Ha Giang Journey
Took a wonderful trip to Ha Giang Province in the north of Vietnam on the Chinese border. Incredible, mountainous terrain with ethnic minority groups in traditional dress. Film at eleven.
Saturday, April 28
We met at the travel agency who had arranged the trip at 7AM Saturday morning. Seven of us, six women and me, all teachers, 3 Americans (Colleen, Stephanie and I), 2 Brits (Caroline and Vicki), 1 Australian (Michelle) and 1 South African (Michelle). A good group, very compatible.
Left home at six AM and was surprised to see so many people out in the streets. The parks were full of people playing badminton, walking, doing Tai Chi, stretching. The streets were full of people opening their shops and setting out their wares. The city was alive at a time that I was usually still asleep.
We had rented a nine passenger van with a driver and a guide. Luckily, this was upgraded at no charge to a sixteen passenger Mercedes van that we filled but still had enough room to be comfortable. Westerners take up more space than Vietnamese. We stowed our luggage, piled and and were delighted to be headed out of town. At this point, anything outside of the city limits of Hanoi would have been considered a wonderful vacation. The city is incredibly noisy and crowded. Everyone honks their horns constantly, even the motorbikes. There seems to be some rule that you should honk in order to let the person in front of you know that you are there (as if he couldn’t hear you or see you in his rear view mirror). And you honk so that the motorbikes and bicycles will move out of your way, which they seldom do. And sometimes it seems you honk just to for the sheer joy of hearing your horn. Life in the street is never quiet. When we got out of the city, we could see open land, flat land, vast, green, rice paddies with women and men bent at the waist working in the fields, people hoeing the land in preparation for planting or tending one or two or several water buffalo. I saw a woman bent over working in a rice field. She suddenly squatted down and all I could see was the cone shaped hat that everyone wore. I’m always amazed at how low the Vietnamese can get when they squat down. They sit on stools that are about six inches high when they eat and all can squat to rest or talk or work in the streets. When they huddle over a heated game of Vietnamese “Chess”, they are usually below the level of my knees.
The roads around Hanoi are not good and we bumped along, honking all the way. Generally we drove down the middle of the road allowing motorbikes to pass on each side going in both directions. Vietnam has wasted money painting white lines in the middle of the road as they are ignored, even in the city. Two vehicles approaching each other head on move over at the last minute. There are thirty motorcycle deaths a day in Vietnam, one a day in Hanoi. From what I’ve witnessed, I would expect more. Almost no one wears a helmet.
So there we are, bumping along on crowded roads, going through small towns with crowded streets, passing an occasional factory belching smoke in to the air. Life in Vietnam is conducted in the streets. Shops are almost always open front so you can see all the merchandise from the street and when they open, they expand out into what should be a side walk but seldom is. We stopped for a coffee break and a pit stop. The “rest room” consisted of two “urinals” and one “stall”. The “urinals” were 3 feet by 3 feet enclosures with concrete floors and brick walls about four feet high, open to the sky and no door. There were two bricks on the floor on which you could stand, supposedly so you wouldn’t splash on your shoes. There was no water and no hole. The urine drained downhill through a hole in the wall to the next urinal which was a duplicate of the first. The ladies had to walk past the two urinals to get to the “stall”. The “stall” had a hole in the floor and, again, two bricks. Walls but no roof and the door wouldn’t close completely. You had to hold the hold onto the door to keep it shut. Privacy is not a big commodity in Vietnam. But we managed.
Everyone ordered coffee except me. I can’t drink Vietnamese coffee. Essentially, it’s tar, unless you add a lot of water. And i can’t add enough sugar to get away from the bitter taste. So I ordered a coke. Not a diet coke, my drink of choice, which is available in only a few places in Hanoi, and rare as hen’s teeth outside the city, but a regular coke with a syrupy taste. The lady picked up a bottle coke, warm, which had been sitting out, collecting what looked like decades of road dust. She took a rag and carefully wiped off the dust. Then she used the same rag, untouched, to wipe out the glass I was to use to drink my coke. I drank from the bottle.
