Mai Chau; Mountains With a Side of Mist

Sometimes, the sight of mountains slicing the sky is what you need from a weekend. 

As a spectacular result of good fortune, my normal days off from work, combined with the Hung King’s Anniversary (30th April-1st May 2016), gave me four days of unfettered opportunity to explore more of Vietnam; hence, it was time for a getaway into the mountains of Mai Chau.

Courtesy of Google Maps. The pin marks Mai Chau District and the black circle indicates the location of a vast number of lodges and homestays.

After agreeing to ride with co-workers, and head down to Mai Chau together, I was late to arrive at the designated meeting point and thanks to a breakdown in communications, wasn’t able to meet them before they got bored with waiting and left Hanoi without me. Being the mature and well-adjusted adult that I am, I decided to take it to heart and arrive before them, making the journey in as little time as I possibly could. Leaving the city at around 11:30am on Friday, I prepared for the onslaught that lay ahead. According to Google Maps, the distance would take just under 4 hours, but thanks to my inability to navigate without a phone screen in front of me and a morning filled with driving rain, the total time was more like 5 hours.

Not deterred by multiple wrong turnings and a crash into a sludgy road that left a small gouge in my left elbow, I found myself at Ban Lac village before my co-workers and immediately felt vindicated in my stupidly high levels of pettiness. Before I had the pleasure of finding my homestay, I ran into a favourable co-worker (not part of the any-man-left-behind-group) who had happened to be in the area at the same time.

The road into the Mai Chau lowlands.

 

The pin is approximately where the Hao Ban stilt house is. The black oval shows a very good cafe/shop and the red oval shows a photo opportunity (one I missed the chance to see). During my first night, I joined a friend at a buffet BBQ held at the Mai Chau Nature Palace which cost 150,000VND.

I booked 2 nights at a stilt house with Agoda and after a nightmare of trying to find the damn hostel I’d reserved for the princely sum of £11.70GBP, found that there had been a royal blunder and I’d have to be transferred to a different hostel, instead. My new place of residence for the weekend was Hao Ban Homestay, located about a 10-minute walk away from the central Ban Lac area.

Mosquito nets and mattresses on the floor were the bedding for the group room. There were no blinds – sunlight poured in from around 5am in the morning.

The shared room was spacious, but decidedly less enjoyable after a large group of older Vietnamese tourists arrived and wanted to make as much noise as possible.

The toilet and shower block were part of a separate building and can be described as ‘functional’.

The main hub of Ban Lac was awash with outdoor meat BBQs, shops selling machetes and miniature crossbows and scores of places to drink beer. The prices here were far from the exorbitant Tay (Westerner) sums seen in Hanoi: A meat skewer of about 30cm in length would cost 30,000VND (1.33USD); sugar cane juice was 10,000VND; beers were 20,000VND; at the Handmade Shop, two ice creams, two sugar cane drinks, and a 500ml bottle of water came to 80,000VND. The waiter at the Handmade Shop also had very good English and even drew a map to allow a friend, and I, to navigate back towards our hostels after we were caught out by a torrent of a thunderstorm.

Content with my efforts during the day, and my left elbow gauzed and no longer weeping, I doused my net and bedding with 90% DEET and settled in for the night.

Day 2 – Let There Be Light.

I woke up not long after 6am, after fighting the light that pierced the open walls and shutters of the stilt house. Surprisingly enough, the noise of animals in the city was so much worse than that of a rural setting. At every ungodly hour of the day in Hanoi you will hear people beeping, building, or shouting, dogs barking, fecking roosters crowing; in Mai Chau there was little of any of the formers. After spending an hour gaining the usual fix of Facebook, and social media in general, I showered and met the coworker I had drunk with the night before. Having enough of mosquito bites and early starts, casting away all mettle, he’d decided to head back to Hanoi before the end of the weekend. I joined him until we reached the peak of the mountain pass in the North and then stopped to breathe in the scenery.

Unfortunately, now we were into the national holiday proper, there were scores of tourists with their bikes and their buses littering the mountain road. After getting a rather impressive shot of the plains stretching away from the mountainside, I turned to see some guy with his trousers down taking a shit on the side on the slope, in the open. A pretty good allegory for humans and their treatment of natural beauty, as a whole, I’d say.

After exhausting my photo opportunities on the mountain pass, I headed back into the plains of Mai Chau and drove around the area for the next 3 hours, or so. It is amazing how therapeutic just travelling on your own somewhere can be. Despite the ‘real feel’ on my weather app being 39 degrees Celsius – the ride was quite pleasant and I revelled in being alone with my camera, and the landscape, just choosing whichever path my GPS said would take me on a circuit of the lowlands.

Returning to Ban Lac Village, I replenished my water, sugar, and energy levels at the Handmade Shop and then napped for 3 hours back at Hoa Ban Homestay. Owing to there being no air-con and only the presence of barely-effective ceiling fans, I woke up in a geometrically-impressive rectangle of my own sweat, to a power blackout. Like some kind of zombie guided by its desire for flesh and sustenance, I shuffled towards the lights and sounds coming from the hub of Ban Lac Village – it seems they were no strangers to intermittent electricity and had the backup power sources to support that fact. Gnawing on fleshsticks and walking around the stalls until satiated, I headed back to my hostel and was treated to a dance performance from members of the local Thai community in the area. The performance was without interruption, even during the moments of darkness where candles had to be brought out. After the show, I met a friend who used the same gym as I did, only to consistently get thrashed at Uno with them and their partner, before cleansing myself in the shower and calling it quits on the night. The deserters messaged me to see if I was up for drinks at the hostel they were staying at, but knowing that a night dealing with rowdy, old, Vietnamese tourists and that a 5am wake-up waited for me, I happily turned down their invitation.

Day 3 – Not knowing a language means that you can’t loose all the swear words you want to use.

After being kept awake until gone 11pm the night before, and being woken up at shortly after 5am, I was ready to see the world burn and the occupants of my room torn limb from limb. After the sunlight beat my eyelids, loud Vietnamese conversation pummeled my ears – my senses were failing me before the first round bout had even started. With little motivation to wait until midday to leave for Hanoi with the deserting coworkers, I showered and packed, leaving Mai Chau shortly before 7am, on Sunday.

The journey back to Hanoi was a lot simpler and definitely easier to navigate – the journey took under 4 hours and I was back well before lunchtime. Unlike the bike journey during my time in Da Nang, the roads had all of the danger and none of the joy. As the morning mist had yet to burnt off, the mountain pass in the North was clouded with fog and visibility was seemingly under 20m; twists, turns, declines, oncoming traffic and even motherfucking buffalos do not make for an easy ride, surprisingly enough. Once through the gauntlet, it was only really the threat of oncoming traffic that was a problem – vehicles don’t run you off the road, but rather, they give you a choice: risk being hit head-on, or take to the side of the road. Perhaps this is seen as a courtesy in the culture out here, because it certainly happened frequently enough. My fears were thankfully alleviated somewhat when I had the fortune of using a Ford Everest SUV as a chaperone along the highways (more like single-lane carriageways) for at least an hour, or so. Any oncoming vehicles were deterred from advancing into our lane by my big, black, motorguard and I peacefully sailed in the wake of his advance.

Overall?

The ride to Mai Chau is pretty simple, but still fairly arduous in its nature. If you haven’t been outside of a city before, the behaviour of traffic isn’t an easy thing to adjust to and you’ll have to carefully look after your fuel levels, when leaving populated areas. I was fortunate enough to be used to taking dives into the ground and fully prepared to treat any minor wounds that may occur. All that being said, the mountains were such a blessing after the flat, grey and bleak landscape that Hanoi offered. I have a great love for hiking and Hanoi is a city that just cannot satisfy that itch. For a novel weekend, the Hao Ban stilt house was appreciated, but for a longer stay, I’d have been elated to have a TV, air-con and sound-isolated room, away from other travellers.

Ban Lac Village was a fun, bustling space that had an appreciated lack of people harassing you to buy things. Yes, there were a few obnoxiously foreign tour groups congesting roads and gawping at things, but no more than to be expected inside Hanoi.

I was happy to have the chance to see something new and experience unexplored scenery – it is worth braving grim conditions for even a small sense of freedom.

Also, I did it all without my coworkers. Here’s to you, you bastards.