The red clay earth that forms the steep hillsides along the Muong Hoa River gives a surprisingly good grip, even on a basic pair of running shoes. Small portions of the path are either dry or flat (but rarely both) and allow us a few moments to stop and look around. Much of it is wet and steep, which means we spend more time looking at where we are about to put our feet than being amazed by where we actually are.
After two or three hours of picking my way along the path on my own, descending steeply but manageably down into the valley among terraced rice paddies and grazing water buffalo, I have gotten pretty good at figuring out which patches of sticky clay will suck at my shoes and which are likely to slip. Deep, firm looking mud, I discover, has excellent viscosity and provides a good grip if you can just get used to the creepy way your foot sinks and shifts into it when you put weight on it. Surface mud is like stepping on a banana peel. Mounds of water buffalo dung are to be avoided at all costs... not for any aesthetic reason – I get over that pretty quickly – but because they are even more slippery than mud. Must be something they eat.
It’s too bad we can't look around more because where we are is really spectacular. We traveled ten hours by sleeper train from Hanoi to Lao Cai, one of the border stations into China, then ninety minutes by minivan up a steep one-lane mountain to Sa Pa. The Vietnamese consider it two lanes, but us passengers were skeptical, especially when we passed other minivans screaming down in the opposite direction. The only way for drivers to pass each other is for each minivan to put one set of wheels off into the "shoulder" which, depending which side you're on at the time, is more effective than coffee at getting your blood going at 7:30 in the morning after spending the night on a train.
From Sa Pa we walked an hour back down a paved road and finally found ourselves at the top of this muddy path used by farmers to get to and from town and between fields. After peeking over the edge, a few of us were very happy to buy bamboo walking spears from the kids who prayed upon tourists there. As aggressive as the kids were about selling to us, I still consider it the best 5000 dong I've spent here yet (about thirty cents).
There are people from three different ethnic minority groups living in the area: the Black H'Mong, the Red Dao and the Giay, and we pass many of them along the way. Some wear traditional clothing and some wear modern shirts and pants. Most of them carry something... baskets of chaotes or leafy vegetables, embroidered clothing and blankets, sacks of rice, presumably heading to the market in Sa Pa. Others guide pack or plough animals, mostly water buffalo but once in a while we pass a pack pony as well. Little kids run up and down the path barefoot or with plain plastic sandals on their feet, sometimes pausing to say "hello" to us in English. A few of the people we pass seem happy to see us, or at least interested. A few have resentful, I-am-not-a-tourist-attraction demeanors (understandable). Most just ignore us altogether and go on about their work.
The terraced rice paddies here are amazing. Like a high wing style airplane, they take advantage of natural forces – i.e. gravity – to get fuel where it's needed. In the case of an airplane that's gasoline flowing down to the engine. In the case of rice paddies it's an elegant system of narrow irrigation canals starting at the highest source of fresh water on the mountain and flowing downward to each terrace by a series of small man-made waterfalls. It's a beautiful sight and also a lovely sound if you're lucky enough to find one in an otherwise quiet place. Imagine hundreds of tiny waterfalls gently tumbling into small clay earth canals, each one on its own so small it can’t be heard from any distance, but together forming a whispery chorus fading up thousands of feet of hillside above you. It's beautiful.
Each family maintains its section of the irrigation canals so there is a communal element to the system that's as old as human civilization. The Code of Hammurabi, the law code literally set in stone by the ancient Mesopotamians, addresses in detail what happens when farmers fail to maintain their portion of the irrigation system, detailing a variety of potential acts of neglect and the punishment for each. If I had more time I would ask our guide what the laws and customs of the H'Mong and the Dao are but the mud demands my attention. I do manage to talk to some H'Mong girls who follow us for a while and they tell me that all the neighbors and extended families work together to help each other with whatever work is needed. This happens to such a degree at the place where we stay that night that it is difficult to figure out who actually lives there and who does not.
There are six of us in my group – three Canadians, two Danes and me – plus our guide, Vinh. We all enjoy ourselves during the first few hours while the mud path is still relatively dry and meandering. Gradually, as we approach the area where natural waterfalls feed into the river, it gets steeper and more slippery. Idle conversations go down to a minimum as we get more focused on our footholds. Vinh trots on ahead like a Vietnamese mountain goat. Whenever I can catch up with him I remind him that I am OLD – forty-two to his twenty-seven – and ask if he could slow down the pace a little. He says yes, but tends to forget. Every once in a while he calls back to us, "Careful, slippery here!" which is always good for a laugh since it hasn't been anything but slippery all day.
