Day four dawned much better than day three. No mortar attack. Instead, a nice breakfast of fried egg and pancakes with banana and honey, then back on the road for the return to Ha Giang city.
A pretty uneventful day in truth, though the bike convoys were back in force, and as infuriating as ever. I’ve begun referring to ‘the locusts’; in my defence there is definitely something insect-like about them. Partly the noise, like the buzzing of mossies. But mostly their omnipresence, combined with the fact that they’re so bleedin’ irritating. And breathe…
Anyway, like I say, day four was much like the previous days – lots of stunning scenery, colourful people doing stuff on the slopes, cold and damp at altitude, warmer down in the valleys. And occasional stretches of unmetalled road just to keep you on your toes. I have to say, I’ve really enjoyed being back on a motorbike again. Bit of a bore for Virle. stuck with the discomfort of four days’ pillioning, but for me, just the biggest and best fairground ride on earth!
Speaking of the people on the slopes – and it really is slopes for the most part – we read somewhere about their dedication to using every scrap of earth that somehow finds purchase on these unyielding rocks. And it’s so true. Everywhere is made productive. You see bare square metres of soil between rocks, with four or five cabbages nestled together like eggs in a nest. And it’s all done by hand, by hoe, by buffalo. No room for tractors in this terrain – or money to buy one.
One other thing we encountered, rather to our surprise: lush fields of marijuana. We’d heard the laws out here are punitive to say the least, yet here were significant chunks of the few available fields given over to weed – often right by the road. Googling later, it appears that it has a long history in local medicine and culture, was proscribed at the insistence of Uncle Sam during the war – to the great chagrin of locals – and is now basically ignored by the cops, who have no interest in pissing off the locals for no good reason. As so often in Vietnam, officialdom does its thing, as officialdom must, the people shrug their shoulders, turn a blind eye and get on with life.
But it was Virle who came back with our pics of the day, overcoming my habitual embarrassment and shyness by employing the cunning tactic of asking people if it was ok:
So now we’re back in Ha Giang city for a day’s r&r – not much more than showering, a bit of basic laundry and some rest from the road before taking tomorrow’s 7pm sleeper bus to Cat Ba for a few days on the beach as the finale to our trip. *sob*. But we are looking forward to the beach! And hoping for some sunshine, which come to think of it we haven’t actually seen in weeks.