Sapa Trek

One of the Black H'mong grandmothers poses for me

It's roughly a nine hour journey by night train from Hanoi's dusty streets up into the mountains of Lao Cai province, Vietnam. Snug against the Chinese border, this is in fact the most easternly stretch of the Himalayas. We left the cozy warmth of the sleeper car for the deep chill of early morning, paid far too much for a street-side cup of Vietnamese coffee (rocket fuel) and boarded the shuttle van to the Sapa Summit hotel,  our arranged trekking company, an hour's drive away.

After breakfast and a hasty repacking session, we headed out front of the hotel to meet our group - and found not only travelers in NorthFace coats milling around, but also a flock of girls and old women all dressed in navy leggings and navy tunics, woven bamboo baskets on their backs, laughing and joking and watching us. One of them brought us a clipboard to add our names to: this was Em, our nineteen-year-old guide.
The girls and the old women - essentially, the village members not needed in the fields - of a nearby Black H'mong village make their way into Sapa every morning in order to meet and escort every new group of trekkers on the first part of their journey. The girls asked us questions in broken English, the grandmothers twisted long-stemmed grass to make toy horses as presents. They tromped through the mud in their rubber boots, holding our hands as we edged carefully along the ridge of a rice paddy so that we wouldn't fall in.

As we approached the village where the women live, the grandmother who'd held my hand along the paddy walls suddenly had a pile of embroidered pillowcases and woven bracelets in her arms, liberated from the depths of her bamboo basket.

This is how you avoid the muddy soup of the rice paddies

"You buy from me? I help you! You no fall." she said, nodding down into the muddy valley.
She was right. I didn't fall. And although I didn't really want either - I had too many woven bracelets already, and I'll have to carry the pillowcase in my already-stuffed backpack, but I felt obligated. Which is, of course the point.

"Well, I... well. How much for this?" I pointed at a navy pillowcase, embroidered with colourful thread. I look over at Dan, who is backing away from several old women, a juice harp in his hand.

At least they were cute souvenirs.

Em cooks dinner for us - stir fried chicken and vegetables

Over dinner that night, we got to know our guide. Em is Black H'mong, one of the many ethnic groups spread across northern Vietnam's hilly countryside. In fact, she was living in one of the villages we'd walked through that day. She had been married for eight months to a man she's known her whole life, who is also Black H'mong, but from a neighbouring village.


Em became a tour guide at 16, to help support her family, and now to help support her husband's family. Here, when a girl is married, she moves in with her husband's family and makes his household her priority. So having a boy has special significance... otherwise, no one will be working to support an aging mother. Em has eight siblings, only the youngest of which is a boy, her mother's goal.

Apparently in the last decade, it has become more acceptable for a daughter to support her parents if there are no sons - in the past, the solution was to buy a son from a woman with an 'extra.'

Although Em was married young, it's now socially acceptable to put off having children until she's ready to stay home with them. For now, she wants to keep guiding tours and bringing in money to support the family.

On the morning of our second day, the fog finally lifted and we got a great view of the valley, each hill terraced into rice fields, like washed-out staircases, or soupy layer cakes. In late December, the rice has long since been harvested and the water buffaloes mill about in the muddy water, munching on the stringy weeds.

S.

Street Soup

We left our hostel, map in hand, bundled in our fleece sweaters against the cool air of a Hanoi evening in late December. In a show of bravado, we struck out across the street. We jumped back in a panic. We froze for a moment on the curb, watched the scooters whiz by us, the drivers nonchalantly navigating the narrow, congested streets.

Eventually, we made it across that street, then another. Our destination was on the next corner, which was fantastic because Hanoi's lightening fast ribbons of scooter traffic were quickly turning me into a nervous wreck. But we'd made it, and there she was.

Tasty soups at Pho 24 

Perched on a small plastic stool behind a long, low table on the street corner was a middle-aged woman, her graying hair held back in a checkered headscarf, deftly chopping a whole chicken into bite-sized pieces with a thick-bladed machete. The table was loaded with soup ingredients and condiments - chicken parts (yum, feet?), slabs of beef, onions, garlic, noodles, vegetables, herbs, countless unlabeled bottles of sauce - all marinating in the perpetual dust of Hanoi's streets.

We plunked ourselves down on stools, pointed to the beef and said, "two?" holding up the appropriate number of fingers and smiling hopefully. Success! She conferred with the soup tureen boiling away beside her stool, tossed in the meat and veggies, and grinning, handed us two bowls of steaming 'pho bo' - Vietnamese beef noodle soup, which we devoured immediately.

I love pho, and nowhere does it better than a street stall in Hanoi. (Although the Pho 24 chain does a good job too!) This is a city where daily life is out on the sidewalks. Street food is king, storefronts spill right out to the curb. My other favourite experience here was the 'bia hoi,' or fresh beer, stored without preservatives in big kegs and doled out in mugs on corners. The beer line isn't carbonated, like it would be in Canada, and so the tube coming from the bottom of the keg is plugged with a cork - or, when business is good, with the bartender's thumb. Like all other street-side businesses, patrons perch on tiny plastic stools at tiny plastic tables.

My Dad is so proud of me.

We spent five days in Hanoi, mostly eating and drinking (I literally had pho for every meal for about three days. I regret nothing.) but we managed some tourist attractions as well. The military museum has a big display of both Russian and American military equipment that you're allowed to climb on, as well as one-sided displays on both the French and American wars. It wasn't the one side that we're used to hearing about back home, so it was interesting to dig through the propaganda to find a Vietnamese perspective.

The mausoleum: you cannot get closer than this from the front.
Immediately after this was taken, the guards yelled at us to back away.

I also got to see my very first embalmed communist leader! The body of revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh, or 'Uncle Ho,' is preserved in an enormous mausoleum in Hanoi. To see him, you must walk a half kilometre around and behind the mausoleum itself - by no means can you approach from the front across the parade square. You check your purse at one kiosk and your camera and cell phone at another. Then you walk single file along a thin red carpet into the marble building, under intense scrutiny by Vietnam's tallest military guards, all in spotless white uniforms. You do not talk, or linger, or put your hands in your pockets. Pictures are right out, thus the mandatory camera handover. Everyone shuffles slowly past the pale, waxy-skinned, serene Uncle Ho (who, by the way, wanted specifically to be cremated rather than embalmed and preserved), observes respectfully and emerges from the chilly mausoleum back into the daylight.

Cool, if slightly creepy.

We also checked out a few of the historic temples, and strolled around Hoan Kiem Lake in the old quarter. And then we ate. And ate and ate and ate.

S.