Our First Real Village Visit

Everything finally fell into place yesterday and despite the rain, which was light anyway, we followed Chang to her village, first passing the boutiques selling all the same things the H'mong and D'zao people sell on the streets but at a much grater price and with the profits going straight into Vietnamese pockets (this is a bad thing because the hill tribes here are not only very poor but are treated as second class citizens), these intersperced with soap stone carvings shops selling Chinese looking figurines and chess sets and restaurants selling offering a broad menu of which nothing is remarkable but the array of food. Finally, we passed out of town, leaving everyting but the small markets where they sell soda, water, gum and gas out of two liter bottles behind. The road wound down the side of the mountain and eventually we came to a small store where a lot of kids waited for tourists to come so that they could sell them bamboo walking sticks with one end made pointy to stick in the mud because unlike the trail through Cat Cat, this one was not paved, instead mainly consisting of wet, orange clay, slick as a fish's scales. We were immediately surrounded. We bought one for Hilary and I charged ahead without, which was fine until the very end when I got a little careless and ended up flat on my ass in the mud.

The trail started down pretty steeply and we carefully made our way on it, still admiring the beauty of the area. We were surrounded by rice paddies on all sides and could see them crawling up the opposite hillside. You see, we were heading down one side of a ravine to then cross a river and head up the other side. It was slow going for the most part and at one point we were passed by a couple of men, each dragging trees at least 8 feet in length behind them by rope. They raced down the path running at near full speed and I thought, "if this guy slips or turns and ankle, that tree is going be the end of him" when each passed, but thankfully neither did while they were within sight.

We reached the bottom about an hour into the trek and waiting for us was a nice suspension bridge and a steep incline, as muddy as the path we'd just survived, with small trickles of water coming from the collection of rain on the surrounding foliage keeping the clay nice and wet, so slippery. We scrambled up this for another hour and finally came to the village school where Chang would be going if her mother would buy her the school uniform. Despite her absence, she speaks English quite well I'd say, though like most people we've met here, she says yes to anything she doesn't understand, so it can be confusing at times. From the school we could look across and see the trail we'd taken down. All along it were tourists inching their way down. We never saw any of them any closer than this, so I don't know if they went to another village, gave up when the got to the bottom or were run of the hillside by some mad man dragging a down tree behind him at breakneck pace.

Mercifully, Chang's house was not much farther and we arrived safely. There we met her brothers whose names were something like Uhn, Tay, Trung and Co, and her grandfather whose name I do not recall in the slightest, but whose picture appears in this entry. We sat inside by a fire that was already going, sending smoke up through a low-slung straw or wicker platform where some things I never saw and forgot to ask about were drying. Chang cooked us lunch of rice with potatoes and cabbage on this open flame while we talked to her aunt who had come with us from town and played with her three youngest brothers. The little house was virtually surrounded by rice paddies and a river ran next to it. We couldn't see a road in any direction, only paths weaving between rice paddies leading to other little country houses. H'mong villages are not what you picture in a village. The houses are not at all close together and as far as I could tell, there were no specific village activities or policies.

We ate lunch, the four of us who had hiked in, while Chang's eldest brother sat watching and evidently waiting to pour his homemade plum wine because as soon as the meal was finished he slapped three sake cups on the table and filled them to the brim from a dirty old plastic jug thick with halved plums and chilies bobbing in heavy pink wine. Hilary politely declined and I ended up havnig four rounds with him so that I was a little tipsy when we started hiking again, this time up to Chang's aunt's house a little ways further up the hill. I should make it clear here that we had actually crossed over the hillside earlier and had dropped down the backside a bit to get to Chang's and that her aunt's was up another hill. I hope that is at least slightly clear.

We only stayed at the aunt's briefly, though she offered to put us up for the night. We were pretty beat at this point and wanted more to get back to town, so we politely declined. As it turned out, we did not have to go so far as we had come. True we were farther down the valley, but there was a back way from Chang's aunt's that led down to a D'zao village. It was on this path that I took my spill only about 100 feet from the bottom. At the bottom we passed several tourists on their way to the D'zao village, all looking eager and excited for their visit, but led by Vietnamese guides to houses made to fit the comforts westerners expect. This is not good for several reasons: the village gets very little of the money from the tour unless someone buys something and the village's customs are interrupted to fit other people, not to mention the western influences and the amount of trash that is produced by these groups that often number in the 20s and require their own bus.

At this point Chang's aunt left us and we climbed up to the road just us three. We took motobikes back to town. I had noticed some people throwing the frisbee in the town square earlier in the week and as luck would have it, they were again when we got back. I joined in and Hilary rested, and that was really about it, except that we met a guy named Martin from Arizona whose frisbee I had been using unwittingly, and who was very excited and talkative, so much so that we barely got a word in in the hour we spent with him. At one point he asked us what we'd seen so far, then brushed the question aside before we even got a chance to answer because "it didn't really matter." We received a nice lecture on the iniquities here and some good advice on some places to eat and visit. He also offered to have us over for dinner. He has a small hotel room, but has come for four summers now and has a H'mong girlfriend which evidently is against the law of the "moral police". This is according to him. He said he'd even had a friend busted by the moral police. As he told it, they came pounding on the door at 3 in the morning and haulled him out of bead, demanding he pay a fine of $30usd and threatening that it'd be $100 the next time. We tend to believe him.

Anyway, that's about good. Miss you all. Post comments!