Ninh Binh
In Hanoi, we were sharing an Airbnb with my Lady Heat friends Lily and Maria and two of their friends, Liza and Tara, on vacation with them. They’d been in the country for over a week; we’d just arrived, and we were beyond – beyond – excited to see familiar faces and be on someone else’s itinerary even for only a few days.
Ninh Binh was a four-part adventure packed into a single day-trip from Hanoi. After a mad-dash for coffee, the six of us boarded our limo-bus and away we went.
Part One: Bai Dinh. This is an enormous pagoda and temple complex. On our visit here we walked a bit, rode an electric car for another bit, meandered through covered hallways lined with hundreds of Buddha statues, and got great views from a tower with an astoundingly huge bell and drum.
Part Two: Lunch in Ninh Binh. This was our first experience with tourist rest areas in Vietnam. Multi-passenger limo-buses are ubiquitous throughout the country and especially impressive in Hanoi, where the drivers expertly negotiate the motorbikes and pedestrians thronging the narrow streets of the French and Old Quarters to scoop up hordes of tourists. The limo-buses all have to stop somewhere for driver breaks and lunch, and thus you have the roadside complex that became a fixture of our travels in the country: pay-your-way bathrooms to one side; snacks and traditional goods for sale at counters in the front; a huge cafeteria-seating zone; buffet-style or set menu meal options; vehicular tetris in the parking lot with every new arrival and departure.
Part Three: Trang An boat tour through the Red River Delta. You don an orange life vest (sometimes against your will…Matt) and get propelled through a network of caves in the waterway. The route is over two hours round trip, which is more than enough time to take in the karst formations and stony grottoes of the delta as well as deeply appreciate the perseverance and dexterity of the boaters who maneuver their passengers through all sorts of stony outcrops in the caves while keeping three feet of distance between their boat and the next in this wildly popular tour.
Part Four: Our last stop was Mua Cave, which had more than a few picturesque sights, even in the misty rain that day. We hiked the stairs to the dragon and Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva statues at the top, getting views of agricultural land, terraces, and goats below. The rice paddy garden in the valley was especially lovely.
Sapa
Another limo bus from Hanoi, this time to Sapa City. If you ever find yourself making this journey, I recommend you pop some dramamine for the final hour of that ride through the twisting mountain roads. That said, it wasn’t just the dissipation of nausea that brought relief upon our arrival to this city in the north of Vietnam – the way Sapa is built into the mountainsides means it is much more hiker-friendly than motorbike-friendly, which is good news for pedestrians seeking a break from the mean streets of Hanoi; the views are truly breathtaking; the climate is more temperate. Sweet, sweet relief! We had two nights at Megaview Homestay and spent the day in between walking around in the cooler, drier air.
The main attraction of Sapa for us was actually the next two nights we spent there, at a homestay in the hills run by a Hmong woman, Ger, and her family. The story of this visit is one we will tell again and again, I’m sure. It is my favorite experience of our trip so far. On Friday around 8am Matt got the final organizing Whatsapp voicemail from Ger, with whom he’d been communicating for the previous few weeks. She was letting us know that her mother, “Mama T” would meet us at Megaview to lead us on the five-hour trek to their village, and that we were picking up two other guests on the way. Sure enough, at 9am there was Mama T, a slight yet sturdy 63-year-old wearing a wide smile and a NY Yankees bucket hat, which made us fast friends.
Once in the center of town a few other women – ladies we’d seen selling handicrafts the day before – sidled up and joined our entourage. “Others from my village,” Mama T chuckled, “they’re going to try to sell you stuff later.” But actually, it was more involved than that. One of the women, Van, was Ger’s cousin and neighbor. She spent her free time with us over the next two days, telling us about her four children, how her name means the “woven circle basket that collects rice” (and rice is the village staple – “we don’t consider it a meal if it doesn’t have rice,” Ger told us), showing us the embroidery loom at her home, and, it turned out, keeping company with those other two guests we collected on the way up to Ger’s while Mama T had gone over to rendezvous with Matt and me. We ate dinners both nights with Van, who’d helped prepare the meals, and stayed up late playing drinking games with her. On the last night a group of us women at the homestay escorted her back to her house, arm in arm.
The first two hours of the trek up to the village with Mama T took us from a main street in town right up a steep concrete incline and immediately off-road onto a rocky dirt path up through planted gardens. Soon, we had wide views of the entire valley in which Sapa sits. We could also start to glimpse the paddy rice terraces comprising the majority of the hillsides above Sapa into various Hmong villages. The two hour mark brought us to a hillside cafe where Mama T ordered us lunch, and we four trekkers, Shailja from India and Zuzanna from Norway, plus the two of us, got better acquainted.
After lunch our entourage dispersed and it was just Shailja, Zu, Matt, and me with the tireless Mama T the remaining few hours to their village. Ger’s home was a strikingly beautiful, solid wooden two-story building perched on an incline in the concrete road headed steeply up-mountain. Mama T left for her house a five-minute walk away to prepare the Shaman ritual (more on that later) and Ger soon arrived to meet us. Ger = Mama T minus a few decades, warm, and master coordinator of all these different visitors and their extraneous luggage and needs. Ger told us the house we were in had been built just four years ago on the site of what was her husband’s grandmother’s home. When the older woman died at an impressive 115 years of age, they built the new abode.
Ger has been doing homestay hosting for 18 years, ever since meeting a tourist in town who helped her set it up. Turns out it’s a pretty common branch of the tourism industry in Sapa, as while trekking we saw many Hmong ladies guiding visitors in a similar fashion. It reminded me of the Maya villages around Lake Atitlan in Guatemala in that each Hmong village has its own language and they don’t understand each other unless they use English or Vietnamese. Ger’s youngest child, home for the weekend from boarding school about 30 minutes walk away, could communicate with Matt and me using a written translation app between English and Vietnamese, but Ger herself does not know how to read or write in any language, though she speaks her Hmong dialect, English, and Vietnamese. This is because Hmong languages in Vietnam are oral, so there hadn’t been a need to read or write. Ger’s husband, Pho, hung out with us after dinner on Friday night, and he communicated with us exclusively through Ger as interpreter. That said, his warm two-handed handshakes, his gleeful cries as we spun the drinking game spoon, his tears of pride at being able to share his home and support his local community, the way he pulled out his flute and two-string guitar to show us music at the end of the night – all of that needed no translation at all.
We were really lucky in our timing because earlier that Friday night we got to observe a Shaman offering in honor of Mama T’s 63rd birthday over at her house. As dusk fell and another woman, “Mama C,” intoned prayers, a piglet was offered up. The altar was made of cut paper, some of the cuttings in the shapes of little people to represent the members of the family. We looked on as Mama C shielded her gaze with a paper veil and continued her prayers.
Over our two days and nights with Ger and her family, we learned about the way of life of the Hmong in the mountains of Sapa. The people take pride in their ability to work hard tending the rice paddies, cutting and hauling wood from the bamboo forests, fashioning embroidered bags, clothing, bracelets and metal jewelry, and managing the tourism industry in their community. I loved the family meals and the treks we shared in this beautiful place.
Da Nang
When I go back to Vietnam, one place I know I need to spend more time is Da Nang. We only passed through for part of a day, and even that limited exposure was tantalizing. Up in the Marble Mountains the artistry of the temple decorations astounded. The city below seemed to sparkle with polished stone. Then, from the backs of the “Easy Rider” motorbikes that took us to Hoi An, we saw beachfront cafes all along the gorgeous coast. Lastly, the views from Hai Van Pass lookout point provided one last promising glimpse of the city we only barely saw. Da Nang, we are coming back.
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