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Part 3 – Sapa to Dien Bien Phu

Our guide, Son, shows up with a solid four-wheel-drive Ford van just as we finish thanking the friendly Sapa hotel staff, who apologize for the cold weather. We take off down the mountain through the fog over roads so broken and pot-holed it’s difficult to maneuver, but Son is a champion. We stop at the Hmong Tam Duong village market where Patricia and I are the only white people. No one badgers us except one Black Hmong woman -- who must have gotten her hard-core sales training in the Sapa market -- who tries to sell us everything she’s got including the clothes on her back. Patricia wants to taste insects and drink worm liquor, but not me.

Lao Chai, our overnight stop, was once a picturesque mountain town but since construction of new dams has begun it has moved to another location where it’s become an anonymous modern city with paved streets, high rise apartment houses, schools, stadiums, monuments and public buildings. More than two million Hmong people have had to leave their flooded villages, rice paddies, fields and traditional way of life for the sake of hydro-electric power. Thanks to the help of foreign investments, the Vietnamese government will stop buying electricity from China and start using their own resources. They’re also stripping the jungle and planting rubber trees in hopes of providing work for displaced tribal farmers and families, who find themselves living in a modern city.

Nothing works in our cavernous modern hotel except electricity and a little heat - tg. Son says there’s nothing to see or do in Lao Chai so I use the time to recharge my phone, camera, laptop, kindle, edit pictures and write. Patricia snores away happily as I work.

Next day the weather is clear and with the car heater on we enjoy stunning vistas with mountains, forests and terraced rice paddies; tiny villages with wood and bamboo structures, a few buffalo and pigs. Hmong women sit on the ground beside the road cradling their babies in shawls, selling chestnuts, oranges, onions, herbs.

No matter how primitive and remote a village may be every house has a TV antenna, and, cell phone towers are everywhere, in the jungle, forest, in the middle of nowhere.

We arrive in Dien Bien Phu, a surprisingly lovely town, and the weather begins to warm up – but only a little. Patricia and I stare guiltily at the huge grey marble War Memorial in the center of town and visit another market where Patricia gets to taste her worm liquor. She likes it.

That night, over a delicious farewell dinner of fried fish, roast pork, steamed vegetables, sticky rice, and fiery rice liquor, Son relates horror stories about the winding road ahead, still under construction, over tall, looming mountains into the remote northern forests of Laos.

Son is gone, Patricia and I are now on our own. Our plan had been to take the local bus from here to our next destination – an adventure we decided to undertake before we got a taste of the terrible road conditions, and, moreover, discovered the bus departed at the unreasonable hour of five AM. By next morning we had changed our minds three times and after breakfast finally decide to avoid the 80 kilometer, nine-hour “bus ride from hell,” and hire a local driver with a good car to take us out of Vietnam, through the border at Tay Trang, into Laos – and depart at a reasonable ten AM.

Our new driver is Trang, who’s made this journey many times and knows the road well. Our hotel packs us a delicious box lunch for the road. We pass the frontier without a hitch. The Laotians issue my visa for $35 and here we go…