March 19th through 22nd: Sapa and the Red Dao Village

March 19th: Sapa town
After 9 hours on the night train from Hanoi, we arrived in Lao Cai, in north west of Vietnam on the Chinese border. From there we took a one hour bus ride to Sapa, the center for a variety of minority people and the jumping off place for village trekking. I first came to Sapa in 2006 on my second Evergreen School trip to Vietnam. The town has grown so much since then as tourism has boomed. There are Vietnamese on holiday here, as well as quite a large international community. I am told that some property value has increased 800 percent. The cold spell that hit Hanoi while we were there dropped snow on Sapa - the first time in ten years.

Black H'mong girl selling a necklace

Red Dao (pronounced Zow) woman

Black H'mong woman selling her incredible hat

Street food - my lunch - YUM!

Colorful products for sale from the minority people

Personally, I do not think the pig hanging outside the restaurant is much of an enticement.

Tile roofs

My friend Song. I met her the first time I came to Sapa. I helped her set up an internet account, but never kept in touch. I do manage to run into her almost every time I come to Sapa.

Trekking to Ta Phin of the Red Dao
We stayed in Sapa just a few hours, then divided into 4 groups and each headed for a different village of a different minority group. Every year the village stay is the students' favorite time in Vietnam, and every year that ask for more time. I was able to increase our time spent in the villages to three nights this year.

My group has one parent chaperone and six students. We have a local guide named Ha (I call him Ha Hai , meaning Ha two, to differentiate him form our national guide), and will be met at our home-stay by a local cook as well.

We walked for 3 hours through beautiful rice terraced hills to the village of Ta Phin.

I apologize for all the pictures, but it was just too difficult to edit, for the scenery was so spectacular.

I have never seen anything like these rice fields, as if swirling down a sink hole.

Rice drying on the trail, with rice terraces in the back ground.

View from our home-stay

After a magical walk of three hours, we arrived at Ta Phin village, home of the Red Dao people. Our home-stay is a very simple wood house with a tin roof and a cement floor. There are no windows with glass in this house. All the students stayed in one room with a number of mattresses and mosquito nets. I stayed in a sectioned off area. Between the two areas was a sitting room open wide to this view. At night a big, blue plastic tarp is lowered to keep out the wind. All the food is cooked over a wood fire. The smoke, at times, fills the whole house. The family (father, mother, son, daughter and "adopted" son) sleep in another room behind the cooking area. The roof is high to allow for a loft area as well.

March 20th: Day two of our home-stay
Life moves at a simpler pace here. It is 6:30AM and I am the only person from my group awake. The village animals are so noisy - roosters crowing, dogs barking, pigs squealing. The village is starting to wake up as well. I watch kids dragging long bamboo poles down the trail, the women in their black or indigo clothes with their Red Dao hats and a hoe over their shoulders, heading for the rice fields. People are gathering wood, or feeding and watering the animals. The wind blows through the valley. You can hear its roar building as it gets closer, but barely feel it as it follows the channel of the valley below - very cool! I have always loved the wind. It feels like it cleanses me as it blows through me.

Chu and the family Breakfast

Chu is 15 years old and an indentured servant to this family. Chu comes from a very poor family. His family traded his services to our home-stay family for 4 years, and at the end of that time, our home-stay family will give Chu's family a buffalo. Chu is treated like a family member - he eats, sleeps and works with the family. Our guide Ha says Chu is very happy here and will be sad when he lives, for his standard of living is so much higher here than with this family.

Silver bracelet Offer of engagement
The red Dao still practice arranged marriages. The boy's family will send a spokesperson, someone who can speak very well for the family, to the girl's family. They bring a silver bracelet and a bottle of rice wine. The girl's family makes a special breakfast of buffalo meat, stomach and liver, as well as other savory dishes. The girl's family holds on to the bracelet for one week. At the end of a week, the girl's family either keeps the bracelet, accepting the proposal, or rejects the proposal by the girl returning the bracelet.

