical form, we decided it must have been the high altitude (Gilbert Arenas, I know exactly what you were thinking when you converted your house into a hyper baric chamber to cope with the Colorado altitude. Related NBA side note: the Vietnamese do not seem excited about the Iverson trade. Not sure if this is because of their general indifference towards professional basketball or rather that they think Philly should have gotten more for him. I’ll continue to track this developing story while on location).
Around five o’clock, we arrived at the village in the mountains where we would spend the night. We were introduced to our hosts – a family of four who spoke no English, but were comfortable using La as a translator. The house had been equipped for tours and had an impressive bathroom, a freezer and a couple of fluorescent bulbs. Otherwise, it was a pretty barren living space. No real furniture – just a low table and some stools. They showed us upstairs, where we would be sleeping. Up in the loft, there were about eight foam mattresses arranged around the perimeter of the room, each of them facing a wide opening to the main level of the house, where the heat could rise through. The house was arranged largely around the kitchen, where a fire was kept hot throughout the day and night. For over an hour, we watched our hostess prepare about eight or nine dishes with food provided by the tour company. All the dishes were cooked in the same wok. It was prepped with a very healthy dollop of oil and a dish of garlic (sorry Laura!) between each dish.
At dinner, our host produced a 1.5 litre Aquafina bottle, half-filled with a cloudy liquid that surely had not undergone the standard reverse osmosis purification process we’d come to expect from the good people at Pepsico. “The family would like to offer you Happy Water” said La. Shot-glasses were distributed and soon filled with generous amount of the home-made rice wine. “Wine” was really a misnomer, unless 2006 just happened to have been a terrible year for Vietnamese Gasoline Sauvignon. The husband had one drink, but after that bowed out, indicating to La that he had consumed over twenty with a large group of tourists the previous night. We expressed a little mock-displeasure and were happy to have survived with our sight.
The next day after a decent sleep, it was more of the same. Muddy paths through the rice terraces and amazing views – the mist was thinner that day. La had mentioned the day before that she had tried to buy a bag of coal at the market so her family could celebrate “Happy New Year”, but it cost three days worth of wages. It was about $10.00 USD. Back in town, we told her we wanted to buy it for her. It wasn’t available in the market when dropped by, so we settled on a gift of the cash equivalent and wished her and her family a happy holidays.
On the way out of town that night there was a couple on our bus who had arrived in the morning and decided to hop right back on the train and skip Sapa because it was too cold. We disagreed.
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