When the rooster started telling everyone to wake up, I started waking up.
Actually there were more than a few roosters, and with not enough hands to strangle them all, I took the other road and got out of bed to take some pictures. It was a bit foggy so I just wandered around the homestay area and snapped this and that. When I crept back up the stairs and pushed through the mosquito net again, somebody was just starting to wake up, so I laid down and waited around ’til about 7.30. Breakfast was to be at 8am, downstairs; and around the outside table, set upon the thin concrete veranda, we waited while the owners bought out coffee or tea, then a stack of pancakes, and drizzly honey, and bananas, and then a plate of apple and pear slices. Almost all of it got eaten.
Nobody was much interested in a shower so we set off along the path through the village, turning almost immediately up the face of the hill, and hiked up to where the mud trails started. Clay has a way of being uselessly thick when rained upon, but once again we were lucky, and apart from the occasional slippery spot we had no problems at all. Xuan (whom I mistakenly referred to as Suan with an S previously) had a great time pointing out which flowers were poisonous and could be taken for insomnia.
Up the ridges of the valley and down the orange paths we picked our way over the driest-looking spots. Just like yesterday Alice was followed by several purple-clad women, while I trotted ahead, or fell behind while taking pictures. The river followed us down the middle of the valley for the first half of our walk, until we turned up another hill and disappeared into the bamboo forest. Less sun was getting through the thick layers of bamboo and the path underfoot was far muddier, but that just made it fun. After a couple of half slips, we began to see how it would be annoying to have to deal with that all day, as the other group would have had to.
But as we filtered through the forest we could hear a waterfall, coming closer around each corner, until suddenly the forest went away and down the side of the mountain there was a 2m wide path cut; down this path came racing a man dragging a log on a rope. Basically what you do is get the logs down the mountain by running ahead of the log; seems pretty safe to me. Down the logging track a hundred metres or so we came to the waterfall, and everyone sat down to have a rest, have a look at the serenity, and eat an orange.
By now it was maybe 11am; or even 11.30am but not very warm, and a bit of a trickle of rain was starting up, even though it later died away due to mass unpopularity.
Further down the logging track, which was a pretty steep slope, we came to a bridge across the river, and a small shop. The Purple-clad ladies were leaving us so Alice caved in again and bought another bracelet and a little jingly bell thing to go on her backpack, which I thought was fair because we didn’t need them to help us along nearly so much as the other group would have. But it’s still nice to buy something small.
We followed the river for a little while after our break, but eventually had to turn back up the hill, and back into the steep and occasionally rocky tracks, which you can imagine presented Xuan with absolutely no difficulty whatsoever. At a point where a stream down into the river ran under the trail, he pointed out a rustic outdoor toilet, set romantically above the water.
‘This is why I tell tourists some of the times, not to swim in this river.’
The rustic toilet belonged to a Red Dzai villager, whose house we were now going to visit. The man himself is one of the local magicians, which is roughly equivalent to being a civil celebrant and an interpersonal counsellor combined. When someone is sick or needs a decision made, it’s up to the magician to call forth the ancestors and see if they can help. The magician would also help decide whether two people are suitable for marriage and so forth. I did ask Xuan whether the magician would be able to concoct any type of potion which might make a woman change her mind about getting married, but he pretended not to know what I meant.
The typical Red Dzai house is much larger than a Hmong house, and has a concrete floor in some of the rooms. And a satellite dish in the eves. The other thing about being a magician is you have to be able to speak and write Mandarin, because all of the scrolls on the altar naming various ancestors are written in Mandarin. Before the Vietnamese language was put together by some Europeans with nothing better to do, most of the people in Vietnam spoke Chinese.
In the attic of the house they store preserved or non-perishable food, and the bedrooms are basically all one room. But they had electricity and seemed to be doing alright. Xuan says that when a Hmong person sells a pig at the market or something like that, they’ll get drunk, fall onto their horse and let the horse take them back to their village. Once on a tour he thought he found a dead person in the forest, but he was just passed out.
Meanwhile the average Red Dzai is more inclined to save the money for something; spend it on the house, or his daughter’s wedding, or what-have-you.
Back down the hill we came to another bridge back across the river, which meant that we had nearly walked as far as the main road and the bus back to Sapa, and a slightly more insistent rain had begun. We stopped for a little look at the river and the rocks before continuing on up hill, looking back regularly down the path and at the magnificent valley. It wasn’t very far back up to the main road, and in the bus it wasn’t very far back to Sapa (10km). We were back in our comfy, damp, cannot-possibly-dry-any-washing room by about 1.30, but we were starving and went walking up the main street for lunch. The place we stopped was actually very nicely decorated but that didn’t mean we couldn’t get lunch for about 70,000VND.
The afternoon was given over to catching up on travel journals and photo editing, and again we wandered not very far up the main street for dinner. Alice ordered a steak sandwich but got something more like rissole sandwich, but the price was right.
