This is going to be challenging. It's now Monday. I've made short notes of my time at San Homestay but now I have to put them together to make sense.
I had a good sleep and all was quiet. I decided to get up, thinking it would be around 10am, so I was shocked to see that it was only 7am. The showers have hot water but I decided to decline the offer and I just washed and shaved at the outside sinks.
Tien belongs to a tribal family in the mountainous area of Vietnam. I knew her in the city but her parents decided they wanted to return home and so she followed. Her dad used to be a math teacher but suffered a stroke. Tien said he believed in traditional medicine and didn't listen to the doctor who said he had very high blood pressure. Tien has a boyfriend who is Australian but arrived via his homeland of Iran and then Canada.
The home is on stilts and made of wood in the traditional style. Colour is added with hand painted murals along the top of the wall, acting like a colourful border. It's quite a ramshackle place with bits added here and there. Now it's a homestay they have a purpose built kitchen outside where we all joined in helping with the cooking and cutting up of vegetables. There's a fish pond, lots of poultry running around and swimming in the pond. Trees dripped with fruit - jackfruit, star fruit, passion fruit, mulberry and all sorts of other fruits I can't name as they are local, with no English name. When we arrived there were four other visitors - a group of three men who left in the morning on off-road motorbikes, with their bodies more or less covered with layers of protective heavy leather. The other man is part Sicilian and part German Swiss. His name is long and Italian sounding so he tells people to call him Loony - I never asked if he knew it meant daft where I come from. He doesn't like living in Switzerland any more and is now searching for a place where he can settle and be comfortable. It's an important coffee growing area so there's a lot of deforestation and changing of the landscape to plant coffee bean trees. A large area at the homestay was covered with drying coffee beans as Tien makes her own coffee and sells it all over Vietnam. I've seen coffee beans on trees but never the flowers. They are white, fluffy and smell lovely; from a distance the trees look as if they've been covered with a dusting of snow.
Breakfast was fried egg with salad and a baguette. The Asian way of cooking a fried egg is to turn it over and cook the yoke. I talked Tien into making me a dippy egg. Tea was artichoke and it's one of my favourites. We got ready to go out for the day. Why Tuan Anh would tell me to bring warm clothing and mosquito repellant I'll never know. It turned into a scorcher of a day and I never did see a mosquito. I asked how we were getting to the hike and I was told "local transport", which turned out to be a small tractor and a metal trailer into which we all scrambled. The group sat on the floor while I perched on the wall. What a ride! 1 1/4 hours of bouncing around, dropping into potholes and ending up on dirt tracks with deep ruts caused by the heavy rains. At times I thought we were going to topple over sideways so I started to think of escape routes. Our guide parked the tractor in a ditch which had a lot of people hanging on for dear life, and then we set off up what I believe to be the worst path I've ever been on in my entire life. I'm used to manicured national park paths! This path was just bulldozed through the jungle so that the buffalo could be taken to pastures higher up. I kept finding myself in front and people kept commenting on how strong I was. I reminded them they were all nattering while I kept my mouth shut and plodded upwards.
Anyone seeing photos of the hike would think it was a photo opportunity as we kept stopping at viewpoints and then the group would create goofy poses and kill themselves laughing. They even got me to join in. Phuoc, who loves nature, showed me trees on which minute orchids were growing; they were about 2cms tall with tiny, white flowers like miniature snowdrops. He also showed me a pitcher plant. How it survived up there in the dry season I don't know. For some reason there was little original forest - most was pine. Sadly, someone was burning the really old and tall trees. Some were half burned at the base but managed to survive. Compared to Canadian forests, the jungle is a mass of trees of all shapes and sizes; strangely we saw hardly any birds - just a few swallows and a hawk type bird soaring high in the sky.
There wasn't a cloud in the sky and I'm sure the temperature was in the 30s. I had to roll down my sleeves as my arms started to burn; there was nothing I could do about my face and I was told it looked like a tomato. I've never been so happy to see a tractor! I checked my Fitbit and we'd done 11km, nearly 17,000 steps and climbed the equivalent of 112 staircases. Back at the homestay one of the ladies took pieces of aloe vera plant from the fridge and wiped it all over my face; it was cold and soothing. I'm constantly being looked after; people keep asking me how I am and do I need anything. Asia's a lovely place for elderly people.
Dinner was rice porridge, which is one of my favourite Asian meals, along with a chicken dish and rice. The family make a banana wine, which is really a spirit, and is very nice. We had it in glasses, smaller than egg cups so we weren't heading for a wild evening. I was also given some wild honey which is produced in the mountains. I kept walking around in bare feet and Tien's mother saw me and pulled me back, gestured for me to sit on a bench and then she brought a bowl of hot water. I washed my feet and put them into the slippers I'd been given and walked off. She came after me again with a towel and gesturing for me to sit down and finish the job properly.
If you want a fun time, sit and watch a group of young Vietnamese playing card games. It's noisier than being at a football match. I sat and watched them and then I went to bed. They kept asking me to join in but it would have taken a month of Sundays to teach me the games. There was no point in trying to sleep but it was nice being horizontal with my feet off the ground.