The motorbike is the major form of transportation as well as transport in Vietnam. Everything is delivered on motorbikes. It’s hard to believe what volumes and quantities they will put on the back of a motorbike. I’ve often said that if you bought a car in Vietnam, they would deliver it on a motorbike. Some of what we saw in the country was very upsetting. One man had three grown pigs in wire cages, alive and struggling in their confined pens, plus one tied down on his back on top of the cages. Another had three wire cages of mid-sized dogs that were stuffed in so tight they were literally unable to move. It was appalling. They were probably on their way to a restaurant where they would be someone’s supper.
We stopped at Tuyen Quang for lunch. As usual, we ordered several different dishes and shared. Anything you can reach with your chopsticks is yours. Standard fare. Tofu, morning glory (some sort of cooked green plant, similar to spinach), French fries, and what South African Michelle described as “whitefish”. They turned out to be minnows, cooked whole, probably fried. They weren’t bad but not particularly good either. Not something I’ll be searching out in my travels. The tails and fins were a little too sharp and pointy for my taste.
After lunch and some distance from Hanoi, the roads got wider and better. Strange that the worst roads are close to the capital city. We left the flat land and drove through rolling hills. It began to drizzle and was raining lightly when we arrived at Ha Giang, the major city in the Ha Giang province. We had left Hanoi at seven and arrived in the late afternoon, approximately 150 miles in about eight hours. Did I mention the roads were bad? The motorbikes were making better time. They could dodge potholes and other vehicles. The rooms in the hotel were large, usually two double beds, but the mattresses could have been used as a torture mechanism. They were hard, real hard. There was no give whatsoever. The floor seemed softer. The Vietnamese seem to like hard furniture. The chairs and sofa in my living room are massive carved wooden pieces. I couldn’t sit on them for very long without having a sore behind, so I got some pillows. When the Vietnamese landlady comes over, she removes the pillows before she sits down.
We went for a walk around Ha Giang. Ha Giang Province is not a heavily traveled tourist area. We were the attraction. People always looked at us as we passed by. Most yelled out “Hello”, especially the young people. When we answered “Hello” many began to giggle and look at their friends. Look what I did! I made them say something. In most cases, that was the extent of their English, though some were able to respond to “How are you?” Passed a small shop where they were making heavy wooden furniture by hand. I think this is standard procedure. One man was using a hammer and chisel to carve an elaborate design in the headboard for a bed. The other was sanding another piece which had three dimensional figures. I watched for a while. It was amazing. One slip and you start over. A lot of work for one piece of furniture.
We had dinner on a barge in the river. The menu was in Vietnamese so we had to walk around other people’s tables and point to their dishes to let the waitress know what we wanted. The locals were very understanding about this. The service was bad but the food was good. However, I didn’t like the way the chicken was prepared. The roast a whole chicken and then just chop it up with a meat cleaver and serve it on a plate. So, instead of getting a nice slice of chicken breast, you get a cross-section of chicken, bones and all. There was no drumstick, just a chopped up piece of chicken. The dinner which was very nice and a lot of food cost 283VND (about $18 for seven people). Lunch had cost 480VND (about $29). We soon realized that anytime we went into a restaurant with our guide, the meal usually cost twice as much as when he was not along. It seems that he always got a free meal we paid for it, and more. Later that evening, we had drinks overlooking the river. 4 beers and 3 Vodka and Orange juice. 7 drinks for $6. That was a good deal, but, of course, the guide was not along.
Sunday, April 29
We had a breakfast of Pho (pronounced “fuh”), the typical morning meal for Vietnamese, essentially a bowl of chicken soup without the chicken and some greens thrown in and some of that coffee which I can’t drink. Then we headed for a village nearby, our first encounter with the locals. The village was nestled in gently rolling hills but provided plenty of flat land for rice farming and rice was obviously the principle crop. The village was off the road but on the beaten path. The people seemed accustomed to having visitors as they ignored us or briefly acknowledged us as we walked through. Most of the homes were thatched huts on stilts. The houses had walls that were not completely closed in and the inhabitants were exposed to the weather. The thatched roofs were almost a foot thick so they were protected from the rain but not the cold. There were lots of animals, water buffalo, ducks, chickens and horses, and lots of children who were very friendly and always said “Hello”. They loved to have their pictures made and then see them in the digital cameras. All the adults were working. Women and men bent over in the rice fields, back breaking work. No wonder we saw so many older people who were stooped. There was a woman washing rice in a woven basket and a man brewing rice wine, a staple of the area, and young girls fishing. The village had an intricate irrigation system fashioned from bamboo split in half. Water flowed down from the hills and they trapped it to feed the rice paddies. They even devised a primitive method to lower the water, run it under the paved pathway and then raise it back up so it could continue into the fields. Difficult to explain but fascinating. All done with bamboo, the most plentiful building material in the area.
