Mountains and Mist

My parents arrive to Hanoi on January 2^nd, on the same flight I landed on, one year later to the day. We spend the afternoon walking the Old Quarter in Ha Noi, wandering amongst cafes, fruit markets, men and women peddling wares from bicycles and narrow, winding streets filled with tailors (I replace a backpack zipper while I’m at it) beneath old French-style facades. We eat dinner in a chaotic little alley filled with hot pot and barbeque restaurants, where vast spreads of veggies and chicken lay in front of us with a rudimentary hot plate and wide pot of broth set over flaming gel. 

The next day we leave the old quarter, heading northeast toward the heart of the city’s old political sector. We cross train tracks tightly lined with houses and a large statue of Lenin. We duck into a massive square filled with bonsai trees and historical photos before continuing past a staunch Hero’s Memorial to the Ho Chi Minh complex. An ornate yellow and green, French-style mansion heads the complex, standing at the forefront of a network of walkways leading to a display of HCM’s antique cars, a reflecting lake, an orchard, and an elegant dark wood stilt house from which he conducted business. Ho Chi Minh’s gray stone mausoleum stands tall and stark in front of a parade ground nearby near an old, simple pagoda and shrine constructed on a single pillar in a small pond.

We loop back south through an avenue of embassies with surprisingly little security to the Temple of Literature, a sprawling ground dedicated to Confucious and the country’s early scholars. Stone turtles line the walkways, carrying monster tablets inscribed with hundreds of years of literature arts graduates. Toward the back of the temple lies a sweeping two-story building, offerings presented and incense burning in front of Confucious and his four main advisors. 

We stop into the Hanoi Hilton on our way back, walking the dark and drab concrete corridors of the utterly depressing prison that housed Vietnamese under the French regime and Americans during the Vietnam war.

From Hanoi we drive to Mai Chau's flat expanse of rice fields southwest of the city. No longer in their prime as when I came to guide in September, the paddies bend through their valley in a broad silver ribbon of sky reflected in muddy water punctuated by vibrant new shoots. Women squelch through mud to adjust stalks' spacing, raised berms and walkways providing solid grids for quick travel, while men turn the earth with manual tractors. Long, narrow arched tarps act as miniature greenhouses to infant starter shoots yet to be replanted.

A short bicycle ride the next morning takes us along the edge of the bamboo forest, where men pile armload upon armload of crude, dried black tea into a monster manual press constructed of clanking metal, compressing bales to be shipped to China for processing. In the middle of a small stream, a man squats on a rock as he skins and cleans frogs for dinner.

Later in the day we follow a cliffside road up and out of the valley, arriving at a local "stadium" (a sparse, lumpy field holds a bamboo soccer ball as well as any other surface), and we begin to walk. We pass through a small village where children play in orchards, reaching high from tenuous perches with long, slender bamboo sticks to pluck delicate miniature peaches from treetops. Our path cuts through corn fields cultivated on rugged natural terraces formed by deep black, jutting, upturned sedimentary rock, then meets a road to twist down into a black Hmong village at the high apex of a long, narrow valley. 

The village bustles. Women, dressed in traditional garb of black shirts with sashes and full skirts intricately embroidered in red and yellow and purple, carry baskets brimming with rice to be husked by the town's single machine. Men operate machinery and chop firewood next to low-roofed houses, supporting beams painted bright with interwoven vegetation and forest animals. Pig food piles high next to firewood. As the sun begins to set, adolescent boys done with the day's work congregate at a dirt field to carry out a gleeful soccer match as younger boys look on.

In the morning we wind out of the high valley where we’ve spent the night, following the mountains'  contour to walk above the clouds as the valley broadens and curves. We pass women washing clothes in a rushing creek, and a tall, flapping scarecrow constructed of tattered skirts swinging in the breeze above a squat house. Our rough-hewn trail cuts directly into the hillside, occasionally crossing longer, more roundabout motorbike paths providing "modern" transport between villages as it drops through dense jungle into the fog. We share our trail with working cows, fitted with rope halters to drag strong, straight, square-cut beams for use in new houses. As the trail mellows, we pass earthen ovens built into the hillside used to preserve sliced cassava root, spread by the thousands into the sun to dry. In a small village near our evening homestay a man uses a kitchen scale propped on a stool to pile and weigh ten-meter lengths of bamboo while happy buffalo graze and wallow in nearby paddies. 

Our homestay this evening is full of life: our host, a Thai woman, lives in a traditional, open-air, two-story wood stilt house. The home fills with delighted laughter as girls arrive on matching pink bikes and teach a toddling baby to play the local version of three-person jump rope. Fish, chicken and vegetables are cooked over fires in the second-floor kitchen, of which the springy, airy floor is constructed from bamboo split to lay flat over larger beams spaced crosswise below.

The simplicity of the house's contents carry its true beauty: our host proudly shares photos of her daughter's traditional dancingand military portraits of various family members hang above an old computer draped with cloth. The family's patriarch, an old man who's lost most of his hearing and moves with slow grace, pulls a stash of old letters and cards from a simple plastic drawer and sits against his bed in the far corner, leafing gently through worn correspondence in a ray of morning light.

