Rough Guide to Vietnam - Jan Dodd [323]
Ploughing in Mai Chau
Other than the excellent restaurant at the Mai Chau Lodge (lunch $12, dinner $15), the best food in town is dished up at the Toan Thang, 200m before the Mai Chau Guesthouse, which serves freshly caught fish but has no English menu. Cafe Hoan, next to the Mai Chau Guesthouse, offers a scenic spot looking over the fields, to have a coffee. There are also many food stalls clustered around the market back in town, some serving lip-smacking kebabs. In the mornings you’ll find hawkers here selling piping-hot banana fritters and coffee.
The far north | The northwest | Highway 6 | Mai Chau and around |
The Mai Chau Valley
Just south of the Mai Chau Guesthouse, a road to the right (west) leads across a few paddy fields to BAN LAC, home to a prosperous community of White Thai, though these days their wealth is derived more from tourist dollars than from farming. This is where most people stay on a two-day tour from Hanoi – it’s a settlement of some seventy houses (about four hundred people) where you can buy handwoven textiles, watch performances of traditional dancing and sleep overnight. Nowadays just about every house in the village doubles as a guesthouse, and many have sit-down toilets fitted below the houses. Some house owners have even changed their roofs from tile back to the original thatch, perhaps to fulfil visitors’ expectations. If you turn up without a tour group, just ask around and someone will put you up for about $5 per person for the night, plus $1–2 for a meal depending largely on how much you eat. While too touristy for some, Ban Lac does offer the chance to stay in a genuine stilthouse – an edifying experience, particularly at dawn if your sleeping quarters happen to be above the henhouse. During the day the lanes between houses are draped with scarves, bags and dresses, with villagers urging passersby to stop for a quick look. Though it seems a bit commercial, the vendors are not as pushy as their Black Hmong counterparts in Sa Pa, and if it does get tiring then a few minutes’ walk in any direction from the centre leads out to paddies and a view of the ring of purple mountains which make for some of north Vietnam’s most classic scenery. In the evenings, the traditional dance performances staged for tour groups after dinner are also interesting, with coy, long-haired girls acting out agricultural chores in a graceful manner. After the show, the audience is invited to join them in a dance, as well as a sup of local wine from a big bowl through a bamboo straw.
Many houses in Ban Lac rent out bicycles, which are an ideal way to explore the valley (20,000đ per day). One interesting route is to cycle 12km south on Highway 15 to CO LUONG, passing timeless rural scenes and reflections of mountains in the flooded paddy fields. At Co Luong, the Ma River joins the road, and huge limestone walls and dense bamboo growth adorn the riverbank. An active market on Saturday mornings is worth the trip, to see the array of handicrafts and fish.
The far north | The northwest | Highway 6 |
Hoa Binh
There’s one final pass to go over before Highway 6 leaves the northwest mountains. It’s a steady climb along precipitous hillsides up to a col at 1200m, and then an ear-popping descent through sugar-cane plantations to HOA BINH, on the edge of the Red River plain. The town’s proximity to Hanoi, 76km on a fast road, plus its hotels and easy access to a variety of minority villages mean that Hoa Binh soaks up a lot of tourist traffic. Unless you need the bus connections, it’s preferable to stop over