Next we drove to a small town where we wanted to see the street market that is frequently by local ethnic minorities, Unfortunately, we were too late on a rainy morning and the market had closed down. So they took us to where we were to spend the night, a homestay with a local family. Well this was part of the tour and they were prepared to have guests. We didn’t actually stay with the family, we had our our stilt house with eight mattresses on the floor separated by curtains that could be drawn for a bit of privacy. Those who had made other trips with homestays indicated that we were in the lap of luxury. Yes, the shower was underneath the main house some twenty yards away, but, at least, we had a shower. The family provided lunch for us. We sat on the floor, a good trick for me since my knees don’t bend very well, and shared from bowls of food laid out on a mat. The family ate separately on a different mat. The food was good. There was a dark meat which was excellent, tender and tasty. The told us it was beef but we were pretty sure it was water buffalo. Maybe the best meat I have ever tasted. We had beer for lunch and then the man of the house wanted to toast us with rice wine. He especially want to toast with me since I was the only man and the oldest (I guess). Anyway, I had five shots of rice wine in addition to the beer. Needless to say, we all took naps after lunch.
After the nap, we were to go to a village some 15 kilometers away. The guide wanted to drive us but we insisted on walking. We walked through several small towns and we were the highlight of the day for the locals. Everyone said “Hello”. They called their families out of the house to see us going by. Kids came across the street to speak to us. They shook our hands and laughed. They wanted photos made and wanted to look at them. One man tried to hand me his baby but the baby started crying. Think the general thought was, “What are these westerners doing walking way out here?” Along the way, we saw a group of boys sitting on a boulder fishing in the river, two guys on motorbikes crossing the river on a narrow bamboo bridge, several waterwheels, and several women carrying heavy loads on their shoulders in the twin baskets. Some of the women had black teeth, the result of chewing betel nuts, evidently a desirable look in this area. The guide showed us the “plant that sleeps”, a small low growing fern like plant. When you touch it, it seems to wilt but recovers in about fifteen minutes. He said that the Vietnamese were able to track the Americans during the “American War” by following the trail left by this plant. My thought was, “Why didn’t our South Vietnamese allies warn us about it?”
We finally got to the village. They flat land was planted in rice and corn and the village was in the foothills. The village was not very interesting and it was getting late in the day so we quickly walked through. One old man latched on to us and wanted to have his picture made with us. He shook our hands and saluted and smiled a lot. He didn’t speak any English so the guide interpreted. He was 74 years old, had fought in the war and had killed 13 Americans. He had been shot in the head and the hip. Some of what he said the guide did not interpret claiming that it was a dialect he did not understand. We weren’t sure what to believe as he seemed drunk or many even mentally unbalanced. He shook hands and wouldn’t let go. As we walked away from the village, he accompanied us, held the girls’ hands and sang to them. A happy, jovial man, but strange.
Supper was a duplication of lunch. Lots of good food and plenty of rice wine. We all slept well that night under mosquito nets.
Monday, April 30
The guide took us back to the same restaurant where we had had breakfast the day before. We decided against Pho and walked across the street hoping to find something else. No luck, so we ordered coffee ( I got a seven up) and juice. We asked for bread and one of the women got on her bike and rode away. A few minutes later she came back with a plastic bag of four baguettes. We asked for more and she rode away again. In the car we broke out the peanut butter we had brought and made sandwiches. They were delicious.
