The Slitherants: Bac Ha - Fri 21/05

Bac Ha…The second shorter stop on our mountain region tour after Sapa, Bac Ha is a much less visited destination than our first stop. The town only has about a half a dozen options for accommodation but as we had been given the number of a local guy who runs a home stay we didn’t have to stay in one of the crumby hotels right in the centre of the town. ‘Sa’s Place’ is a home stay run by a guy named Sa and his wife. It’s about two km’s from the town and I thoroughly recommend staying here if you’re ever in Bac Ha. First of all it’s only $5 per person per night and his wife is the most amazing cook. Sa also has a seemingly never ending supply of corn whiskey that gets served up gratis with lunch and dinner and most of the night as well. He also makes his own plum wine and it tastes a lot better than the corn whiskey, let me tell ya. Sa also has a six year old boy who delighted in being read English story books by Kate and was a pretty damn likeable little guy. Sa grows plums, raises about 70 chickens, 4 dogs, 4 cats and a whole other menagerie of animals on his small farm and it is a peaceful respite from the towns where trucks and buses honk their incredibly loud horns unceasingly.

The main reason people come to Bac Ha is the Sunday market where the otherwise sleepy mountain town comes to life and is transformed into a bustling marketplace where all manner of goods and animals can be purchased. It also attracts the colourful flower H’mong people in droves and in their elaborately adorned clothing they make for a pretty unique and special sight. The flower H’mong people walk a very long way to the market along steep mountain roads in order to sell their wares and we saw people leading up to a dozen horses tied to one another and all manner of other livestock like pigs and buffaloes to be sold. The livestock market was a real highlight and I learned that if you need to buy a pig you can purchase him in a sack and then tie him to the back of your motorbike using a special wooden frame, no problem. The water buffalo are tied by their noses to a large rock or stone on the ground as the potential buyer and seller haggle over a fair price. The water buffalo can also be ridden like a horse if you’re not too large and we often saw young children in particular travelling this way.

My plan had been to find the stalls selling corn hooch and sit down and have a few rounds with the boys. Once I found the section selling hooch though I realized that this was a serious whiskey selling site, not a bar, and unless I wanted to purchase a minimum of about ten litres then don’t even bother…The food area was gnarly and the locals took great delight in swilling back entrail soup and all other manner of disgusting and stomach churning delicacies. I wasn’t even going to try to get a seat at one of those tables as I know when I’m beat. Just the smell of walking through this section was enough for me and watching the locals chewing this gunk open-mouthed made me feel ill. The market itself was certainly an eye-opener, don’t even get me started on the meat section, but it was definitely a highlight and well worth taking in.

On another day of gallivanting around the countryside on our bike we took in another smaller market at a place called ‘Can Cau’. This was a place even higher up in the mountains than Bac Ha and was frequented by almost exclusively by Flower H’mong people. The scenery and the people were pretty awesome but the market was only average so we jumped on our bike and blazed on. The road up to a place called ‘Simacai’ passes within about 8 km’s of the Chinese border which you can see clearly from the high mountain road. The scenery here is definitely mind-blowing and we were both loving cruising through it on the bike, passing the hilltribe people and their live-stock on their way to and from market.

At nights we would sit with Sa and his boy as his wife kind of did the cooking and rarely joined in with us. Sa was a wealth of information about everything that he thought was wrong with the way Vietnam is run. It was nice to finally speak to a local who could tell us about what it’s really like to live here. He had some pretty interesting facts like; if you want a good job in the government then you can buy it! Nothing happens here apparently unless you pay for it. So for instance, your job as a government official might cost you $80 000 AUD, but with all the good bribes you’re going to be getting you might make this money back in six months or so. A policeman can make a lot of money by stopping truck drivers and the like and demanding money in exchange for not arresting them. The average government employee wage here is about $150 AUD per month and yet these officials can all afford cars and live in relative luxury by extorting money from the public. This, as Sa explained, is how the country is run. If you can’t pay for a service then you will never receive it, that goes for housing, healthcare, education etc. If you pay some money then you will go straight to the front of the queue. Crazy! I don’t know how this is supposed to reconcile with the official communist status of Vietnam and how everyone is supposed to get an equal share but there you go. Sa regaled us with plenty of examples of how corrupt the government and officials are and it makes you despair when you think of the plight of the overwhelming majority of poor people in this country. Staying with Sa turned out to be an education in itself and it was nice to learn a little about one of the countries we have visited rather than just the usual tourist fare. All too soon it was time to board the overnight train back to Hanoi. A place we had been previously and the capital of communist Vietnam. Hanoi is an ancient city full of history and one of the most interesting ‘old quarters’ of any city in the world. But more about that next time. ‘Til then.

The countryside around Bac Ha.

Xe's House (pronounced Sa's)

Xe's son and me.

Xe's son making monster faces.

The cute kitten. His name was called Snow in Vietnamese. The cats are liked in the country as they eat all the rats.

Xe's house.

The plough that are pulled behind the buffaloes.

Another sort of plough which is also pulled behind the buffalo but is used (I think) to flatten the dirt so that the terrace is even and water is dispersed evenly within the rice terrace. Brett - I can explain this more when I talk to you or mum sometime. The other things are brooms.

Can Cau Market
Below are some colourful pictures of the people at Con Cou market. The colourly dressed minority girls are called Flower H'Mong.

Can Cau market with the mountains in the background.

The horse market. This was situated above the market.

Tim and the motorbike. After the long ride on the motorbike on the dusty ride we decided to invest in face masks to stop us breathing in the dust. Tim got a piece of leopard skin material and I got a material surgical masks (which all the locals wear).