I got absolutely no sleep last night. I couldn’t get to sleep because of the various wild animals living outside our doorstep, it was like trying to sleep in a barn, and I think there was some sort of cat/duck/wolf pacing outside our room. It sounded big and was making a strange noise, but I have no idea what it was…
I woke up at 4.30am and didn’t get back to sleep again, the light was shining into the “barn” which was our accommodation at 5.00am and the local people began their daily business at 6am. We didn’t get breakfast until 7.30am… by this point I was starving!
Breakfast was egg…. so it’s a good job I recently decided that I’m going to have to eat eggs when living in Asia! It wasn’t too bad. Today we were going on a motorbike ride (well, an automatic scooter actually) and having only been shown how to use them the day before I decided NOT to drive one myself, especially as I managed to fall off a bicycle! So I went on the back of the tour guides bike, which was good because it meant I could take in the stunning views without having to focus on the road… I had to breathe in when the big trucks came past but apart from that it was good fun!
Today’s trip was brilliant. We went to a chop stick factory (which we thought would be a huge industrial building but it was actually a large home-made shed)! It was just a death trap, there was a large circular blade which one man lifted up and down, while another fed the bamboo through. None of the workers wore goggles, gloves or safety equipment of any kind and apparently it’s not uncommon for people to lose fingers etc… The bamboo then shoots off the end of the bench and hits a cloth curtain, very near to the next workers face. The next worker slices the bamboo in half with a huge blade, and this half of bamboo is then thread into a further slicing machine to make the chopstick.
This is done all day, every day. The bamboo comes from up stream and is transported to the factory downstream in rafts. It was all very interesting. Little did I know that in 1.5 years time my parents would come to visit me in Vietnam, and I would take them on this exact trip, but I’d be riding my own bike by then!
We then took a one and a half hour hike up through the mountains, where the rice fields had been carved into the hills to form a complex irrigation system. The people here are not Thai, but yet another minority group. There are hundreds of minority groups from all over East Asia living in Vietnam. The local people here live up near the water that comes down from the hills. They have their own fish farm, but they wash their clothes in the same pond they keep the fish! And they have their own irrigation system made of bamboo which is really cool, and they get water to the village through bamboo canes which have been split in half. They also use a water system to grind the rice, ready to eat. The water goes into one end of a hollow log, when it gets full the log drops and the hammer at the other end of the balance is lifted. The water is then released from the bamboo, causing the hammer to drop back to the ground, therefore grinding the rice.
It was truly beautiful here and we didn’t see any other Westerns (horrible things!) for the whole day, which was great!
The ride back was interesting, my helmet strap came off half way through the journey and I told the tour guide, presuming he would stop, but he just said “Ok, do it up!!” So I had to take both hands off the back of the unsteady motorbike while he continued going past large trucks that didn’t fit on the road properly and various large pot holes… it was not fun!!
We then found that the road, which on the way there was fine, was being “re-done” and so was now covered in small shale which even the tour guide struggled to get over, so I have no idea how the others managed it! There was no warning, just all of a sudden there was a truck reversing in the middle of the road (which nearly caused us to crash) and a whole load of small rocks along the road. How do they do it?!
When back home safely, I realised that another problem with the “barn” room was that the bathroom ceiling didn’t go all the way up, so you could hear everything. On numerous occasions there was just awkward silence, broken only by my friends upset stomach exploding in the toilet. It was truly disgusting. If this had been me I would have been mortified but he didn’t seem that bothered…or pretended not to be. He didn’t really have a choice!! Eventually this awkward silence was broken by my hysterical laugher….He then asked me if I could pass him some more toilet roll as he had run out… the perks of countryside living in a developing country.
That evening I enjoyed drinking some (very, very cheap) beers with the other people who we were travelling with. I love meeting new people!