One of the Danish girls is afraid of heights, so stepping across slippery stones where the rivulets collect into small cascades is especially tough for her. I get quite myopic myself and can't actually say whether the fall would be bad or not. I don’t really notice. All I see are the next two steps at a time. It is all worth it, though, when we arrive at our home stay in Ta Van Village with five hours of strenuous hiking behind us.
Our hosts for the night live in a structure Californians would consider more like a barn than a house. Unplastered wooden slats for walls with nothing filling in the spaces between them but magazine pictures. The floor is made of pounded earth. Our beds are bare mattresses laid out next to bags of rice in a wrap-around loft only accessible by ladder. This is more comfortable than it probably sounds. The main room is somewhat adapted for use as a home stay, since our hosts would otherwise be sleeping upstairs where we are, but the kitchen is typical of the area, with an open fire pit for boiling water and cooking as well as a simple burner for smaller dishes.
Zu, our hostess, lives here with her daughter, son-in-law and grandson, but she is the only one who takes much of an interest in us. The others are too busy going about their lives. Zu is enough all by herself, even though she speaks only a few words of English.
We aren't quite done with the delicious dinner Vinh made us when Zu pours us the first of what will be many rounds of her home-made rice wine. Moonshine, really.
I had already tried several shots of this stuff at a neighboring village we stopped at along the way. The tour company pays families 10,000 dong (less than a dollar) to let a group stop by for a short visit to see what some of the H'Mong and Red Dao houses look like. The men were drinking at the H'Mong home when we stopped by and they offered us some of their home-made brew. One of the Canadians and I were the only takers, for which I was rewarded the privilege of having my picture taken with the man of the house. Normally, the villagers here don't like to be photographed. I had to have a second shot while posing for the picture, of course. Then, just in case that one didn’t come out good, we did it all over again. Each time, the men filled my shot glass to the brim. Zu's brew is much smoother than the old man's fire water.
Vinh teaches us a simple Vietnamese toast… mot, hai, ba, zoe! The words for one, two and three are too hard for us to remember in Vietnamese no matter how many times Vinh tries to help us say them, so eventually we give up and just say them in English: one, two, three, zoe! We get the point across, though. The hikers in the home stay next to us have already been toasting loudly and we decide to challenge them to a zoe contest to see who can be the loudest. Juvenile as it sounds, that is actually my idea. Within half an hour the four of them admit defeat and come knocking at our door – a Finnish couple with their guide and host. A while later another neighbor stops by to join us as well and we have quite a party going.
The tradition, according to our guides, is to sit around the supply of rice wine and take turns providing the entertainment. One person sings a song, then he or she gets to pick who is going to sing the next one. Each one is toasted by a round of rice wine either before starting if the singer needs a little courage, or afterwards. We are serenaded in turn by beer songs in German, Spanish and English, as well as an instrumental piece by a guy who plays a blade of grass.
When it is my turn I can't think of a single song I know all the words to so I try my hand at the grass. I can't get it to play and eventually break it so someone suggests that I must know the words to the “Star Spangled Banner” so I sing that. Those who know it help me out. When we are done with that we need something to achieve political balance so we sing an Ode to Ho Chi Minh and toast him, too. There is one real work of art in the mix, a beautiful, haunting call and reply style folk song about welcoming visitors which Zu and her neighbor sing for us.
At some point in the evening somebody asks what Vinh will be cooking up for breakfast. Banana pancakes for the tourists, Vinh says, and fried crickets for him and our hosts. Fried crickets? We need a little convincing so Zu brings them out. Sure enough, she has a whole sieve full of boiled red crickets all ready to fry up for breakfast.
"You can try them in the morning if you want to," Vinh offers. None of us jumps on the idea of crunching down crickets for breakfast, but someone – it might have been me – suggests that we might be bolder while we still have a few rounds of rice wine in us. Conveniently, crickets are not only for breakfast… they also make a good substitute for beer nuts. Zu dashes off into the kitchen to fry some up for us while we are still talking big.
