Needing to decompress after an intense weekend coaching my team at a football tournament, I decamped on Sunday afternoon to Mai Châu. I just left straight from the pitches with hundreds of young footballers, the crazed coaches, the hoarse parents and a medal ceremony on to the dusty roads of industrial Hanoi to get out to the beautiful province of Hòa Bình. As ever, I spent the first hour of the trip questioning my own sanity, “this road is depressing, maybe I should turn back, I would have been at home by now…” and then you get out to the green bits with views, hardly any lorries and my mental state lifts. The open road, cruising at literally tens of kilometres per hour, trying not to obsess about what just happened on the football pitch. I would need to keep going solidly to get to the destination before dark. All going well under a grey sky and then after the Hòa Bình town bypass the road leads you up into the heavens, or thick cloud, as it is known. Visibility was perhaps two motorbike lengths. There wasn’t much traffic but I joined a sort of convoy of cars for a while before they shook me off. On the other side of the road, lorries squealed and wobbled past on their way down the mountain and you are struck by the dark thought that it is only convention keeping them on that side of the road and also, darker still, that if they hit you, you would end in a ravine. It was thrilling and forlornly smearing my glasses with a wet finger helped me stop thinking about the football for a few moments here and there. After this Ganzfeld for about half an hour, the merely miserable mist on the other side was like a summer holiday. OK, there were slippery, mud-strewn roads plus the odd pothole but at least you could see where you were going: Visibility really is under-rated. I made it to Mai Châu just as it was getting dark and rolled up to a well-kept house offering rooms. This was the view:
And here it is again, a beer, a shower and 15 minutes later
The next morning I rejected the Western breakfast offered to me (bread and banana pancakes) and insisted on beef noodles. A bird strutted about my breakfast table, apparently unaware that I fancied chicken noodles for dinner.
Then I went to find the back of beyond, 30 km up a mountain from Mai Châu. What do people do out here? Well, of course I still don’t really know but I took some pictures that give a little insight.
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It is a very calm place, not bustling, so it is easy to think that nothing is going on. Yes, nothing, apart from making clothes, practicing dance, collecting some sort of insect for drinking in alcohol, making trinkets, and the slow, muddy, never-ending, bent-back work in the rice fields. And they obviously send a lot of letters… three pint-sized post offices off the beaten track
and they play football, or at least have pitches and goalposts that make you stop complaining about the ones we use.
The trip back was in constant drizzle, so a lot better than the way there then because you could actually see your life flash in front of your eyes. And I got back in time for football training.
So what are YOU going to do? 