Trekking

Tuesday the 12th (i think)

Today we took a long trek (about 2 miles) down the mountainside and through several small villages. The people we saw were the Dzay and Red Dao peoples. It had rained a lot the lat two nights so it was pretty muddy. Where we got out of the van there were two children selling walking sticks made out on bamboo with a sharpened end. We bought them for 5000 dong each (that’s about $.35). Quyet told us that if the little boy were to sell 10 of these it would make enough money to buy 10kg of rice.

There was also a group of about 6 young girls with an older woman standing around the car trying to sell us stuff, when one of them noticed she could see her reflection in the side of the shiny cover for our spare tire on the back of the car. Pretty soon they were all laughing and chattering away about this and all trying to see themselves in the tire. I am not sure if they rarely saw themselves in a mirror, or if their reflection was distorted due to the curve of the tire. I imagine it was both.

The mountains in this part of Viet Nam are quite steep and most of he soil seems to be fairly clayey. They could not do the terracing they do if the soil was not a clay soil. There was a path that we followed that wound it’s way thru the rice paddies where there was a lot of transplanting of the young rice plants from the patty they were germinated in. The rice seed is allowed to soak for 5 days and then it is heavily seeded into a paddy and allowed to grow for a month. Then it is transplanted about 6” apart into another paddy and allowed to grow for another 3 months to maturity. All the farming we saw was being done by hand, except where we saw water buffalo helping to cultivate the fields. Due to the nature of the paddies in the mountains (they are relatively small and contoured to the hill), it is hard to imagine that rice farming in this part of Viet Nam will ever be done by anything but hand. Apparently down in the flat lands more machinery is used. Where the mountainside is too steep to terrace and contour corn is planted. I thought I saw corn planted on some pretty steep mountainsides in Peru, but it is nothing compared to here. When it comes time to harvest the corn they carry it down off the mountain in their baskets they carry on their backs. This is a feat I cannot imagine doing year after year. It is no wonder as tourist money comes into these villages the young people no longer want to farm!

Besides being the land of greenness, the Viet Nam we saw is also the land of water. It is everywhere and it is hard to imagine they can find enough dry land to build a house on. Obviously Viet Nam would not be one of the largest rice exporters in the world if there were not a lot of water is required to grow it. They have become masters of channeling water down the mountainsides and using to their own end. Each paddy has an outlet that allows the water to spill into the paddy below it.

We stopped in a small house where a woman was selling stuff and we were able to see how they remove the husk from the rice. Cleverly using the power of the stream flowing by her house there was a 4” log that would move up and down pounding into a small mortar like bowl that was filled with rice. It was enough force to pop the husk off the rice but not break the rice kernel. Quyet said that down in the flat lands where they do not have the flow of water they do in the mountains they us the same type of set up but someone (Quyet when he was young) powers it with their legs.

The trek ended in the valley below where we had started and the driver was there to meet us, but not before we were able to swing on a huge swing set made out of bamboo. Greg and I both enjoyed this trek today as we are not used to sitting around so much and I like being out and “up close and personal” with nature and my surroundings.