We got up at 6am ready to take the three and a half hour bus journey to Mai Chau. The traffic was even worse than normal, (The Vietnamese get up very early, so 6.45am is rush hour for them!) and my seat belt was tucked under the back of the seat and had clearly never been used! At one point the taxi nearly mowed down a group of cyclists, who were cutting across us, to the point where the poor cyclist was wobbling about all over the place with his feet off the floor. At this point I closed my eyes… Immediately after this two busses past each other and no joke, they nearly crushed a girl on a motorbike between them!! She managed to break and reverse back just in time.
Luckily, we were at the meeting point in Hanoi centre very early, because the bus came at 7.30am even though weren’t meeting until 8am and apparently if we hadn’t been there it wouldn’t have waited!
So we then had 13 people on a 13-seater mini bus, with no air con and no space for bags. Luckily we were first passengers on and sat near the front, but the people at the back were pretty much on top of each other.
The first stop was a toilet break, 2 hours in, where I experienced my first squat toilet, with a bucket of water used to wash everything away. There was nowhere to wash your hands, lucky I had the hand gel! We were meant to stop at a “photo point” but this never happened.. I’m not sure why…
The Vietnamese are very relaxed and we weren’t told anything or given any sort of useful information. We arrived and had to wait an hour for lunch, however the whole time we didn’t know what we were waiting for, and then we waited another hour and a half for our rooms! Luckily, the room was very nice and we were upgraded to a bungalow (meaning we had our own bathroom). However, the door frame completely fell off the moment my house mate opened it…
Eventually, we got told that we were going on a bicycle tour, but my bike was too big so my feet barely touched the floor and the right brake didn’t work. I didn’t think this was too much of a problem until a massive truck came by and I moved out the way too fast, panicked, and tried to brake using the right break which obviously didn’t work- so ended up being thrown off my bike and into a ditch…! Everyone just thought I couldn’t ride a bicycle… Which was very embarrassing!
The scenery was beautiful; it’s a small Thai village where they grow rice to eat as a community, based at the bottom of a valley. I had never seen anything like it…. Often we would be passed by people walking cows on the side of the road and there were dogs everywhere…After the cycle ride we looked around the market stalls, all selling apparently “hand-made” goods.
The doctor told me before coming away to avoid dogs and that if I am even licked I must go to the hospital straight away, to avoid getting rabies… I think this was a little extreme but it still disturbed me to see all the other tourists stroking the dogs, having them on their laps and letting them nibble their fingers! (They were puppies though and extremely cute).
We had a look around a real Thai house and drank green tea communally which was nice. In the evening we watched a Thai dance, and while I tried to embrace the culture, it was, quite frankly- awful. The local people clearly do it every night, and hate it! They didn’t smile the whole way through, or make eye contact with the audience, they had no energy or enthusiasm and were talking to each other the whole time mid-performance, probably about what they had for breakfast!
However, as tourists we were just as bad. At the end they asked for people to join in the dance but no-one would. In the end, I ended up doing a dance with them in front of everyone, which involved hopping over moving bamboo canes that they had on the floor. Luckily for me, this was quite easy (even though I naturally have two left feet) but I still got it wrong the first time.
I love embracing other cultures- where will you explore next?
