Hanoi:
street food, face-masks, motorbike traffic
Sa Pa:
colorful clothes, hill tribes, terraced mountains
I am working my muscles carefully, treading carefully through trickles of
muddy streams and squishy earth. I sing under my breath, and John whistles and Alun races Viet Hung and Greg pants. Our 16km hike is descending through cascading rice terraces and lush vegetation on the eastern slopes of the Hoang Lien Mountains, also known as the Tonkinese Alps. The Red Dao women,
wearing elaborate red headdresses, are plowing the fields and amidst pillars of smoke, fan flames to burn old vegetation. We are invited into an elder woman's home and she dresses me in a new, indigo dyed frock carefully hand-stitched in a yellow and black pattern. she has been sewing this dress for five months now -(it is a new dress for herself)- she only makes herself a new dress once every f
ive years or so. We greet the Dzay people in Tan Van, the Black H'mong and Dao tribes in SuPan, (The majority of people in the north are the Black H'mong who wear exquisitely embroidered indigo tunics and heavy silver jewelery, and are terrific salesmen), and end up in a bamboo and wood plank stilt-home of a Tay family in the village of Ban Ho where we stay for the night. We are greeted by almost all the people we pass along the way, everyone wants to know who we are and try and sell us something. It's really cool and they get us to buy their wares: first we are greeted, then asked where we are from, how the trek is going, etc., and once we have become friends they close the deal...
We trek for several days more... the best part of our trek was when I stop to chat with a local woman (through some pantomime and the translation of our local tour guide, Viet Hung). Her 18 y
rs old daughter is carrying what looks to be about 30 lbs of rice on her back; her 6 yrs old has a yr old baby wrapped around her back; they are all trekking back home after a day of threshing the rice on top of the mountain. The woman points to some open sores on her feet, they are cuts, they are infected. Thankfully, I got my trusty backpack and a filled first aid kit. I clean her wounds, rub on some first aid cream, bandage her foot and give her a tube of ointment and a shit load of band aids. It feels really good to help her out in the best way I can.
iin cuz some were for midget legs and some were for giant peoples legs... you know when you get to the last step but you think there is another so you take a huge step down only to hit the ground, hard? yea. Every time you do that, think, "Great Wall." Honestly, I feel privileged to be here. And triumphant to have come so high and far.
