C & C globetrotting around the world…

After having met Henri in Hanoi, we headed to the train station in the evening to catch our train to Sapa, 300km Northwest of Hanoi. The train tracks and hence the trains in Vietnam a narrower than the Chinese ones. We boarded the train for our 9 hour overnight train ride on a hard sleeper. People had advised us against it saying it was bad, but since we had travelled thousands of kilometers on hard sleepers in China, we wanted to try it out here. It’s funny that they are called hard sleepers. The only difference is that there are 3 berths on top of each other instead of 2 in the soft sleeper. You still get a mattress, a pillow, a blanket with new linen. The trains are worse than in China (but still ok), rattling and swaying a lot, which explains why they go so slowly. The trains are also not as tall, so the room between berths is not as big. In China people sit on the bottom berth until it’s time to go to bed, when everyone goes to their own berth. In Vietnam, you cannot really sit on the bottom berth unless you are a 5-yr old child, but since we took the train from 8pm to 5am, this was not a problem and we went to bed right away. The country is a lot smaller, so the distances are not that big and one can do well in smaller spaces. The people in our compartment were nice and Christoph tried communicating with them using the few Vietnamese words he learned, but Vietnamese is even harder than Mandarin. It has 6 tones, not “only” 4 to pronounce everything. They use our alphabet since it has been introduced by a French priest, Father Alexandre de Rhodes in 1651, which gives the false impression that it’s easy to read and pronounce. Cecilia decided to stick to “hello”, “thank you” and the numbers only, while Christoph is actually trying to pick up a bit more.

Sapa is a hill station founded by the French in 1922 in the Tonkin Alps at an altitude of 1650m and home to a multitude of ethnic minorities in Vietnam. Unfortunately 2 of our 4 days there it rained, so we didn’t enjoy as much as we had hoped. Even if the days were nice, the nights were very cold and damp. When the rain finally stopped, we went down in the valley to Cat Cat village, a village where people of the H’Mong minority live. We were disappointed because the village is not authentic anymore, with no specific architecture and with every house having a “souvenir shop”. The H’Mong people have an interesting custom where they organize a “Love Market” every week in one of the villages. This is a kind of speed dating for the young people, where they can meet other H’Mongs from neighbouring villages. Also, at these events young men can “kidnap” a girl with their friends and bring her home. They will keep her for 3 days, showing that they would like to marry her. If she agrees, the young men will ask her parents for approval and the preparatory wedding ceremonies will begin. Among other ethnic minorities in the region, there are the Red Dzao people, as well as a few others. What all these Montagnards (as the French called the hill tribes) have in common is that they came from China a few centuries ago, having similar languages and writing in Mandarin Chinese. Their clothing is also similar to those of ethnic minorities in Southwest China, except that the H’Mong and Dzao people wear a lot of silver jewelry.

On our second sunny day, we set out to walk to more minority villages in the area. We passed through Linh Ho village and continued on, seeing children play in the rice fields. We also came face to face with water buffaloes, who look a lot more intimidating than they really are. As soon as you come close, they move out of the way, but we were still a bit nervous in their presence. At some point we lost the main path and were wandering in the rice fields. Then the path stopped completely and we were practicing our sense of balance on the walls of rice paddies. Talk about being off the beaten path! After a few more muddy rice paddies, we finally saw a path which led to the road. There we were offered a motorbike ride back for $2 each and jumped at the opportunity (that’s the going rate). We were both behind the guy on his motorbike and it was a thrilling ride. Enough adrenaline for one day!