8/17/2023 0 Comments Village life game mountain![]() ![]() It was raining on our first morning and we saw one woman using a large leaf as an impromptu umbrella. The Tay villagers no longer wear their traditional costumes – they are nearer to the city, and its influences – yet it is still an ancient-seeming place. ![]() ![]() The next day we drove a couple of hours to the Phong Thien commune, home to the Black and White Tay and, as we were later to find out, that excruciating cockerel. This was a typical distinction between city and country folk, Quang told us. They were both in their late 20s, yet the difference between the two was remarkable, the former confident and chatty, asking us lots of questions and telling us about himself with the help of Quang, and the latter not uttering a word, barely able to bring himself even to look at us. Unfortunately, we had lunch at the home of someone who was going up in the world, which meant we ate our delicious picnic not in a picturesque traditional house but in a breeze-block carbuncle, breeze blocks being such a status symbol as to be like the Rolex watch of the Dao world. We sat with the son of the family and a son-in-law, the former a city worker back to visit for the weekend, the latter still a country boy. Outside several homes, a woman was winnowing rice using a large, flat-bottomed basket, tossing the rice up high into the air to separate it from the dry husks. Most of the dwellings were traditional wooden affairs, the Red Dao houses built on the ground, the Black Dao houses on stilts. When we walked out of the market up into the surrounding hillsides, we quickly saw how self-sufficient the Dao were why there was very little they needed to buy.Įvery house was The Good Life personified: aside from the rice paddies themselves, there were immaculate vegetable and herb gardens (the Vietnamese diet includes copious herbs and salad leaves at every meal, often added to a meat-based noodle broth called pho or bun). Instead there were numerous stalls selling the yarns and the braiding that decorated the Dao costumes. There was very little food to be bought – dried fish and pork was pretty much all that was left by the time we got there. Try Luke Nguyen's regional cuisine: 10 Books To Inspire TravelĬheck out southern Vietnam, too: Saigon Looks To The Future Self-sufficient homes Such is the comparative rarity of tourists in Ha Giang that we were as much an object of fascination to them as they were to us, a fact that lessened that uncomfortable feeling of voyeurism that you can sometimes suffer when you travel off the beaten track.īefore you set off: 48 Hours In Hanoi, Vietnam ![]() The youngest had abandoned one practice, however – the chewing of betel leaves. The older women were all betel chewers, their blackened teeth considered by them and their peers to be beautiful. Our guide Quang told us that women, especially unmarried ones, had less sartorial freedom because their reputation as a "good girl" would be at risk if they chose to abandon the traditional dress. Whichever their tribe, the men wore modern clothes. The Black Dao wore a black hemp outfit trimmed in white, and on their head was a black kerchief decorated with white cords. Their heads were haloed with a big coil of red trim, and on their chests was a large pewter necklace that looked more like the breastplate on a suit of armour. The Red Dao women wore a navy hemp outfit with a red trim. In the morning we went to the nearby market in the district of Thong Nguen, where we saw women from two different tribes meeting to shop and, more importantly, to gossip. No middle-of-the-night cockerel crows here just some fairly low-key frogs. Our first night in the region was spent at a pretty, French-owned guesthouse in the village of Panhou, its rice paddy surrounds reinvented as an exotically planted water garden. The mountains of Vietnam's north, along with those of its interior, are where the majority of the country's 53 minority groups live (the 13.8 per cent of the population who are not ethnic Viet), many of them upholding a way of life that has remained largely unchanged for centuries. Beyond was a landscape of toothsome crags and wild forest and jungle, offset with the gentle, shimmering emerald of paddy fields. ![]()
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