We left Ha Giang and started our climb in to the mountains. We would leave the valley floor and snake our way upward on narrow, winding roads. The driver, an excellent driver I might add, honked the horn before making each turn to announce to anyone approaching that we our van was just around the corner. We never really got away from the constant noise even in the peaceful, isolated mountains. We climbed up, up, up, hairpin curve after hairpin curve. We stopped for pictures and watched families planting crops on the hillside, and when I say “hillside”, I mean a steep slope. They had carved out narrow terraces that stretched from the top to the bottom of the hill and worked in groups as they tilled the land. Children looked after babies and some women worked with a baby strapped to their back. Others left their infants on the hillside in the shade of an umbrella. One maybe eight year old boy had a one year old on his back and held the hand of a three year old as the wandered up and down the slopes. Other children walked along the road tending their water buffalo. They were somewhat stand-offish but also curious and came toward us and let us take pictures. Large areas of land were under cultivation but there weren’t very many people working and they seemed to be working as a unit.
We passed through Quang Ba and continued to climb. The major crop at this altitude and in this terrain was corn. We saw long irrigation ditches made of concrete, probably constructed by the government. We stopped in Yen Minh for lunch of tofu (standard), noodles, beef, morning glory and iced coffee. I was able to drink the iced coffee because they put so much condensed milk in it that it kills the task and makes it seem more like chocolate milk. We saw another group of westerners, 4 adults (one man and three women) and 7 children, the only other westerners we saw on the entire trip. They were French and were teachers in Ho Chi Minh City. We agreed that we were happy not to be traveling with children though they were very well behaved and ate what was placed before them with chopsticks. At the end of the meal, the children were given brownies. I whined, “Oh, I want a brownie.” The man heard me and brought me a slice of brownie. I tried to refuse but he insisted explaining that they had more and saying, “You’re traveling with six women. You need it.” I took it and shared with my group. It was delicious!
After lunch, we continued our climb upward. Wooden plows were used to loosen the soil where possible. Houses were made of mud and clay. This was Black H’mong country, one of the ethnic minority groups in the mountains. Our guide told us and we were able to distinguish them by the two panels of black on the women’s black skirts. (Blue H’mong had two blue panels on black skirts). At this altitude the land was very rocky but it seemed that every inch of available soil was planted in corn. (Some one told us that the dirt had been “brought in” but I question this. Literally, a square foot of dirt surrounded by boulders had a sprig of corn starting to grow. Everyone, including old people, was bending over doing manual labor, chopping, hoeing, cutting, and weeding on the steep hillsides. At one point, we stopped to get pictures of the spectacular view. A family of Black H’mong walked down the narrow path from their house on the hill to see us. Several adults and four or five children. The man carried his naked son in his arms. They were excited to have their pictures made and see them in the cameras. One woman had four gold teeth across the front. Saw this a few times and maybe it is a symbol of wealth. A better symbol would have been to have running water. It seemed that none of them had had a bath in quite some time. Beautiful, friendly people but living a hard life scratching a living our of the hills with little chance for improvement in the future. I admired them a great deal. I would not have wanted to live like that and yet they smiled and seemed happy.
We passed through Meo Vac and entered the land of the Blue H’Mong. This area provided the most spectacular scenery. High Mountains topped by what looked to be volcanic rocks. Big country with high mountains and deep valleys. It reminded me of the Alps or the Pyrenees. It didn’t have snow capped mountains but the distance from the valley floor to the top of the mountain felt like the Alps. Vast and magnificent. We all agreed that the photos we were taking now and would look at later would not capture the majesty and beauty of the landscape.
We decided to walk along the road for a kilometer or two taking pictures and watching the people working n the hillsides. It seemed almost impossible to plant crops of the steep mountains. We felt that if we slipped we would be unable to stop ourselves and would roll all the way to the bottom. And yet these people worked the soil and moved easily along narrow paths worn by years of climbing the mountains.
We spent the night in Dong Van, about 15 or 20 miles from the Chinese border. This has always been a tense area and we had to have permits to enter. Saw several signs in the area that said “Frontier Area”. Evidently, in years past, the Chinese would come across the border and steal Vietnamese women for wives. Now they pay families for their daughters. April 30th is the anniversary of reunification of North and South. There was a big celebration on TV. Singing, fireworks, ceremonies, men in military uniforms and old film clips. I can’t really get a handle on the feelings of the people. Are they expressing their sentiments or are they parroting the dictates of the government? Were they celebrating the reunification of the country or a victory over the Americans? I’ve talked to my students about the American War and there seems to be no animosity toward Americans or me. I told them I would not wear a t-shirt with the Vietnamese flag on it if I were in America because of the reaction it would cause. One student pointed out that that response was probably because we lost the war. I asked what happened to the leaders of the South Vietnamese military (our allies) after the war. They told me they were “reeducated”. I found out later that some stayed in “reeducation” camps for ten years. I don’t really have a grasp on the lasting effects of the war.
