So what made the four days I spent in this poor, rural province on the border with China some of the best I’ve spent here? It was the man who helped us not get ripped off on the extremely crowded minibus and then asked for my number so his daughter could call me to practice English (which she now does). It was the woman, her teeth already black with betelnut though she can’t yet be 30, who drank us under the table with homemade rice wine and then sat down to watch a Christian superhero series with us because she thought we’d like the English. It was bonding with Dao university students home for the long weekend over the streets we all knew in Hanoi and the funny things Vietnamese people do there.
I went to Ha Giang with my Canadian friends Tim and Laura for the long weekend created by International Workers Day and Vietnam Reunification Day. We hiked for four days, sleeping in a different village each night. The area is sparsely peopled, but those who do live there are mainly of ethnic minority groups. We stayed the first and last night with Red Dao people, called so because of their distinctive red headdresses, and the middle night with a family of Black Dao who wear long, black shirts. Though the families had hosted tourists before, the way they barely fussed over us and the fact that we didn’t see any other Westerners during that most popular travel weekend in Vietnam created the feeling that we were the first outsiders to make it over those particular mountains.
Our days were full of experiences that tourists just don’t have, and not only of the “authentic” – showering with cold water ladled out of a bucket, watching families melt pork lard over open fires in their kitchens before eating on the floor with them – variety that we were paying to have. We were invited to go along with the young people of the village to learn the government choreographed mock-traditional dances that Vietnam teaches to its ethnic groups to attract tourists. We’d seen the same dances in a more polished form claimed by an entirely different people in the separate setting of the Mai Chau valley earlier in the year, but this time we giggled along as the kids struggled over steps that were as foreign to them as they were to us. We talked about international development projects with a Dao man who has never left his district while both grappling to find the right words in Vietnamese. An unlikely lingua franca, Vietnamese is not the language spoken among Dao families. Although they were fluent, their accents and patience made it much easier to practice our painfully patched together sentences with them than with lowland Vietnamese people.
In my favorite moment, our younger guide, who had come across as standoffish and uninterested in talking to us, confided that he simply had poor hearing. He did want to spend time with us, we just had to speak more loudly to include him. Our campaign of offering him cookies, taking photos with him, trying to clean up after ourselves and engaging him in small talk that would undoubtedly been unintelligible to someone with the very best ears had finally paid off.
Ha Giang had all that. Plus, it was beautiful.
Posts
