The night went much better than I thought. I expected no one would sleep with all of us sleeping together. I expected that snoring, bathroom trips and very thin mattresses would keep us all awake but it didn’t. I had the best night’s sleep so far in Vietnam except I woke up not feeling very well. 😞
Most people were stirring by 6:45 and we went to breakfast. The owner of the home stay went out to cut herbs and we had a brief discussion about their medicinal benefits.
After breakfast we went to Hieh Village which was about 10 miles from the home stay. On the way to the village Mai told us about some of the practices of the Thai people. In the Thai culture the man comes to live with the wife’s family after they get married. They stay there until they have their first child or three years whichever comes first. This is to make sure the husband treats the wife well. Hopefully during those three years the man builds a house for the couple to live in.
We walked through the village. Most of the houses are traditionally on silts. This was to keep wild animals out of the house. Nowadays it is used for storage or sometimes they have a fish pond under the house. They scrape their leftovers into the fish pond to feed the fish which they eat once they are big enough.
Mai approached a gentleman and asked if we could walk around his property. It was very clean and tidy. The bathroom is separate from the house because you can’t have the bathroom under the same roof as the ancestral altar. The kitchen was also separate from the house. They had a machine to separate the rice from the chaff which is used by the whole village.
After walking around the gentleman invited us into his home. We entered a big fairly empty room which served as their living room and sleeping quarters. The gentleman was 76 years old and he lives there with his wife and his 40 year old daughter. The wife had lost her thumb and pointer finger in an accident with the machine that separates the rice from the chaff. The daughter was very small and I think she was intellectually challenged. Her handicap was caused by her dad’s exposure to agent orange. The gentleman was a soldier for the Viet Cong and he went south to fight in 1970. He had many medals as a result of his service. He did not fight to spread communism but rather to unify Vietnam and to free the country from foreign domination. He’s not upset about his daughter’s condition because it allows her to stay with her parents. Also he doesn’t feel hostile towards the Americans because he says that blood is blood and he wants to be friends. It was a very powerful discussion and his attitude was inspirational. We said goodbye and thank you.
We continued on our walk and saw many beautiful sites and interacted with some of the village children. The village population is only 400 people and can only support a primary school. I wrote earlier about the cost of school in Vietnam. The hill people do not have to pay for primary education and the threshold for test scores needed to proceed from secondary school to college can be lower for hill tribes because of the inequality of the school system. In order to go to secondary school many of the hill tribes families must move to a larger town so their kids can go to school. Of course this is very expensive and it limits the number of kids who can go to move on within the school system.
We passed a cemetery. In the Thai culture they bury their dead and then they built a small house from bamboo on silts over the grave. The house stays there for three years for the spirit to reside in. Then the family’s comes back and burns the house, burying the ashes with the body.
Here are additional pictures from our walk.
We went back to the homestay and the “madame” had brewed the herbs that she picked earlier into a hot potion. We soaked our feet in the potion. It’s supposed to relax your arteries and veins and improve your blood flow. I don’t know if it worked but it was very nice. After our foot spa we had lunch and then prepared to leave. Before we left the “madame” presented us with string bracelets and wished us good health and good wealth. She was really very sweet.
On our way back to Hanoi we stopped at the top of the mountain and could look down into the valley where we just stayed. It was pretty foggy so the pictures aren’t great.
We also stopped at a rest stop to use the happy room, AKA the bathroom where we got some ice cream which wasn’t so great. The traffic in Hanoi was terrible. Apparently the government had built large apartment complexes without considering the impact on the traffic. We got back to the hotel around 7 and Rick, Mai, and I went out for beef pho.
We were supposed to go the New Year’s Eve party on the roof of our hotel to watch the local fireworks but I didn’t feel well and Rick was tired so we just went to bed.