We traveled this morning by highway, 3 hours southwest to the valley of Mai Chau near the Laos border. We anticipated a rural and mountainous experience for two nights and some exposure to 6 ethnic tribes near the Laos border. It was a very busy two lane highway, but compared to the frantic streets of Hanoi conditions are practically Zen.
Q reviewed my blog along the way and found maybe 6 mistakes – dates, spellings, etc. But I think, at this point, my work is guide-approved.
Riding through small rice fields. Q explained that these fields are too small to be profitable, but that the lease owners are required to keep farming or the government will confiscate their land. They also receive a small stipend from the Party but they are pretty impoverished.
This older generation, personally familiar with economic collapse and famine sees this as a defense for their children if starvation or poverty returns. Access to rice in the experience of the Vietnamese is synonymous with survival.
Our firstwater buffalo sighting!
Our driver Angh is from Mai Chau. So we stopped (suddenly) at a town specializing in orange production to pick up 50 pounds (about $15) for his family. The transaction included a sit down to sample the oranges and palmello, chunks of sugar cane to chew and the omnipresent green tea.
We arrived at the town of Mai Chau, the principle of 6 villages in the Mai Chau valley. Two ethnic tribes the White-Thai and Black-Thai live here. The Black-Thai live in the mountains and farm corn. The White- Thai live in the valleys and farm rice. Both have distinct traditional outfits, diets etc and have been living as separated neighbors for 600 years. Q was adamant that the Thai designation had no linkage to Thailand and kept reminding us that the black/white designation had nothing to do with skin color. Got it.
We had a traditional lunch and then walked the town. Pretty touristy with beautiful hand-woven textiles everywhere. Many of the private homes offered “Home-Stays” or rooms for rent. The main economies seemed to be rice, fabric sales, and tourism dollars.
As we walked, the town steadily filled up with uniformed students. We figured out that we were at the start of a massive multi-school retreat, rally and field day. Within two hours one end of the town had filled with buses and we were surrounded by over 2,000(!) kids. It was pandemonium.
The kids were accompanied by a small number of teacher-chaperones who immediately started getting completely smashed on the local rice moonshine.
They were all piling into a big field where this guy was yelling at the top of his lungs through a bull horn. He kept this up, literally without stop until 10pm. Not to be too ethnocentric, but the Vietnamese language through a low quality bullhorn can be pretty jarring to Western ears. It went from culturally interesting to audio-torture pretty quickly.
Checked into a beautiful Eco Lodge overlooking the rice paddies. We had our own well appointed thatched hut, with a big wooden tub, veranda, and comfortable beds. The bamboo and stone architecture were warm and very South East Asian. There was a pool and a bar, ethnic dancing, free moonshine, etc. Not as refined as the Metropole but Wow.
The only downside and it was not a small one was a constant thumping club beat from the Field Day a few hundred yards away and of course, bullhorn guy. He did not stop, He did not take a breath, He was field day Satan.
Q picked us up at 6:30 for what turned about to be a very special evening. We were invited to his friend Mr.Cho’s house for dinner. Coincidentally he’s also Drew’s South East Asian doppelgänger. He has a large guest house in town built on stilts and we gathered with him, our driver Angh and a few other new friend’s (Thuit and Hongh) for a feast and moonshine binge.
The food was a giant shared plate of chopped pepper chicken, fried fish, pumpkin greens, beef in lolott leafs, green papaya and banana leaf salad, yams and a nice, big bowl of fried grasshoppers (we had some, ok l guess). We were also taught it’s polite to reverse our chopsticks and serve from the shared plate with the opposite fat end. There was also a plastic pitcher 3/4 full of water (it turned out to be rice moonshine).
It was fascinating. His friends were White-Thai (though we learned Ang’s wife was Black-Thai) and they spoke a mix of a local dialect and Vietnamese. A three way interpretation fest led by Q and Angh ensued. Life experiences, children, stories, and jokes flowed back and forth. Each pause, another toast – a shot for the locals, a sip for JuJu, and me somewhere in between. Q got really funny and poked some fun at us. Angh got very drunk-emotional about his new best friends Mawcomb and DjuDju.
We learned a lot about their lives. Thuit and Hong were rice farmers. Cho ran a guesthouse for large charity groups (there were 15 American kids on a road building trip there that night). He also ran the local moonshine distillery.
There were lots of warm smiles, firm handshakes and eye contact as drunk Thuit left for his rice fields and the party broke up. We called a cab back to the Eco Lodge and Q and Angh settled in for a sleep over.
We came home to catch the tail end of an ethnic dance performance (Black-Hmong) at the Lodge (cool)
Mac and Juju explore Southeast Asia 
Love, love, love!
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