A few minutes later she re-appears and a glistening dish of dark reddish brown bugs sits in the middle of the table. Our moment of truth has arrived. We make Vinh eat one first to make sure this isn't a game of play-a-joke-on-the-stupid-tourist. Then we agree to all try one together at the same time for courage and to have a round of rice wine ready to wash it down with… one, two, three, zoe! ...crunch, crunch, sip, swish, swallow.
Not bad. Actually, they’re pretty good as long as you don't think too much about what you are doing. The closest thing I can compare them to would be seasoned, toasted pumpkin seeds in the shells… crunchy, slightly oily, a little spicy (especially the second batch when Zu adds more chilli), and then at the end the last little bit is kind of woody and you have to chomp on it for a while to get it down.
Yes, by the way, I did say the second batch. They really are quite tasty!
Eventually the neighbors go home and we all stumble up into the rice loft to sleep. Vinh had promised us that rice wine doesn't leave a hangover and that was one thing he came through on. We wake early to thunder rolling across the valley and rain pelting the tin roof hard. None of us wants to wake the others but it turns out we are all awake anyway and thinking the same thoughts, torn between the awesome feeling of being warm and safe inside and the uncertainty about what this fresh drenching will mean for our hike back to Sa Pa. We are going on no matter what, we know that; the question is how easy or difficult the path will be to walk on. It is hard to imagine the second day's hike being much more difficult than the first, but that's what the Finnish couple's guide said last night while Vinh tried to laugh it off. We ask him again over breakfast… "up and down," he says, making a reasonably meandering hand gesture. "Not so hard."
Hmm, his estimation of difficulty hasn't been too accurate so far. We aren't convinced.
The Finnish couple decides to take the "paved" road, which stays along the valley floor. To his credit, Vinh does offer this to us as an option as well. We hesitate. We are here for the hike, after all. At the same time, none of us wants to work quite as hard as we did yesterday, especially after all the rice wine. Vinh had given us little reason to trust his rating of difficulty so far, but we also weren't sure of the other guide's motives. Maybe he just didn't feel like working very hard so he suggested the easy way to his clients. Maybe.
We decide to go for the challenge.
The initial climb out of Ta Van village is steep. Within five minutes someone asks if it gets any harder. "No," Vinh says. "No harder than this."
Liar!
Within the same five minutes I recognize that this is right at the edge of what I can handle. I am the oldest person in my group by fifteen years, the last five of which are the ones where things start to fall apart. I am also one of the least athletic. One of the Danish girls is an avid hiker, and all three of the Canadians are fresh out of college rowing and other teams. One is a personal trainer. I am way out of my league and I know it, so I reluctantly suggest to Vinh and the group that it might be better if I went the easy way with the Finns. "If it doesn't get any harder than this I can do it," I say, "but we would really have to go slower than we did yesterday and I don't want everyone to have to wait for me."
"That's OK!" they chime in. "We don't mind slowing it down a bit."
"Are you sure?" I ask. We had a nice little party together last night, but maybe they are just being polite to the matronly one and I don't want them to do that.
"Really, we'd rather slow down a little, too. Why don't you go in front"?
OK, so we are all of the same mind; I was just the first one to say it. "But it doesn't get any harder than what we just did, Vinh, right?" I ask, motioning to the muddy cliff we'd just scaled to get up out of Ta Van.
“No harder than this."
Such a charming smile he has. Why do I believe him?
Half an hour later, already twice as difficult as the hardest part of the previous day and certainly harder than the first five minutes out of Ta Van, things suddenly get even more treacherous. At least there is plenty of vegetation on either side most of the time to hold onto and to break your fall if you slip. In that sense it is not as scary as my hike down into Canyon de Chelly in Arizona, where there was not a leaf, root or stone to hold onto and slipping meant a several hundred foot fall to the canyon floor. At least I have on good running shoes instead of old sneakers with the soles worn flat. But with no rice paddies to land in if you slip, the hillside falls off at a frighteningly steep angle. More and more rivulets cross the path and the things that pass for good footholds become harder and harder to pick out.
Just as I am wondering how much it would cost to have a helicopter suck me up out of the jungle and back to a comfortable hotel room, a dry, leathery hand grabs mine and pulls me up the next "step." Zhao is her name. She says she is fifty, but so do all the other elderly sherpa ladies who come to our rescue. She is smaller than me by at least six inches and thirty pounds, but that lady saves my ass a dozen times over during the next ninety minutes.
