Field notes: From Pu Bin to Pu Luong – Vietnam’s rural reaches

Image

The village of Pu Bin feels a long way from anywhere – perched on a forested mountainside, often wreathed in mist and fine rain, soundtracked only by crowing chickens and burbling streams. Pu Bin means ‘flying village’, and it feels appropriate as I look out towards the valley of Mai Chau, hidden beneath concentric rings of white cloud which give the village the cloistered feeling of an island in the sky.

“When I first came here in 2014, there were no villages or paved roads,” says my guide, Cao Hong Nhung, who is in charge of the project to bring tourism to Pu Bin. “Tourism has changed everything here”.

The centrepiece of Hong Nhung’s mission in the village is Bin’s House, a lovely wood-clad guesthouse staffed by locals and decorated with murals depicting rural scenes from the jungle-smothered Mai Chau valley. Until the guesthouse was built, no tourists ever even visited here, and tourism certainly didn’t offer opportunities for employment. Today, though, community tourism is helping to diversify and enrich the lives of the locals, who previously had survived purely on farming.

Life was hard – cassava is the main crop here alongside rice, which only yields one harvest per year, in stark contrast to the three rice harvests served up each year by the fertile paddies of the Mekong Delta. We spot some farmers working in the dry fields and head down to meet them, learning that they’re harvesting cassava roots. I’m soon put to work, digging up the starchy tubers with a shovel; it’s back-breaking work, even for a few minutes, but this is no time to put my feet up – I’m soon handed a conical hat and wellington boots, and a basket is slung across my back. We’re heading to the rice fields.

A few minutes later, I’m standing shin-deep in a muddy rice paddy, being handed tiny grass-like shoots – young rice plants – and following the locals’ lead in bending down to plant the shoots in the muddy earth. Their shoots are planted straightly in neat, even rows; mine, not so much. Still, they are patient with me, and very encouraging, even if I have the feeling that some re-planting may be required once I’ve cleared off.

Image

Back on dry land, Hong Nhung leads me through the village to a wooden stilt house, the characteristic architectural form in the Mai Chau valley. We remove our shoes and climb up a rickety ladder into a longhouse-like space, atmospherically lit and hung with bundles of dried herbs and mushrooms. Stove smoke emanates from a darkened kitchen through an open door, and in the middle of the room there sits, cross-legged on the floor, an old lady in a brightly checked headscarf and batik-wrapped velvet tunic. Her name is Ha Thi Hong, she tells me, reaching out a hand in welcome and smiling to reveal a mouthful of teeth as shiny and black as volcanic glass. For the women of the White Thai, the main ethnic group in Mai Chau, teeth blackening was once a widespread beauty practice. “But the young women don’t do it anymore,” Hong says, a touch wistfully.

One element of White Thai culture which Hong is successfully passing down the generations, however, is the cuisine – and today, she’s leading me in a cooking class. I’m handed a giant pestle and mortar and set to work shelling and pounding peanuts, which we then combine with salt and chilli to turn into a tasty seasoning. As I work, Hong wraps sticky rice in banana leaves and shows me how pork and vegetables are packed into bamboo tubes and then steamed, a traditional cooking method across rural Southeast Asia.

Image

I’m famished after a day’s exertions in the fields, and thankfully Hong has been preparing long in advance of my arrival. We sit cross-legged on the floor and eat a magnificent meal – baskets of purple sticky rice, bowls of pumpkin soup, and pork and lemongrass stew cooked in those bamboo tubes, all washed down with the local rice wine – a potent brew which, for better or worse, it is considered very rude to refuse.

A bit of Dutch courage might not be a bad thing, though, because Hong and I are summoned outside to a courtyard to find that a traditional dance is being laid on for the tourists in the village – and we’re expected to join in. The bamboo dance has been practiced by villagers since time immemorial, and Hong tells me that she learned it in her youth – but that it had been in danger of dying out in recent decades. The coming of tourism has brought it back, Hong says – something she describes as “wonderful”.

The dance team demonstrate an elaborate routine which involves stepping over a grid of bamboo poles. I and a few other tourists have a clumsy attempt at replicating the dance, and are put to shame by Hong and a handful of other village elders, their quick feet belying their old age, their faces beaming as they play out the almost-forgotten dance of their childhood.

Image

Tourism may barely be a decade old in Pu Bin, but it’s (slightly) longer established in Pu Luong, a nature reserve made up of mountainous jungles and hill-tribe villages which borders Mai Chau. The scenery is spectacular: glittering terraces of rice paddies which stagger down the mountainsides, broken up by tracts of thick jungle, dense with ironwood and acacia trees and strangled with figs. Tigers still roamed here as recently as the Vietnam War – that explains the stilt houses.

On a hike through the countryside, I get talking to a rice farmer working the paddy fields. “Tourism is good for us here,” he says. “We used to rely completely on farming, but now there are more jobs for the local people. We can sell rice and fish to the hotels, sell our handicrafts and textiles. It keeps our traditional way of life alive. If we stay poor, we can’t preserve it. Our culture will die.”

We arrive at the village of Pu Luong, where a growing cluster of hotels sits on a dramatic mountain ridge, with sweeping views over a green valley. Pu Luong has grown in popularity as a much more serene alternative to Sapa, the northern Vietnamese trekking town which originally hit the tourist radar as an idyllic base for hikes in the unspoiled countryside, and now is a fully fledged tourist resort, with cable cars and even a casino. Pu Luong couldn’t be more different – still a picture of bucolic calm – but visitor numbers are still growing, and are already high enough to have enriched the lives of the locals significantly.

“Before tourism, the average income in this area was 2 million dong per month,” the manager of Pu Luong Eco Retreat tells me over a beer. “Post tourism, that has trebled to 6 million dong per month.” He motions at the rice terraces and neatly divided farmers’ fields in the valley below us. “These fields weren’t farmed at all before; now they are, to supply the restaurants and hotels. It’s a virtuous circle. It lifts everything up.”

Vietnam Airlines operates five times weekly nonstop from London Heathrow to Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City, with Economy, Premium Economy and Business Class cabins offering impeccable levels of comfort and service. Speak to us about arranging your flights.

To keep exploring Vietnam, read National Geographic Traveller executive editor Lorna Parkes’ experience on the Con Dao islands.