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Those more familiar with OS maps might note that red indicates a (largely) metalled road of any size.
Tracks shown in yellow are footpaths or concrete strips for motorcycles. |
I did not feel at my best the next morning, but I was up
early and we sat in the yard ready for breakfast. Eventually Der surfaced, gave
me a conspiratorial smile, and started on his daily chores. There was no sign
of Minh.
A little later Der went off on an errand taking Nhu with him
on his motorbike – something that looks terrifying to us, but seems second
nature to most Vietnamese.
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Der and Nhu go off on an errand
Ta Van |
We went in and sat by the fire in the kitchen, the scruffy
little cat choosing to sit on Lynne’s foot.
Der returned, chopped up some pork and put it in a pot over
the fire, and still there was no sign of Minh. Eventually he appeared looking
like a man who had come a distant third in a drinking competition he had never
wanted to enter. Der – who seemed to do most of the cooking – made some
pancakes.
We sat outside at the ‘normal’ sized table, drank tea and
ate pancakes spread with something sweet which may or may not have been jam. Outside
the Hmong women gathered like
vultures, awaiting the first tourists of the morning.
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Waiting for the first tourists of the morning
Ta Van |
Breakfast over, we shook hands with Der, gave grandma an
opportunity for a last giggle, and set off. We felt privileged to have become
part of their family for the day.
Our plan was for a half day walk to the Dao hamlet of Giang Tu Chai and then down to Hoa Su Pan 2 where a car
would pick us up and take us to our next homestay in Ban Den, the chief
settlement of Ban Ho village.
A Vietnamese ‘village’ is actually an administrative area,
sometimes quite large, comprising several settlements described as ‘hamlets’.
Usually they have individual names, but in some villages, like Su Pan, they are
known as Hoa Su Pan 1, Hoa Su Pan 2, etc. Sometimes, as in Ta Van, the village
and the largest settlement have the same name, while in others, like Ban Ho,
there is no settlement of that name.
Again we had a choice of routes. The easier way involved
walking along the valley and approaching Giang Tu Chai from below, the more
demanding led up the valley side and approached the hamlet from above. Again we
settled for the easy route.
We walked back through Ta Van, down to the river….
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| Down to the River at Ta Van |
…..and then up the other side of the valley, from where we
could look back to where we had stayed.
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| Looking back at Ta Van across the valley |
We were now back on the metalled road from Sa Pa, and we followed
it through an area renowned for its ancient carved boulders. A small museum
attempted to explain some of the carvings, but the meanings of most, assuming
they have any, are yet to be decoded. Sadly the museum contained only photographs
as most of the boulders have been removed for study in Hanoi. Two remain lying
in the grass outside. I found it difficult to pick out the carvings from the
marks left by several million years of weathering.
Leaving the road we descended back into the valley through
the hamlet of Giang Ta Chai (not to be confused with Giang Tu Chai). It is a Hmong
settlement which, unusually, has several Christian families and a church. The
French ruled Indo-China for over a hundred years before independence in 1954 so
there are many Vietnamese Christians – more specifically Catholics - but most
live in the urban centres. There are few churches in the countryside and even
fewer in the ethnic minority villages of the northern highlands.
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| Giang Ta Chai Church |
Easter was ten days away, but the banner reads The Church of Giang Ta Chai, Happy Christmas.
We crossed a metal suspension bridge built beside an older
rattan bridge. Beneath the bridge a bored Vietnamese guide was watching two
westerners who had clearly come on a fishing holiday. I have difficulty working
up any enthusiasm for fishing as a participation sport, but as a spectator sport
its tedium is surely without parallel. The guide had my sympathy.
On the far side we found tables and chairs lurking beneath a
thatch-roofed enclosure and took the opportunity for a well-earned cup of tea.
Relaxing for a moment we had time to notice that although there was still
complete cloud cover, it was starting to warm up down in the valley bottom.
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Just over the river is a thatch roofed tea house
while below the bridge is a man on a fishing holiday |
The earlier wide path along the river had narrowed to one
passible only by pedestrians and motorcycles, but it was flat and easy going.
After a kilometre or so we took a rough track rising along the valley side.
