2 DAY TREK – EVER MORE REMOTE (ie basic)

From Sapa (already 5000’ up) we took a bus for half an hour and got turfed out with our back packs + 3 trek helpers, who cooked our meals, made up the beds at the homestay and helped us up the muddy, slippery slopes and along the tightrope divisions between terraced rice paddies.  2 or 3 got a boot full of mud and one fell off completely and jumped in feet first to 2 feet of water – luckily we escaped with just muddy shoes and overtrousers. 





Balancing on the edge of the paddy terrace






These are some of the views on the way – a much poorer region than the previous trek, where they had 3 rice crops a year and worked hard all the time.  Here it was higher up, more isolated and only 1 crop a year – our guide thought they should use the fallow fields for other crops, but it seems they can’t be bothered – they are used to a very basic standard of living and I guess will only change as the world catches up with them and they realise they have to work to catch up with the world. 




The villages we passed through over the 2 days are occupied by various ethnic groups – named according to the main colour of their clothes eg White, Black, Red – all very colourful and many of the ladies weave their own particular patterns and then sell various items to tourists.  One of the villages had been recently built by local people for a small community of isolated mountain people who had been brought down and given land.  Some of the older generation refused to leave their old way of life but they were getting a lot of diseases and problems from the inter-breeding.  Most of these villagers have been getting “married” at 11 or 12 and then having kids a couple of years later with 10 or 11 kids not uncommon – the more the merrier for working in the fields. 



There is an edict in the country that families should be restricted to 2children and this is enforced on Government employees, who may lose their jobs if they go over the limit.  But outside of that people pretty much make up their own minds and it is not enforced at all in the mountain regions.  One of our guides said he would not want more than 2 anyway for economic reasons – so in the end it seems economics sorts out the size of family the world over – very hard to control and the consequences hard to determine – eg China is now panicking because not enough youngsters to support the ageing population.

We passed this school on a Saturday and the kids had all come in to receive bags full of clothes/shoes/goodies that had been put together by a school in Saigon, as a New Year gift to the poorer village.  It is one of the highlights of the kids year and they were all queuing up and then excitedly opening the bags.  Was a bit difficult to say “Oh, that’s what we do in the UK for Romanian orphans”, as we had a Romanian lady in our group!  And ashamed to say to my US and Aussie readers that we collect in our local shop and elsewhere for food banks for people in the UK who can’t afford food – we really do have needy families under our caring Conservative Government.