From Sapa to the Crappa

Sapa and Ha Long Bay definitely rival one another for most beautiful places in the world. I can't decide which wins, but they both definitely top the list. Our four-day "Homestay and Trekking Adventure" in the Northern Mountains went off swimmingly--figuratively and literally. It was an amazing time. All-in-all, we hiked about 35km through the mountains over three days, staying in hill tribe villages for two nights along the way.

The hiking was intense. Some of the up-hills definitely put my rather-out-of-shape father (His sizeable belly created a bit of a stir on our travels, and the best comment has to be the motorbike taxi driver that pointed and said "Like Buddha.") to task, but we all made it through. It started raining the first night we were out, continuing intermittently through the second day and night. By the end, we were all connoisseurs of mud, which comes in a surprising number of varieties in the mountains of northern Vietnam: there is the red sticky clay, which which coats your shoes and everything else, but has the advantage of sometimes being too sticky to be slippery; then there is the black sticky mud-clay, which is both slippery and coating; the brown mud-sludge is child's play, it splashes more than it sticks, and a simple spray with a hose will get it off; the charcoal gray clay must be respected, however, as it will quickly build into 6-inch platforms on the bottom of your shoes, the one advantage of which is that once you stop trying to scrape off the extra ten pounds of foot baggage, you find that the shoe extensions can actually create portable steps for going down the steep inclines if you position your foot properly; I could go on.

Of the five people in the tour group, I am proud to say that I ended up the cleanest, not falling on my ass until our final decent, which was basically 1.5 hours straight down a mountain side, more mud skiing than walking. Slogging in a line through a muddy, narrow mountain path, surrounded by palms and bamboo, and growing gradually soaked as my sweat and the drizzle communed with one another, I felt like I was truly in 'Nam. The perennial diatribe of John Goodman's crazy Vietnam vet character in The Big Lebowski--"I didn't watch my buddies die facedown in the muck to..."--kept running through my head, and I hoped that I wouldn't be watching any of my buddies do the same.

Our final homestay was in a Black Tay village, a tribe closely related to the Thais of Thailand and the Lao. I paid 15,000 dong (about $1) to have the youngest son run to a neighbors house and get a 1.5 liter water bottle filled with homemade rice vodka. One other member of our group, my father, our guide, the father of family we were staying with and his eldest son, and I sat up until the wee hours drinking the rice vodka and smoking the thuoc lao, a wooden bong that is used to smoke strong tobacco in massive doses (anyone who knows my father knows that he was not partaking in the thuoc lao, as he would die). Communication was slightly awkward, as the family spoke only Tay and Vietnamese and my father and the other group member spoke no Vietnamese, but I think a good time was had by all. One of the village water buffalos had fallen off the road in the rain and died, so everyone in the village had purchased some of the meat and was up late eating it and partying. We were served some of said buffalo, which was delicious. Once we went through the jug of wine I purchased, the father brought out the half liter that remained of his own brew, and we polished that off as well. The only awkward moment was when our guide looked over to me as he was lighting the thuoc lao for the woman from our group who was joining us and started telling me in Vietnamese how he thought is was terrible when women smoked and drank and that that was why he could never marry his English girlfriend. Embarrassed, and lacking the language skill to really engage the topic, I just kept repeating "Van hoa rat cach nhau"--"The cultures are very different."

We arrived back in Hanoi at around 5am yesterday. After a long nap, we did a little touring, and then met up with Tu, my tutor from when I studied here. I wanted to show my dad a quintessential Vietnamese Bia Hoi night, and we did it to the nines: 23 beers, one plate of salt-coated shrimp, a plate of chicken intestines and ly flowers, and a massive lau, which is basically the same as a hot pot. We got the mixed lau, which comes with a hot plate of boiling broth and vegetables and a variety of meats, greens, and noodles you cook in the broth. Our meats included beef, fish, snails, eel, chicken, pig liver, chicken liver, beef stomach, chicken intestines, and a gallbladder and pool of blood of unknown origin. It was all delicious and/or interesting, but, unfortunately, I think we treated my father to his first bout of welcome-to-Vietnam diarrhea, and our touring today is limited to brief sprints of site-seeing, with frequent "rest" breaks back at the hotel.

My dad headed back to the hotel after dinner, but Tu and I went out for a night on the town. He took me to Ho Guam Xanh (Guam Lake Green), a club that normally has live rock, but we were lucky enough to show up right after a visiting South Vietnamese pop star took the stage. (OK, so it sounded like karaoke to me on the way up the stairs, but this guy is huge.) I just realized that one very important detail that I forgot to include in my account of Nathalie's visit is that we were sitting in the bar car on the train from Saigon to Da Nang when a Vietnamese music video was being filmed, and we were asked to serve as extras. Basically, we were supposed to sit at our table and talk, ignoring the spiffed up dude sitting next to me, lip-synching a ballad to the camera. SO, this being my second brush with Vietnamese celebrity, I was able to play it cool, but I couldn't help a breathy giggle when he came around to our side of the stage and grabbed the hand I reached out (following the lead of Tu and the two girls sitting next to us) and gave me a little point and wink.

After the club, Tu said he wanted to take me to a traditional Vietnamese wine house. We took a cab across the city, finally stopping in front of a small alley on a street I have never seen. Walking down the alley (it was 1am at this point, way past Hanoi's bed time), we reached a door advertising karaoke, and I had a moment of panic that Tu had brought me to a brothel. The reality proved much weirder than that, however, as the door opened onto a dark room, empty except for a woman sitting at a bar in the corner, below a television set playing the Michael Douglas movie Falling Down with Thai subtitles. Most of the floor was taken up with a slightly raised hardwood platform, empty except for an antique baby carriage in the middle WITH A BABY ASLEEP IN IT! To the left, one wall was covered with a weird string spider web, adorned with three large, carved, wooden shields, and something like a bust. The other wall was blank except for a bunch of large signatures, graffiti'd in marker. Tu and the woman had a sort of whispered conversation that I barely understood, and she led us over to a stack of short, Japanese-like tables in the corner, putting one on the floor and instructing us to sit around it. Seeing my baffled expression, Tu explained that this was an all-night wine house, very popular among local artists. Apparently, it is normally packed, but was sort of closed today because the woman had just given birth and her husband, also an artist, was on a trip to the south. However, Tu was a good customer, so she promptly served us a bottle of a black wine purported to cure stress-induced anger, unwell greenness, and a whole bevy of other ailments I couldn't translate. I was still thoroughly confused by the situation, so I did the only thing one could do: I drank up. Tu and I caught a motor bike back to my hotel around 2:30am. The door was chained with a bike lock, so we had to knock and yell until we awoke the bellhop sleeping in the lobby, who very cheerfully opened up the door, retrieved Tu's bike, and ushered me to the elevator. I love Vietnam.

I just realized that nearly every post on this blog mentions excessive drinking in one way or another. Um, sorry, mom. Hopefully the intense cultural experiences attached to nearly every instance are coming across too...