It was a good steady climb, sufficient to bring out a sweat
and raise the heart rate. Regular visitors to this blog will know that I may be
over-weight and over-sixty, but I do regularly put on a pair of walking boots
and am no stranger to rough paths and modest gradients. Such walking, though,
is not one of Lynne’s hobbies and she soon started to flag and as she flagged
she started to complain. Long before we reached the top she was voicing the
opinion that it was all a plot to kill her, and that Minh and I were doing it
deliberately.
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| Lynne struggles upwards |
With effort and appropriate encouragement we made it to
Giang Tu Chai, a collection of ramshackle wooden houses perched on the valley
side. It was the only hamlet we visited that had no motorcycle access and, as
far as we could see, no electricity.
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| Giang Tu Chai |
We entered one of the houses, a large single room dwelling
with a wattle partition dividing what Minh called the ‘front room’ from the
kitchen. The only light came through the open door and the gaps in the walls.
The ‘front room’ was more like a farm shed than a living
room. In one corner a man was making one of the large baskets local women carry
on their backs. He did not look particularly pleased to see us and soon put
down his work, picked up his pipe and went outside for a smoke.
Minh seemed on better terms with the old woman – presumably
the man’s mother or mother-in-law – who squatted in the kitchen cooking lunch.
Except for the flames of her fire, she seemed to be working entirely in the
dark, though my flash photograph rather spoils the effect. A cat sat by the
fire staring at her as she stirred some green leaves in a pot.
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| Squatting by the fire cooking lunch |
She chatted with Minh while we let our eyes accustom to the
light so we could get a proper view of a life which cannot have changed for a
hundred years or more. Almost all Dao women
still wear the traditional red headdress, but lower down in the valley most of
them seemed on nodding terms with the twenty-first century, somewhere up that
valley side we had walked out of the modern world and into an older and harsher
environment.
Eventually we realised we had intruded for long enough, and had
to tear ourselves away. As we left, the old lady scuttled from her kitchen and
introduced us to her pile of handicrafts. She may have been Dao but she had the same stock as all the
Hmong women. Now, though, seemed the
right time for a token purchase.
Even Lynne had to admit that the effort of getting there had
been worthwhile, but now we had to get back. Our ascent had been a steady rise
along the valley side, but our next path dropped straight down to a suspension
bridge we could see far below.
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| Minh with the bridge down below |
The descent was, by any standards, steep and slippery; my
walking poles would have been useful but they were in a cupboard on the other
side of the world. Occasionally we needed our hands to climb down rocky
sections or had to grab at convenient plants to prevent an over-precipitous
descent. Neither of us found it easy and Minh’s trainers were giving him less
grip than would have been comfortable.
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| Struggling down |
Long before we reached the bridge Lynne was telling anyone
who would listen that she was going to die. There was no one to listen except
Minh and me, and we ignored her. According to her diary ‘I was now so tired I could barely put one foot in front of another. I
was getting close to despair, my feet hurt, my legs hurt, I’d had enough.’ She
does so go on.
We got there in the end – to Lynne’s great relief. She posed
with Minh for a photograph on the bridge looking ‘fine and smiley.’
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| Posing on the bridge 'fine and smiley' |
Then it dawned on her that to be picked up by a car we had
to reach a road and that meant ascending the other side of the valley. It was
not a long ascent and a nice, simple concrete path of moderate steepness led
straight up the valley side. Minh and I strode upwards and let Lynne proceed at
her own pace. I paused to take a photograph of her, ‘Smile,’ I said cheerfully.
Lynne however did not have the will. Her diary says ‘I did feel that if I were to drop down dead in the next few moments
David should have a last photo to remember me by. I couldn’t raise my
head, I was that tired as I crawled up
the slope, but I summoned all my final energy to raise two fingers at the cruel
bastard who thought this was some idea of fun!’
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| Two fingered salute |
She made it, still alive and complaining, and Minh phoned
for the car.
A tiny old man had followed us up the path. Minh and I were
sitting on a boulder when he reached the top and I was flicking through the
pictures on my camera. Attracted by the bleeping he came over to have a look.