At first I only rely on her sporadically, like the others in my group. Just for the hardest bits. But she knows what is up ahead and she sticks around. It doesn't take long for me to recognize what an asset she is. She knows every root and stone on this path, even the ones that are, like some of us, covered with a fresh layer of slippery mud. She teaches me how to find them, pointing out each and every foothold during the hardest bits. That makes the difference between stepping on firm ground and falling on my butt or worse.
These ladies are amazing. Quick enough to grab their tourist mid-fall and strong enough to haul us back up from the slope before getting more than an arm's length down. They point out the optimum place for each and every footstep when the path gets really tough, and where we can see no reasonable foothold at all they simply pull us up, literally dangling our entire weight plus the weight of our backpack, up the next two or three feet. When we cut our legs they quickly pull some leaves out from the underbrush to stop the bleeding. I have no doubt that, if one of us twisted an ankle, his sherpa would quickly fashion a splint of some kind and simply carry her tourist the rest of the way on her back.
Age does have its advantages, I think. I am the old one. There is no shame in using my sherpa. I decide that I am not so proud that I will refuse Zhou's guidance and I stop letting go of her hand. If I lose my balance she senses it immediately so I never even come close to actually falling. The others take longer but eventually most of them get tired of suffering through multiple falls, cuts and bruises. I look back at one point and see that all but one of them is clinging to a sherpa lady's hand too. That makes me feel better. As the oldest person in the group I guess I have the least to lose; but I was just the first one, not the only one, to admit that I needed a little help.
- - - - -
Back in Sa Pa, sore from my hike, I decide to get a massage. I began to discover the joys of Vietnamese massage last week in Hanoi. It’s not about sore muscles and relaxation like it is in California. Here it’s all about invigoration of the skin and blood flow. Rather than a California-style deep-tissue pressure experience, where the masseuse often as not will go right for the cartilage if you let her, Vietnamese massage is a combination of pressure strokes and various pinching, grasping, thumping, slapping and pulling of skin. The best word to describe it would be “vigorous.” And it works… normally I don’t go in much for that sort of thing, but someone who has the right touch for it really can make you leave feeling invigorated, your flesh more rosy. It is important, however, to choose a venue carefully.
In Sa Pa the place has an open air storefront with herbal soak baths on one side and massage rooms on the other. Sounds good so far. I walk in to check it out. The baths are stand up style in half cask oak barrels in a room with wooden slat walls. I peek in but the room is so dimly lit that I can’t tell if everything in the tub actually belongs there. It does not look inviting. I pass on the herbal soak. The massage room is behind a bamboo slat barrier. The door closes with such difficulty that the masseuse spares herself the trouble and just leaves it open until I ask. “Oh, shy?” she says. Well, not really, but you know… I wouldn’t mind shutting the door before I undress.
The massage “table” is actually a large bed. For some reason, this is not enough of a red flag to get me putting my clothes back on. The bed pad is about as soft as a gymnasium mat. The masseuse joins me on it, alternately crouching on the bed for leverage or sitting on my shy bare butt. It is the first time I can recall ever having a woman snuggle up between my legs. I’m guessing that more happens on this bed than just pure therapeutic touching, but my masseuse does not offer me any “naughty extras.” She just slaps, pulls and pinches away, using enough pressure strokes for me to leave feeling like I’ve had a legitimate massage.
Vietnamese masseuses don’t place the same value on mood as we do in California. Our massages are done to the accompaniment of relaxing music, usually some hokey new agey stuff you would never listen to anywhere else but it works. In Vietnam, since the goal is not relaxation, it doesn’t occur to them to provide acoustical inputs to help you wind down. If there is music at all, it is as likely to be techno as anything else. Or they’ll leave the radio on… ads, static and all. It is not unusual for a Vietnamese masseuse to chat with someone either in- or outside of the room while she works. The door opens, someone comes in. Someone else comes in a few minutes later. If they giggle together you just have to assume for the sake of self-image that they’re not giggling at some part of your body.
My masseuse in Sa Pa chats with the bartender while she works on me. She is trying to help him figure out the words to a Britney Spears song. Don’t ask me why there’s a bar at the day spa. Don’t ask me why that did not strike me as strange when I first walked in. I must have been light headed from the exertion of hiking out of Ta Van Village that morning. I’m old, after all. That’s my excuse.
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