Catching Up

Catching Up - Day 86 (and 85) May 1 (and April 30^th)

This was two days of trekking in The Sapa Valley.  I am documenting both days as I took so many pictures that I wanted an excuse to get them all in. It is easy to take lovely pictures in Sapa.  I am writing from the hotel room back in Hanoi.  Trying to get my part of the Africa/Asia section of our blog finished.  The next time I write will be in Oxford.  Getting ready for Europe.  Just the nine weeks in a campervan.  I refuse to find it daunting. This is extraordinary freedom.

I didn’t fancy the walk at all. We had an incredible view, a comfy room and nothing makes me feel the age of my knees more than actually putting myself in a hilly landscape on foot.  Age is a thing.  It makes it seems so reasonable and attractive to simply admire the view, generously applaud the achievements of others and husband diminishing energy for the important stuff. Stuff like trying really hard not to be sententious, fussy, cantankerous and hypocritical. Age is also a thing when travelling with a 10 year old.  It is difficult to take a break when it denies an insistent and deserving son a game, a story, an enquiry, an audience or best of all a game of pool. Or a wrestle and a tickle. It keeps you young (and break free).  Taran doesn’t really use breaks – just 10 hours totally sparko every night and the occasional game of Plants vs Zombies.  It has been amazing travelling with him.  The time of my life.  And I am sad this part is coming to an end.

So walk I must.  But not happily for me this this morning - or in sandals. They have served me well for 86 days. 

We breakfast.  

We walk and talk and slowly my mood is shamed into something serviceable 

both by the jeweled filigree that is the country around me 

and the good cheer of Jo and Taran. 

There are lots of people working QUITE HARD preparing the paddies for planting and even they look cheerful enough. Some break up the soil by hand - the whole family working together with mattock and spade

But the guys do love a rotavator (and so do I)

 

There are ducks and chickens and pigs (little pot-bellied ones) and buffalo and goats and dogs and geese.  It is late spring and every beast nurses a collection of tiny beastlets.  It is charming and we stop to play and film them for todays featured video (full screen please for full cuteness)

Lunch is fried noodles and pork.  The number of raw red chillis I can now consume with a meal would surely amaze and impress even my sternest critic.  Taran thinks I should enter The Herefordshire Festival of Chilis World Championships.  He may be right!  So that’s good too – I mean good that they serve me a side plate of chillis and limes on request. 

We walk on, slowly.  The footing is good, the trails we follow are mainly single track for foot and motorcycle ....

and serve the busy villages and fields and farms.  Up and down we go.....

we meet farmers and children 

and sprightly old ladies in tribal dress with kind sparkly eyes but whose living it is to sell us ethnic bric a brac that we don’t want.  They know it is hard for us to disappoint them and so we must buy our allotted portion before closing our wallets to further entreaty.  Is it a victory of a sort to let them know we are happy we have over paid them?

The day starts to linger.  We try our hands at milling some grain the Sapa way 

and see a neat water powered pounder

pounding grain I suppose as long as the water flows. 

Taran finds some local boys to play football with 

as Jo and I sip coffee in a track side guest house.  

Incredibly we find a pool table.

A chicken crosses the road in the dusk.

 

For no obvious reason

After supper with our family in the home-stay we bed down on hard mattresses in a cosy chamber. A storm starts.  It goes on all night.  Hammering the tin roof.

But in the morning the landscape has absorbed the deluge.  The endless terraces are shiny and flush with the rain but the river only a little higher.  Very soon now it will be time for transplanting the rice seedlings.  They have been nursed in the better irrigated fields for a month.  A patchwork of the freshest green

 superimposed on the duller tiers of dirt and grass. The paddies are full of water now and being muddily prepared to receive the seedlings.

It really is hard work. 

The planting to come is very hard work too we are told.  It is the busy season and our guide will help her husband dig after she leaves us.  Her husband is a teacher but everyone must grow their rice. “We eat it every day – sometimes one kg if the work is hard”. That is a lot of rice.

The villages wake up - charcoal stoves grilling and boiling breakfast. 

Motorbikes buzzing, peasants picking their way to the fields.  And the old ladies are back too – porting their wares in baskets hoping for a tourist to attach to but we are all, and there are a lot of us out today trekking, hardened now.  

Wearing our bracelets and packing our embroidered pillow cases we have done our bit.  They must sell elsewhere.

I duck the climb up to the bamboo forest. The clay is slippy and the path uneven and busy.  I descend by a short cut and wait for Taran and Jo by a bamboo bridge under a waterfall.  There are giant orange butterflies and droves of youthful tourists in braided shirts and shorts.

Noodles and soup for lunch with our guide. Chilis on the side for me again; deliciously smoky bright and oily once you get past the heat. We taxi back to our guest house and say goodbye to Shaan with a tip and a handshake.  She hangs on though with her sister at reception probably not in too much of a rush to join her husband in the mud.

That is that.  We are on the way back now.  Back in the swish bus and rather tiringly this time - strangely like an old re-run of a TV show you used to love - back to Max.  Back too to the snack lunch at the bus stop. 

Back to Hanoi .

Back to good old Hotel Light and back to a good night’s sleep in pristine linen. 

Tomorrow we fly.