From Sapa to Phongsali

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Muddy faced children stood half naked above the road looking down on us lined along the side of the road. Pigs ran around grunting at each morsel they stuck their nose into. The children watched, without expression, without comment on the proceedings below. A crowd gathered to watch us with blank expressionless faces.

Then came squeal of the Korean made beige mini bus as it raced up the hill and into the thick sticky mud, the wheels spun again sending thick brown mess flying. The crowd waited in silence, holding their breath, watching. The wheels spun and then spun and then nothing. The driver cut the engine and shot back down the hill in reverse. We all sighed waiting for him to launch into another failed attack on this mountainside that has held us captive three hours from help, three hours from civilization, nothing here other than the forlorn hill tribe village sinking into the monsoon mud above us that has spilled its inhabitants onto the road side to watch our unending predicament.

The predictable squeal of the engine didn’t come though. Instead the driver got out, still in his clean polished shoes and neat restrained Lao patterned shirt, with his young bus helper in his two brand t-shirt, Armani and Kalvin Kline, and crossed into a small wooden shelter by the side of the road. Us the passengers looked at each other and shrugged, then turned and trudged down the road to join him and discover what was going to happen next, hoping above all to leave this Lao mountain before darkness and rain joined us.

This was the second bus of our journey between two towns famous for their hill tribes. Sapa in Northern Vietnam has been pulling the tourists for the last twenty years with its mix of beautifully clad local Hmong and Red Dzao hill-tribe women. And it has been pulling the local hill tribes for a century longer for its huge food and clothes market. Whereas Phongsali, remotely placed in Northern Laos, receives a lot less tourist dollars but retains its charm with cobbled streets and hill-tribe ladies in their finery shopping for daily needs rather than selling tourist clobber.

The first bus had left Sapa on an early cold misty morning, at an altitude of 1600 metres Sapa keeps the clouds wrapped close and the air remains cool in the day and cold at night. The high peaks surrounding Sapa, which are drenched with green cloud forest, had pockets of cloud rising to join the mass gathering higher. The bus twisted and turned up to Tram Ton Pass, at 1900 metres the highest paved mountain pass in Vietnam. The road was carved into the hill sides resting on a thin shelf around the steep mountainside. The cloud forest came down on the right with huge leaves creating curtains across full gushing streams. A wall of cloud built up on the left which occasionally parted showing drops falling away to dizzying distances below with small dirty brown villages and glowing green rice paddings in the distant valley bottoms and dazzling blue brooks twisting through the maze.

The small bus from Sapa was packed to the brim with a fifty fifty split between backpacking tourists and Vietnamese travellers. The Vietnamese have a great ability to sleep, throughout the country you can find them sleeping in all sorts of improbable places, from the backs of motorbikes to swinging in hammocks underneath motorway road signs, a bus journey was no different and within fifteen minutes the Vietnamese portion of the bus was sound asleep. The backpackers though had tales to swap about hostels in other far flung places “I stayed in Green Parrot hostel in Bolivia last year, it was great, you should go”, backpackers in these parts have a strange habit of never speaking about the country they are currently in but always about somewhere on the far side of the globe. Vietnamese and backpacker alike where squashed in, always one more person than a bench allowed to ensure the full seven hours of the journey were spent in as much discomfort as possible.

From Tram Ton Pass, once the thundering Silver Waterfall had been passed, the road dropped down into the valley floor and we passed through tiny villages with their houses high on stilts, little muddy faces peered out of open doors and on spotting a white face in a bus broke out into a smile which was regularly followed by a wave, waving makes a bus journey go so much quicker. The villages slowly got bigger and then we reached the outside of Lai Chau the metropolis of this side of the mountain and the main roads were full of pretty hmong women dressed up in their traditional dress with dark indigo underclothing trimmed with deep red edgings. The bus pulled into a ramshackle restaurant and we all disembarked to explore what the pho ga, noodle soup with chicken, was like.

After following the precipitous banks of the Black river and crossing the filthy site of a new hydro-electric dam our bus ended up in Dien Bien Phu, site of the final French defeat in Indochina that sent them home and cleared the path for Vietnamese independence and the Vietnam/American war. Those on the backpacker trail into Northern Laos spend one night here before jumping onto another bus to complete another eight hour journey into Muang Khua on the River Ou. Others on a more timely tour of South East Asia spend a day or two in Dien Bien Phu before jumping on the same bus. Our bus arrived and was met with the usual scramble around the open doors of motorbike drivers trying to grab anyone who might want to go anywhere, giving promises of hotels and restaurants and doing everything for you. We politely negotiated our way through the crowd with the odd di bo “I walk” and found a bed in a small neat hotel overlooking the bus terminal.