Chao May, 20 year old daughter of our home stay family

Chau May received her 22nd marriage proposal the morning after we arrived at the home-stay. Needless to say, she has rejected the previous 21 proposals. Our local guide Ha explained that "the times, they are a changin." The home-stay family is letting Chau May accept or reject each proposal, unlike their arranged marriage, which was set up by their parents before they had ever even met each other. Chau May is 20 years old, and so her parents are concerned that she is becoming an "old maid." At the end of our three day home-stay, I asked Chau May what she will respond to this proposal. "I have no idea," she said. How will she decide what she will do, I asked. "I have no idea," was her reply. Our home-stay family has never met this family, so I asked the mother how the decision will be made. She said she will ask about the family this week, and then go to a "fortune teller" to look at the couple's horoscope. I asked the mother how many more rejections will she allow her daughter to make. When this question was translated, everyone just laughed.

We worked in the rice fields in the morning, scraping the weeds off of the terraced walls and digging up the hard ground with picks. It was very hard work and we were exhausted after one hour. Ha told us that one square meter produces about a bowl of rice. So every time a farmer eats a bowl of rice, he or she is reminded of all the sweat that went into producing it. Unlike a city dweller, for the farmer nothing is wasted and nothing is taken for granted.

Izie and an infant

We went for a walk in the afternoon, touring the villages around our home-stay.

Early evening cooking lesson

At night we took advantage of hot herbal baths, made from 17 different jungle herbs. The herbs are boiled in a large wok, and then the liquid is poured into two small wooden tubs, large enough for one person to squat in. One student remarked, "It was like soaking in tomato soup. . . .But in a good way." It was a pretty good description of the smell, and quite a luscious experience.

3/21: Day three of our home-stay
In the morning we volunteered to go with Chu to gather wood. We trekked through the jungle for close to an hour, sometimes using all four limbs as the trail made its way up a slippery wet path that closely resembling a stream bed. I asked why we had to walk to so far to gather wood, and was explained that all the land is owned by families, even the jungle, so we had to walk to our home-stay's property.

Our group with back packs for carrying the wood back to the home-stay

Izie bursting into song

Anna in Red Dao garb

Our home stay family is wealthy, and does not need to sell hand-made textiles any more, unlike many of the Red Dao people we have met. They do have a basket full of stuff that is for sale. As we looked through the items, our search became a fashion show.

Sam

My group modeling their Red Dao clothing

Chau May, the 20 year old daughter, with Mai Duong, our cook. Though Mai Duong is also from a minority group, though not Red Dao. She is Thai, and so she was excited to get involved in the fashion show as well.

March 22nd - Day four of our homestay

Saying good bye to our home-stay family. In the middle is the father, daughter, and mother.

We walked to the van, were driven to another location south of Sapa, then walked for an hour or so to Ta Van, where we met two other Evergreen school groups. From there we took our vans to Ban Ho, the location of the fourth group.

View from the Ban Ho home-stay, the location of the fourth group

The reason we all met at Ban Ho is because of this water fall and river. Though the water is very cold, it was so nice and refreshing to swim in. The waterfall is just around the corner, in the upper left of the photo.

We all ate lunch together at the Ban Ho home-stay, and then were treated to traditional dancing, including this dance with poles that separate and come together. We all had to try.

Me with Mai Duong, our group's cook. I teased her that I would have to hide this picture from my wife.

My old friend Ming, the owner of the Ban Ho home-stay. I came here the first three times I came to Sapa, in 2006, 2008, and 2009. The last two years I have gone to the Ta Phin home-stay. Maybe next trip to Vietnam I will go to the Ta Van home-stay. It is important for me to experience all the different home-stays, though it is difficult to not return because of the bonds created.

We returned to Sapa in the afternoon. We have been trying to give the students a "work session" from 6 to 7PM every day. The students have a number of assignments while on the trip: reflect in their journal every day, work on their NGO projects, upload their best photos to a shared file, contribute to the "composite journal" (each student must contribute 4 entries, which I will compile for everyone on the trip), email their parents, and read the other students' itinerary reports. Today we asked each student to write three "post cards" or slides about their home-stay experience. Then we got back together in home-stay groups and decided on six of them to share, creating skits for each entry. We then got back together as a whole group and read and acted out each vignette. It was a fun way to share with everyone each group's home-stay experience.