He seemed fascinated by the electronic magic. ‘He says he’s 89,’ Minh said as
the old man squatted down to have a better look. My one-year-old grandson can
manage that manoeuvre, but I lost such suppleness many years ago. The old man inspected
the camera with interest, marvelled briefly at my digital watch and then, as if
to prove he really was from another age, opened and closed a zip on Minh’s
rucksack as if he was seeing one for the first time. When our car arrived he straightened
up with complete ease, while I struggled upright from my boulder.
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| Electronic magic |
We were driven further down the road and found ourselves
enveloped in thick mist while the temperature plummeted. After a few miles we
took the narrow side road descending steeply towards Ban Den.
‘Ban Den is lower and warmer,’ Minh had told us, and he was
right. Once we were below the mist the temperature rose pleasantly into the low
twenties. The tarmac ran out on the edge of the village so we strolled into the
centre where we had a late lunch of pho bo, noodle soup with beef. Coriander is the usual herb in pho,
but on this occasion the soup was strongly flavoured with mint. As I slurped my
noodles, I heard the distinctive and not entirely unfamiliar rumble of my
grandmother rotating in her grave. A Vietnamese village café was one thing, but
to eat beef with mint sauce was clearly a step beyond civilization.
Our home for the night was at the farthest and highest point
of the village, which Lynne saw as the straw beyond the last straw.
Our hosts, Mr & Mrs Ut, were an elderly Tay couple who were clearly important
within the village. Their large wooden house, set in a substantial garden, was
a manorial hall compared with Der’s modest residence. The kitchen, though much
larger than at Ta Van, had a similar packed earth floor and an open fire. There
was little in the way of kitchen appliances except the usual two ring gas
burner.
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The Ut's house
Ban Dem |
Downstairs was open at the front and had as many tables and
chairs as a restaurant. At the back was a curtained off sleeping alcove and a
television. The huge single room upstairs was reached by an outside wooden
staircase. A dozen mattresses had been laid out on the floor, two of them had
been covered with sheets for us. There were stairs up to the gallery where there
were more mattresses, one of which was for Minh.
There was a shower room on the back wall and while we made
use of that Minh walked back into town to buy some bamboo tips for dinner.
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| Minh helps Mrs Ut in the kitchen |
There was a carp pond beside the house and large fish could
be seen patrolling its milky depths. A little further away was a similar pond
on a slightly lower level. A narrow concrete channel fed water from one pond to
the other and over it had been erected a sturdy wooden hut. Breeze blocks on
either side of the channel provided a place to squat and waste was swept away
by the rushing water. As toilets go it was simple and effective and as fragrant
as any toilet anywhere. There were carp in the upper pond, carp and crap in the
lower pond but nature seemed easily capable of dealing with this low level of pollution.
More worrying was the narrow and uneven path between the ponds, but thankfully
that was lit at night.
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| The path between the ponds |
Lynne went for a nap and I pottered around for what was left
of the afternoon. When she returned we were offered a cup of tea and cakes of banana pounded and
boiled in sticky rice and stored in banana leaves. They tasted as appetizing as
they looked and neither of us persevered beyond the first bite.
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| Banana and sticky rice |
Dinner was again at 6 o’clock when the sun set. We ate with
Minh and the Uts seated at a ‘normal’ table on the terrace. It was basically
the same meal as our previous dinner and the two lunches before, but this time
with fried bamboo tips rather than cabbage. There were also a large pile of
boiled bamboo fronds. These were to be dipped into a paste of pounded herbs
collected by Mrs Ut herself. ‘It’s very bitter,’ Minh warned us. He was right, we both found it too bitter to be
enjoyable and judging from the way Minh avoided them he agreed. Mr and Mrs Ut,
though, took a different view, slapping the fronds into the paste with vigour
and chomping them up with obvious relish. Between them they demolished the
whole huge bowl but only picked at the beef and chicken.
Mr Ut also produced a water bottle full of rice wine, a gentler
fruitier distillation than Der’s. Glasses were filled, clinked and emptied and
then refilled. Minh informed us that, on doctor’s orders, Mr Ut would drink only
three glasses as he had a stomach problem but we were free to carry on. After
the previous night’s excesses this seemed a good time to call a halt.
Lynne went to bed soon after dinner complaining of sore
legs, sore feet, sore everything. Minh and I sat and chatted while the Uts
watched television with their granddaughter who had turned up around five o’clock
and had been doing homework ever since.