Dien Bien Phu can’t be called a tourist destination, indeed you need a particular fascination with military history to find anything remotely interesting in the town, but it is all rather lovely. The buildings are concrete, modern and ugly, the roads are big, long and straight, there are large signs and run down stalls, motorbikes zipping back and forth like all Vietnamese towns, but this town was no where and there was no real reason to be here. Very few tourists make it here, at least away from the bus station, and so you are welcomed with a smile and generosity. On one of the roads out of the town is a lonely Russian tank raised onto a tired concrete plinth in the centre of a large puddle. The tank overlooked a small river and there stood up to his waste was a fisherman holding his net neatly in one hand ready to launch it an elegant arch across the surface. Next to the tank is a truck with its back open and apples pouring out into boxes, with no customers the seller is asleep on a small mat amongst his wares. An inscription is near the tank in Vietnamese only, who else would want to visit other than fierce nationalists.

We ate dinner in a large beer hoi restaurant, a cavernous metal shell full of school tables surrounded by plastic chairs, upon entering and finding a table a litre jug of beer, 50 cents, was brought and we ordered various snacks to be eaten alongside the beer. Such places are found all across Northern Vietnam and in them you can always find Vietnamese men drinking, joking and occasionally toasting. A raucous table near us let out a cheer and all the men got to their feet and held their beer aloft and then shouted three times mot, hai, ba, dzo (literally “one, two, three, drink it all”) each time louder than before and then finally they emptied their classes and raised them again showing them empty before sinking to their seats to raise the volume of conversation up another level, time to move on.

The Bus on from Dien Bein Phu crossed a newly opened border for international tourists between Northern Vietnam and Northern Laos. It is slowly making its way onto the backpacker circuit and for those travelling between Sapa and Luang Prabang it avoids a huge detour that was previously required to the South for several hundred kilometres followed by a torturous journey on mud tracks returning North on the Lao side.

The bus left Dien Bien Phu at day break to give the best possible chance of completing the long journey in day light. The road on the Vietnamese side of the border was good and the bus full of backpackers, except one Lao woman, twisted back and forth through the cloud forest up to the border. “I’m glad I didn’t have to spend another night in that town” said one larger than life female to the bus in general, clearly not having liked Dien Bien Phu. Another girl in her skimpy top with her stomach on show and belly pierced hadn’t got as far as the section on not offending the locals in her Lonely Planet on Laos. The border was straight forward enough and once we all piled back into the bus with passports in hand the paved road quickly disappeared and was replaced by gravel and then around a corner that also disappeared, literally, down a cliff. We stopped and waited. Two large yellow Komatsus, a Japanese make of large yellow excavators, were digging a new road out of the hillside. We watched and waited.

Onwards and only an hour behind schedule we made good progress passing remote villages hidden away from anywhere other than this track running to the border. Every few kilometres there were stations of Komatsus waiting to clear the next landslide, in this world of communism political pride is key and here keeping the road clear to Vietnam fell neatly into place. Four hours in our journey and four or five attempts up a particularly wet tricky hill with us all on board had us ejected from the bus to watch the driver have several more failed attempts to get his small city bus up a rough muddy mountain track. And so here we were trooping back down the muddy hill to join the driver and his helper in the small road side shelter. As we approached the hut we saw the driver take out a small saucepan and remove the lid. Inside was a huge portion of chicken and rice, and much to the frustrated passengers dismay he started to tuck into his lunch. Clearly we were not going anywhere soon. So we sat on this forlorn hill village being watched by small muddy faces as we watched the driver and his helper eat their chicken and rice with pigs sniffing around our feet.

The attempts to drive up the hill had been marred by backpackers shouting helpful advice at the driver. The South East Asian world of male pride does not handle being told what to do by large women very well and shouting is a definite no no. We sat and watched, all workers get an hours lunch break and the driver was taking his, no matter how many evil stares he got or clicked tongues. As various members of the bus party got more and more aggravated the large female backpacker flagged down a large pick-up truck and after a long discussion five backpackers jumped in the back and disappeared towards Muang Khua never to be seen again.

Lunch done, chicken eaten, after lunch nap had, the remaining passengers were pointed up the hill and off we trotted. The driver as cool as you like strode off into his bus, started it and disappeared up the hill. Clearly all that was needed was a bit of chicken and rice and a little sleep to break the back of the hill. The bus disappeared around the bend in the mountain above and we all followed on foot, the slog up the hill helped the heat take hold and soon we were all bathed in sweat. Around the corner and no bus in sight, so we continued to the next corner, and the next, and the next. Finally there was the driver stood cigarette in hand, impatient at us for taking so long to get up the hill. Another pick-up truck and the final group of backpackers left us, seemingly satisfied at getting off the bus, leaving, just myself, my girlfriend, the Lao woman, the helper and the driver on board. A raised eyebrow was all we got from the driver for the last set of departures and a sly smile from the Lao woman.

