Sweet Sa Pa
Our first hike in the mountains below the town of Sa Pa took us through beautiful terraced rice fields. Taking pictures of rice fields is like taking pictures of sunsets…the next one is always better than the previous and you end up with a ton of photos!
Up here, there is only one growing season for rice (unlike in the south where there are three crops) so the rice grown here is predominantly for the families to eat themselves over the course of the year. You’d think that’s a lot of rice for the year, but these households are multigenerational. Three maybe four generations live together and each person eats rice with every meal…a lot of rice…three to five bowls of rice (per person) with each meal. Planting starts in May for an October harvest so the preparation of the fields is just beginning now.
These fellas help prepare the fields by walking around the terraces, eating the weeds and fertilizing in their wake.
Our first hike in the mountains below the town of Sa Pa took us through beautiful terraced rice fields. Along the way, we encountered Chi, a woman of the Black Hmong tribe with surprisingly good English. She walked with us, chatting along the way, and I thought I had made a new friend! Needless to say, when we parted ways, her true motivation came out…she unpacked her basket to show us her handicrafts…no pressure, of course. But she was my new friend, so…
Typical clothing of the Black Hmong is a black base fabric with this type of embroidery. They make their own clothing from scratch, right down to weaving the cloth from hemp which they grow JUST for the stalk. Of course the leaves are discarded… Draped across Chi’s body and wrapped around her left hand is the hemp she has gathered that will be dried, boiled to soften it, twisted into long strands and woven on a loom. The resulting fabric is off white which is then dyed with various leaves and roots. As she walked along the path before we met her, she was busy hand-winding the hemp into a skein to keep it from tangling.
Crossing a bridge over the river at the bottom of the valley, a bunch of little kids ran front the opposite end to greet us in the middle. How cute, I thought, coming to greet us as we approached their village. I realized naïveté caught me again when I noticed the ringleader clutching a fistful of woven bracelets. They rattled off a few English words and I realized we were as much part of their business as we were contributing to their English language education. Chi would have started out this way too, picking up language by interacting with tourists. Chi’s English was limited as she could only ask the questions she knew and respond to me if she recognized the words I was using. She had a basic banter which worked pretty well.
A Hmong woman demonstrating how they weave the hemp fabric. It all starts with the bundle of hemp leaning against the loom.
We are calling it the Frankentruck (in homage to Alex’s university housemate who was a builder of Frankenbikes). The take bits and pieces of vehicles, equipment and machinery and craft them into a trucks…when there is a need for hauling stuff. If there is a need for a plough, they’ll pop out the engine and craft a plough. Very efficient use of materials. There is no license plate on this vehicle because it will never go onto the official roads. It does all its travel around these mountain paths.
A Red Dao grandmother heading home with her grandson on her back.
A mobile gas pump. No need to leave the village to fill up.
Our second day, we did a cultural discovery hike with a local Black Hmong guide.
Sung is a tiny woman with an enormous smile and a wealth of information. As she shared fascinating tidbits about local plants (if you ever have a chance to chew on a cinnamon leaf, do it! Amazing spicy and sweet flavour) and her culture, we also gleaned interesting information about her own life journey. She’s the ripe old age of 26 with two kids aged 9 and 11…do the math. She was happy to share that she had a love marriage; she met her husband at a Lunar New Year party when she was 14. They married three weeks later (because it’s not acceptable to be pregnant before marriage), and she had her daughter at 15. She left her childhood home to move in with her husband and in-laws because her husband is the youngest son and it’s his responsibility to stay home and support his parents through their old age. Sung decided five years ago to be a guide so she learned English (beyond her childhood English banter she picked up selling handicrafts to people hiking through her village) and here she is today!
We finished our hike with an amazing BBQ lunch prepared by a Red Dao woman.
The same Red Dao woman showed us how she makes paper from bamboo at her home in the village.
Finished sheet of bamboo paper.
After our second hike, the fog settled in and didn’t lift. We heard some people bailed on their hotel reservations and returned to Hanoi…we went to the pool in time for happy hour!
Silly guinea fowl…no shirt, no shoes, no service.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, conse ctetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut...