I didn't ride the motorbike myself, of course - plunging myself into Vietnamese traffic without any experience driving motorcycles wouldn't have been fun. Instead, I rode on the back of the bike of one of the guide's cousins. After experiencing the feeling of freedom on a motorbike, I think I now understand why people drive motorcycles - it's great! Compared to a car or bus, you get to experience the surrounding nature in a much more immediate way. Plus, feeling the air rush around your face and seeing the green landscape speed by is simply amazing.
Our first stop was a cricket farm. Crickets are considered a delicacy in Vietnam, but not many people farm them purposely. The crickets were kept in open cages with lots and lots of dry leaves and branches inside. Whenever someone came too close to one of the cages, the crickets panicked and started moving around, making an amazing rustling sound that seemed to come from everywhere at once. When the crickets are big enough to be eaten, they are first killed in hot water and then fried in oil and eaten with chili sauce. Of course, we got to try:
I have to say, the crickets weren't half bad! Definitely better than many of the snacks you can buy in western supermarkets.
Our next stop was a local market. The market offered all kinds of food, but also other items, such as these sets of paper clothing, cigarettes, cell phones, and other goodies:
Our guide explained that the Vietnamese culture puts a lot of emphasis on remembering the dead. Therefore, on the anniversary of somebody's death, their relatives buy paper gifts and burn them to send them to the dead. As Buddhists, the Vietnamese believe in rebirth, and thus these offerings can be seen as a way of wishing the ancestors well in their new lives. The gifts can represent anything that you'd like your deceased relatives to have: clothing, motorbikes, cars, and even iPads.
A short ride after the market, we stopped at a small factory that produces silk - or rather, that shamelessly exploits the silkworm's tendency to spin silk cocoons ;-)
The families in the factory's neighborhood breed silkworms and then sell the cocoons to the factory. The factory stores the cocoons like this before processing them further:
In the next step, the worms - which at this point are sleeping inside the cocoons - are killed in hot water and the cocoons are unwrapped to produce silk thread. The unwrapping is mostly done by machines, but the cocoons have to be hooked up to the machine one by one, so there is quite a lot of human involvement necessary.
Our next stop was a nice contrast to all the cultural information before: the elephant waterfall is a massive downpour of water. The cool thing is that you can climb down and approach it from the side. It's too wet and windy down there to go behind the waterfall, but even from the side the view is spectacular.
Then, on the way to our guide's native village, we stopped at a viewpoint where we could admire the Vietnamese highlands. Much of the highlands is covered with coffee plantations. Coffee is a lucrative crop, and so the highlands are comparatively rich. What I found amazing was that the plantations are owned by families. Big companies only come into play when it comes to roasting coffee, so much of the profit actually stays with the local people.
Close to the village, we found that a couple of families were in the process of harvesting rice. The harvest is always a community effort - everybody helps harvesting their neighbors' fields, and in turn the neighbors help with everybody's harvest, too.
There are many steps in the harvest, and women and men both contribute. Cutting the rice is done by the women; collecting bundles of rice and carrying them to the thresher is done by the men; filling rice into sacks is women's work, putting hay onto a truck men's work.
After watching the harvest for a while, we had lunch in the village, and then went to visit a local family in their house. We met the 60-something mother with four of her grown daughters. The youngest daughter, about thirty years old, had grandchildren already. Grandchildren! She said she was married at ten and had her first child with fourteen.
Marriage in this particular hill tribe is always arranged; the girl's family has to buy a boy for their daughter, and after the marriage the husband comes to live with the wife's family. An inexpensive husband - one that isn't particularly strong, or one that drinks and smokes - costs about one buffalo (worth roughly 700 US dollars), while an expensive one may cost five or more buffaloes. The family we visited was quite poor, so they didn't have enough money to buy a husband for each of their daughters. As a result, only two of the four daughters are married. Since there is no way for two people to get together other than marriage, the other two daughters are missing out on sex life - for their entire life, in all probability.
Aside from marriage customs, the family told us about many aspects of their lives: what they eat (mainly rice), where they sleep (on the floor, with pretty much everybody in the same room), and what they do all day - make cotton threads and weave colorful skirts, for example:
After we left the family's house, our guide told us more about customs in mainstream Vietnamese culture. In marriage, for example, a girl goes to live with the husband's family. The society seems to put huge pressure on girls to get married before they turn thirty, and then to produce offspring as soon as possible, ideally within one or two years of the wedding. Weddings are big and expensive affairs. The couples generally have two huge parties, one for the wife's family and friends and another for the husband's. Each party has at least a few hundred guests, who are all provided with food and drink - you can guess that weddings put quite a strain on a family's finances.
The beauty ideal in Vietnam encompasses everything that the average Vietnamese person is not: white skin, a westerner's frog eyes and big nose, and 'noodle soup', i.e. curly hair. I'm guessing we have cosmetics companies and plastic surgeons to thank for this; they earn a fortune selling skin whiteners and eye and nose surgeries to Vietnamese people.
Our guide also told us about the pitfalls of the Vietnamese language. Like Chinese, Vietnamese is a language that uses tones in addition to sounds. These tones are not always easily audible or reproducible by foreigners. A slight mispronunciation can turn 'thank you' into an insult - what a minefield!