The rain started, the pick up truck followed us with six plastic sacks visible in the back with tightly hunched backpackers underneath. Finally our driver, helper and us three passengers let out a loud laugh. This was not any rain, this was monsoon rain, heavy and thick, the beautiful forest clad mountains disappeared and were replaced by rain, the road disappeared and was replaced by a brown thick torrent, our hopes of reaching Muang Khua tonight disappeared and were replaced with resignation, but we were dry and quietly smug about still being sat on board the bus. Most of the journey was down hill, we could drive down and we could slip down, either was fine, down hill was Muang Khua. But ahead loomed an uphill and as we arrived the inevitable wheel spin occurred again, and then again and then again. We reversed and let the pick up truck pass with its plastic wrapped backpackers huddled in against the rain. After some pushing and slipping around in the mud from the occupants of the pick up truck, it disappeared up the hill and left us sat by the side of the road in our beige Korean bus settling in for the night with the cloud slowly curling around the bus windows.

As our thoughts drifted to sleeping without food there was banging on the door, which the driver duly opened and in stepped a drenched figure. After an exchange with the driver of which the only word we understood was Komatsu, the helper rummaged around the bus and pulled out a large steel cable. This was looking good, the drenched figure disappeared into the night and 10 minutes later we could here the rumble of a powerful engine, around the corner and through the rain came a huge Komatsu. I can recommend to anyone stuck in the mud, in any form of vehicle, the Komatsu as the perfect rescue vehicle. We were hauled to the top of the hill and left to glide down the other side, across fast running fords and slow running muddy ponds to reach the Ou and on the other side were the warm lights of Muang Khua.

After a river crossing in a boat so small, thin and fragile that the crossing made me sweat more than any of the huge drops along the road we arrived safely in Muang Khua and settled down to our first and well deserved Beer Lao. Beer always helps relationships and we were soon busy chatting to two Aussies who were also headed off the backpacker trail and instead towards the Chinese border and Phongsali. The quickest route to Phongsali was up the river Ou as the roads in this area all headed South and West and were mostly unpaved.

We gathered in the morning huddled by the riverside. The Aussies who had been up a while had already found a boat man, a boat and two others willing to join us. The boat was a Thai long tail, a metre across and nine metres long which had wooden benches going down the length. The driver sat in a small wooden shed on the front and the rest of us sheltered under a plastic roof for the six hour journey. The river was running very high as the monsoon had been particularly heavy this year. The skill of the boat man was apparent as he navigated up the river swapping from one side to the other always choosing the best point through fast running rapids, at several points up stream we were literally going up hill. As we went past villages and remote farmsteads people would stand at the side of the river and whistle to the driver at which point a hurried conversation would occur which would either result in us picking the person up or continuing leaving them standing there. One such occurrence happened with a gentleman in a beautiful purple hat, sat like a saucepan on his head. He had a huge stew pot a metre in diameter. He sat at the front regal and handsome. An offer of a Chinese chewy stick (rapidly bought before departure and quickly rejected after tasting) was appreciated and brought out a smile. We had found someone who liked them and slowly plied the rest onto him. He left us at another riverside village, smiles and waves from a new friend – from suspicions to friendship only takes a smile. Kingfishers darted along the riverside flashing metallic blue and forest slivered down to the banks. The fast river created a gentle soothing sway that lulled you into a false sense of security and helped ease the pain created by the wooden seats. Six hours flashed by, an open air boat being so much more luxurious than an enclosed bus.

Arrival in Phongsali still involved an overcharged bus ride and a 2 kilometre walk after an argument with a bus driver but arrival was bliss and we settled into our dirty bug filled hotel room like it was the Ritz. A dinner of wok fried aubergine and chilli potatoes filled us created by a warm large Chinese lady and we lay down ready for our trek into the surrounding mountains to meet yet more hill tribes.

And so our journey between two treks to visit hill tribes had taken us through much hill tribe territory. The villages we were taken to by guides were clean with running water and even electricity supplied by generators in streams. And while staying in these beautiful stilt houses, with welcoming hosts and piles of food and smiling running playing children I cast my mind back to the village on the muddy hill with its muddy children, muddy pigs and our muddy bus, these were the real hill tribe people, still not used to white people and still cautious but interested in us, watching our every move with curiosity but never quite having the courage to approach us.

Trekking to these hill tribe villages provides valuable income that is used to provide clean water and electricity. The money invested in the villages we stayed in had transformed them from what would have resembled that desolate village perched above a muddy track into quaint clean habitable places. In the final village we visited in Northern Laos, a tall elegant woman approached me with a handful of beads, the sad request of “you buy, you buy” reminded me of the huge negative impact western tourists have on these villages. Laos has invested a lot of time and effort into promoting a positive impact from tourism and by visiting with official agencies and remaining culturally sensitive we can only hope that the negative impacts are kept at bay.

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