Indochina Express - Day 8 (Sa Pa)

March 10

When we get up, the sky is looking a little brighter. I'm still not feeling well, so after breakfast, Beth, Chris and Mark leave on their hike down the mountain to several of the local villages while I walk about the property within easy distance of the nearest toilet. Here are some of the pictures that I took:

I tried recording the local bird calls and letting my Merlin app try to identify them, but the app reported that they only know about 35% of the birds in this area, so I was only able to identify an Asian Palm Swift and a Eurasian Tree Sparrow even though I saw and heard a lot more birds than that.

After walking around for a while, I went back to the bungalow and worked on my blog for a few hours until about 3 PM when Beth and crew returned. Here is what she said that they did:

While walking down into the valley for about an hour and a half, the group was joined by several of the local Black Hmong women who integrated themselves into the group as a guide and in an attempt to sell everyone something. They walked along with the group, making animals and hearts out of grass from the trail side, until they got to Y Linh Ho village. There the group stopped for tea and for Chris and Beth to buy some small items. They walked along a little further until they came to a second Black Hmong village called Lao Chai, where they had lunch and got to see how people lived. Conditions were pretty primitive, but the people seemed happy. Beth tells me that all of the Hmong people (there are five different Hmong peoples in Vietnam) were originally from China and moved into the mountainous parts of Vietnam about 300 years ago. The Black Hmong women are famous for making cloth from hemp and dying it a deep indigo blue. The group continued on to a third village called Ta Van, this one belonging to the Tay people. The Tay people are the oldest and largest ethnic minority in Vietnam after the majority Kihn people. They are believed to have arrived from the interior of southeast Asia around 500 BCE. Because they have been in Vietnam so long, they have largely adopted Kihn ways of life. Finally, the group were picked up by the van and driven back up the mountain - a big improvement over having to walk back up! Here are some of the pictures that Beth took:

We eat dinner at the restaurant that serves local dishes. Everything we had was great, but we are disappointed that they are out of mango sticky rice.