I took three days to get from Mai Châu to Sapa. The long way, through the mountains, through Phu Yen and Mu Cang Chai on roads that wound through terraced rice fields so vast and so perfectly arranged they looked engineered by something patient and old. The terraces at Mu Cang Chai were golden. Late season. Weeks from harvest. They cascaded down the mountainsides in layers, each one holding its own thin sheet of water that reflected the sky, and riding past them felt like moving through something sacred, though I know that sounds like too much and I don't care.
The last stretch from Lao Cai to Sapa was thirty kilometres of switchbacks climbing from the Red River Valley into the Hoang Lien Son mountains. The temperature dropped ten degrees in twenty minutes. Fog came in and wrapped itself around the road. I was wearing every layer I had, a t-shirt and a flannel and a waterproof I'd bought in the Old Quarter for eight dollars, and I was still shaking when Sapa appeared above me, half-hidden in the mist.
Sapa at fifteen hundred metres felt like a different country. Steep narrow streets. Shops selling trekking gear and handicrafts. Hmong women in deep indigo clothing walking in groups, silver jewellery catching whatever light got through the cloud. The buildings were a strange mix of French colonial stone and modern concrete hotels. The church in the centre, the Stone Church, looked like it had been transplanted from Normandy.
I parked the bike and checked into a guesthouse near the church. The shower was almost warm. The town smelled of woodsmoke and cold earth.
I found Cal in a bar called Sapa Rooms. He'd taken a sleeper bus up from Hanoi, arrived that morning, hadn't slept, looked fine. He was already a beer in and had booked a two-day trek into the Muong Hoa Valley with a Hmong guide called Bau. He'd found her through the hostel. She'd be taking a small group down to Ta Van and the villages around it, with an overnight homestay. I said I was in without thinking about it.
Bau met us the next morning at nine outside the Stone Church. She was small, maybe five foot two, with black hair pulled tight and hands that had done more work than mine will ever do. She carried a woven rattan basket on her back and spoke three languages. There were four of us in the group. Cal and me, plus a French couple who turned out to be on their honeymoon and turned out to be lovely once they warmed up.
She led us down a steep path out of town and into the valley. Terraces falling away on both sides, bamboo groves, a stream crossed on a bridge made of three planks. Water buffalo in the lower paddies. The air smelled of wet earth and woodsmoke. Bau walked at a pace that made me feel genuinely unfit and talked as she went. About the Black Hmong, her people. How they grow their own hemp and dye it with indigo, pounding and re-dyeing the fabric until it reaches that deep almost-black blue. How they speak their own language among themselves and learn Vietnamese for school and English for the tourists who are now, as she put it simply, everywhere.
I asked if that was a good thing. She thought about it for a while before answering. Good for money, she said. Her children go to school now. Before tourists, many Hmong children didn't. But also it changes things. She didn't say what things.
We walked through Y Linh Ho, dark wooden houses built into the hillside, and ate lunch at a place run by a Hmong family. Rice cooked in banana leaf, pork and vegetable stew from a wood fire, morning glory fried with garlic so fresh it stung. In the afternoon we passed through Lao Chai, one of the oldest Hmong villages in the area. Children ran beside us selling woven bracelets. One girl walked with me for about twenty minutes without saying anything, just matching my pace, occasionally looking up. When the path forked she went the other way without a word.
Bau's homestay was in Hau Thao village. We arrived late afternoon with the light going gold and the mountains throwing long shadows. Wooden house, two storeys, built into the slope. A dog in the doorway. Chickens under the stilts. Her husband Sung was chopping wood around the side. Mattresses on the floor upstairs, thin curtains between them, and a shower outside that ran water cold enough to make you reconsider the whole concept of hygiene.
The evening is the part I come back to most when I think about this trip.
Sung cooked. Pork from a pig they'd raised. Stir-fried with lemongrass and chilli. Tofu. Rice from their paddies. Spring rolls that Bau showed us how to wrap, rice paper softened in water, filled with pork and herbs and glass noodles, rolled tight. She poured rice wine into small glasses. Happy water, she called it. There were toasts. There were many toasts. Cal was good with the children, making them laugh, drawing them into the group. The French couple turned out to be excellent company after a glass or two.
I went out onto the terrace at some point. No streetlights in the valley. The only light came from the scattered houses below, soft yellow windows, and above me more stars than I'd seen since I was a kid. Bau came out and sat down. We were quiet for a while. Then she said something I've thought about every day since. She said: you think a lot. And then she pointed at the valley and said: this doesn't need thinking.
I put my notebook down. I looked at the valley. The mountains were enormous and dark and the stars were sharp and close and somewhere below a dog barked once and then stopped. I slept on a thin mattress in a wooden house on a mountainside in Northern Vietnam and I slept deeper than I had in a long time.
The walk back the next morning was different. The valley felt familiar now. The terraces weren't scenery, they were someone's livelihood, someone's morning view. Bau pointed out plants. Which ones the Hmong use for medicine. Which ones for dye. Which ones would kill you.
Back in Sapa I bumped into Léa at a café near the market. She'd arrived by sleeper bus a couple of days after me and was heading south. Da Nang, Hoi An, then eventually Ho Chi Minh City. We had one beer on a balcony overlooking the fog and talked about the road and the cold and what was next. She wrote her number on a napkin.
Cal was leaving that afternoon. Bus back to Hanoi, then a flight to Bangkok. He said he'd be in Ho Chi Minh in a few weeks and that I should come. He meant it in that way people mean things on the road, where the intention is real even if the logistics are vague.
I stood outside the Stone Church and watched the fog roll through. Tomorrow I'd ride south. Same road, different direction, different person on the bike.