We leave the village through a live version of Old McDonald's Farm, scattering flocks of muddy white ducks as they waddle and squack across the road and veering around overprotective mother buffalo with tiny calves as we head for the road to Mai Chau proper, and then Hanoi, and finally the city's train station. 

Our night on the sleeper car ends when we arrive to dawn drizzle in Lao Cai, the far north's drab, industrial transportation hub where trains stop before true mountains rise. We leave the city on a road winding in puke-inducing curves up into the mountains, swinging around rice terraces stacked dozens high on ridges that drop from the clouds out of sight.

Our bed and breakfast is a quiet, six-room affair run by an old man and his wife, with sprawling rooms, corn hung in baskets by the fireplace, and a vibrant garden filled with hanging flowers, peach trees, a small pond and a white pigeon house. The owner sets up a small trekking tour in short order and sends us in a truck to crest the hilltop and ride down through Sapa proper, narrow streets lined by hundreds of guesthouses stacked precariously over the valley's walls.

Following our guide, Mu, and three older women who have tagged along to chat (sell us things), we drop into rice terraces. Mu selects a vertigo-inducing path, picking her way along the terraces' outer rims, steep steps below on our right and rice beds brimming with squelching mid to our left. Clouds shroud the mountaintops, but considering it's January and we're not in the midst of pouring rain I feel pretty lucky. The ladies make toy horses from rice stalks as we walk, adding small tails of delicate pine before presenting them to us as small keepsakes. 

We eventually emerge beneath the clouds into an ethereal world of thousands upon thousands of twisting rice terraces, empty brown beds rimmed in golden-green as they snake and undulate around each other, following the mountains' contours to meet at a river flowing around boulders below. 

In a small village at the river we find local craft and culture on full display. Young men chisel boxes and dragons into white marble mined straight from the mountains above us. An old lady sits behind a foot-powered sewing machine in her batique shop, hands stained blue from vats of indigo dye. Freshly dyed bands of cloth hang draped in loops across bamboo poles. Orange incense sticks dry by the thousands on mats laid in the sun. Women pull strands from hemp stalks, spinning thread by hand. A young girl bears a deep red circle rubbed into her forehead from a buffalo horn, meant to stave off headache. And two gargantuan pigs lie squeezed into tubular wire cages, ready to be carried to market on the back of a motorbike. 

The next morning we take some time to wander the town's streets. Mist and fog obscure our view as they swirl and morph in the valley below, curling around hills and rising to cloak us in a world of gray before parting to allow sun to stream down once more, over and over and over again. 

In the afternoon we travel west to Bac Ha. We detour to the Chinese border crossing in Lao Cai, a stout bridge over the river bustling with people pushing carts piled high with goods, guarded by large, arched gates displaying country seals at either end. At the temple next to the border crossing our guide, Xuan, climbs into a small tree and reemerges with arms full of star fruit. "Government temple," he tells us. "Free fruit!"

Bac Ha itself is situated in the drier mountains northwest of Lao Cai. This is corn country, populated primarily by Flower Hmong, where rice is a luxury, ponies pull laden carts through the streets, and houses constructed of mud and clay protect occupants from pythons. Traditions are different here: On the way in, we pass a funeral procession having just laid a body into the earth to decompose, the bones to be interred into a final resting place three years from now. An evening walk takes us into the hills, following dirt roads to a small village where wealth is counted by the amount of grain stored in a family's loft and local corn whiskey proves strong enough to burn steady when set alight.

I've heard the of Bac Ha itself described as a bit of a backwater town, finding its place somewhere between a village and an industrial center. Its true finery is revealed in the Sunday Market, a weekly spectacle bringing trade throughout the region to a hub in the city center, twisting through squares, alleys, and side streets. Women and girls, dressed in vibrant finery and carrying large bamboo baskets on their backs, sell row upon row of fresh vegetables from the central plaza. Towers of incense line sidewalks. In a covered meat market, men take cleavers to pork heads and pile intestines to the side. Vats of fermented horse stew sit to the side, prepared specially in the lead-up to Tet– the Lunar New Year. In women's territory, stall upon stall hawks brilliant blue traditional skirts and vests, factory-made.

On a flat hillock overlooking the rest of the market, a sale takes place in the buffalo sector. A young girl and her cow look on beneath a blue umbrella in the midst of the bustle as a large, excitable cluster of men surrounds a mother and calf. Fat piles of money change hands as no fewer than three (and quite possible closer to five or six) men meticulously count bills. Beneath the buffalo market, men lift piglets by their hind legs to be prodded and tied into sacks. Puppies waiting to be sold as guard dogs sit in baskets at young girls' feet, tongues flapping in the sun. Bamboo lattices ensconce eggs packed by the score next to caged chickens and ducks.

The market carries on throughout the day as we lose ourselves in the bustle before returning to Lao Cai in the late afternoon, watching distant jagged peaks beyond the river darken to stark silhouettes as the sun sinks, and catch the night train south once more.