Celebrating New Years in the country

     We took a one hour flight from Hue to Hanoi for the last leg of our journey. In the last two weeks we have come from the south to the north of this long country that is about the length of California. We ate dinner at a French Colonial restaurant and then headed for our hotel in Hanoi. Unfortunately, I was felled by something I ate and spent an unpleasant night. I feared I would not be up to a four hour bud journey to the home stay in the north but had recovered enough to give it a try. The roads here are rough. That is an understatement. They are potholed, under construction, sometimes narrow and all bets are off when it comes to rules of the road- at least that's what it seems like to a Westerner. The truth is that driving here is constant vigilance and negotiation. The road may be one, two or more lanes but that only means there is more space to move. People pass on curves and weave in and out of traffic. Vehicles flow and everyone knows to look at each other and move slowly. It's hard to describe but it mostly seems to work. That being said it was a long bumpy ride on a bus that was designed for Asian bodies. At 5'2"' I had one inch of leg room between my knees and the seat in front of me. 

      Food in the north is somewhat different than in the south. The pho has less vegetables in it and is less seasoned. They make a wine here that has a whole snake in it to give it flavor. Wasn't offered that but probably would have declined. People own way more dogs here. People eat dog. Again we weren't offered any and again I probably would have declined. 

We stopped at a lovely home stay for lunch both going up to the village and back. 

   This part of Vietnam is so very different from all of the other places we have visited. The  air is clean, the scenery out of National Geographic and the people gracious and welcoming.

     Our homestay was in a very remote community called May Chau. This is community of one of the 54 ethnic minorities in Vietnam called Thai. They have little contact with Thailand but speak the same language. We slept in a large house on stilts in a dormitory arrangement - mat on the floor with two duvet covered blankets, mosquito nets and a separate building with toilets and showers. It was unseasonably cold-the coldest it has been in 10 years. They built a bamboo fire and we sat around after dinner. Then later, as it was New Years, they put on a special performance of dancing (girls doing traditional dances) and music (men playing a stringed instrument, flute and drums.) They offered us homemade rice wine with dinner and then fermented sweet wine after the dancing. I sure wish my stomach had felt up to drinking. After, we talked a bit but none of us made it to midnight. At that point 5 of us had succumbed to the illness. All of us rode that day on off road trails and small roadways through rice paddies. We met as many water buffalo as people. Again as in every place we have ridden, every little kid and many adults come to the edge of the road and wave and say "Hello, hello." It is amazing how rural this life is. They do have electricity and running water but just about everything is still done much the way it was before all of that.

     New Year's Day we hopped on the bikes after breakfast and cycled off in the chill morning for our last 16 miles - a short last tour through villages and rice paddies back to where we had lunch the day before. On the way we stopped at a small place beside the road where a cople of people were turning bamboo into chopsticks. The whole time i was standing there I could only think of how this could never be taking place anywhere but in an undeveloped area. There were absolutely no safety precautions - no safety goggles, no safety guards on the machine that was splitting the bamboo into sticks, chips flying all over the place... We all just shook our heads at how things are so different here.

     Because it was a school holiday, we could not stop by to give away the rest of the items donated by Michelle, Glenn and their friends, so Vu and Thai chose to give the items to the village we ate in. 

     We were able to shop in the handicraft market full of items made by locals before we hopped on the bus for our return to Hanoi.