That night we walked the streets. People called out “Hello’. Children came up and said “Hello”, shook our hands, giggled and ran away. One man brought his babe in arms up to me and held the baby up to my face. The baby made a kissing sound against my cheek. I think they feel it brings good luck. We were sitting on the curb drinking beer when a man went by on a bicycle with a box on the back. A really strange sound was coming from the box. A person?, an animal?, a cry for help? We referred to him as the Poltergeist Man. He passed by and we hoped he would continue away, but he turned around after about a hundred yards and headed back our way. He passed us again but stopped nearby and opened the box when someone came out to him. We walked over and discovered that he was selling bread from the box. The sound coming from the box was his advertisement but it almost scared us away. We bought some bread.
Tuesday, May 1
May 1st is Labor Day in most of the world. There was a parade of school children down the main street of Dong Van. Bread and peanut butter for breakfast. We stopped at a Lo Lo village. Interesting but not much to see. One young girl put on their native costume, a patchwork of bright colors, and posed for pictures. We continued through the mountains but had started our descent. Still spectacular. We could see paths winding from the valley floors to high in the peaks. Every available bit of space was cultivated, but there never seemed to be enough people to farm such a vast area. Maybe they practiced crop rotation.
We stopped at a village called Pho Cao (not sure if this was just the name of the village or the ethnic minority that lived there). We walked along the main street, the only street as far as I could tell. Everyone was dressed in black. They didn’t say must, just looked at us. I got the impression that they didn’t have many visitors. All the men were dressed in the same black outfit, black pants and jacket with buttons up the front. They were having lunch from a common pot. Meat was being cut up, cooked and served on a long board with the men sitting on each side. The women wore black, heavily pleated wrap around skirts with colored panels and brocade down the back. They displayed more color. Everyone seemed shy and suspicious. We found out later that it was a funeral. The grandfather had been killed in a motorcycle accident.
We took pictures and when we showed them, everyone began to gather around until we were surrounded by people eager to see their images in the camera. They began to offer us food and drink, goat meat, very fatty and rice wine out of a common cup. The funeral was evidently an occasion for eating and drinking. One man passed out and was lying on the ground. Everyone simply ignored him. I was amazed that no one stepped on him as they crowded around to look at pictures.
We continued our descent through the mountains. We stopped beside the river and went wading. Two women were planting corn on the slope between the road and the river. I’m sure it was not their land but I doubt that anyone would question their us of the land. Life in the mountains is a hard life and no one should limit their ability to scratch out an existence.
We had lunch in Yen Minh, the restaurant where we had seen the French travelers, completing the loop of the mountain area. Amazing country. Vast and beautiful. Stopped at Heaven’s Gate, a high pass through the mountains, our last chance to get good pictures of the terrain. Then down the mountains to Ha Giang. Had a nice, inexpensive dinner (without the guide) and then went to a bar. Two of the ladies in our group ordered drinks the locals didn’t know how to mix so our ladies went behind the bar and made their own drinks. A good time was had by all.
Wednesday, May 2nd
Our sightseeing was over. This day would be devoted to making the run back to Hanoi in order to teach at two in the afternoon. We decided to leave at 5AM. We piled into the van, hoping to get some more sleep. The motor wouldn’t start. The battery was dead, really dead. After several adjustments to the engine (don’t know what he did), the motor started and we were on our way. At 6AM, we saw children with backpacks walking to school and others riding their bikes. 6AM! The streets were full of people and all the little roadside markets were open. They start early in Vietnam. We passed buses absolutely packed with people. Some even had people riding on top of the bus with all the luggage including motorbikes tied on. And on those roads that would have been a real heart pounding experience. The trip back was uneventful and a little sad. Back to work. Back to the noise and crowds of Hanoi. Away from the beauty of the mountains.
It was a wonderful trip and I recommend it to everyone.
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