The night train to Lao Cai was uneventful, aside from running into two chaps I'd meant to go travelling with for a few days but had missed the meeting time due to a hangover. I swear I'm off the grog for a while! From Lao Cai it was just a short trip on the back of a motorbike then swiftly through immigration and over the bridge to China. Immigration was a breeze but the customs guys found my Lonely Planet Guidebook and promptly confiscated it. Something to do with the fact that Taiwan is coloured differently to China and there are anti-China comments regarding Tibet. Like get over it guys, you're a superpower now, who gives a shit what others think!
So I wasn't feeling too happy for myself by not hiding the guidebook better. But I had a rough itinerary written down so I at least had a plan. A nice chap from Kunming wrote down a few important phrases in Chinese which I am guarding with my life! And then I jumped onto the bus to Yuanyang. What LP says should take 4 hours, actually takes 7 hours, and then we were delayed 3 hours due to an accident between 2 trucks. But everyone on the bus was great, even sharing snacks, and occasionally swapping seats with the more tender stomached passengers. Poor souls, throwing their guts up on the bumpy roads.
Yuanyang is famous for its rice terraces, which are irrigated year round. The Hani people, more on them later, have fashioned them from the mountainsides over centuries. The walls are quite high, some look to be over 6-8 feet. They are unbelievably spectacular, particularly at sunrise and sunset, when they reflect the colours. I wasn't fortunate enough to see a colourful sunset but it was gobsmacking in its beauty regardless.
The Hani are the predominant minority group here, in fact I'd be hard pressed to spy a Han Chinese amongst the crowd. I scored big on my two days here, by being around for a market day and for some sort of event that looked to be a training session for an advertisement. Men were being instructed on the choreography of swinging a hoe, and the women were singing the jingle. I do hope they got paid more than the straw hats being passed out to keep the sun off!
The women wear very colourful clothes and head dresses. Some even wear funny hats. The kids wear hats covered in cheap silver and bells. And the market was full of all sorts of embroidery items as well as jackets and trousers. I could have bought myself an entire outfit, but the weight of them!!
The baby carriers were works of art, and what interested me was that they use cathedral quilting on them. Would be interesting to know the provenance of the technique!
I'm away tonight on a sleeper bus, one with beds, to Kunming. And maybe I can pick up another LP. For all the photos, and I do apologise, there's alot of them, click here
Pac Bo is right on the border with China and our walk today kept us within only a few kms of the border. Vietnam and China have never had the friendliest of relationships, so visiting this region requires extra police permits and a compulsory local guide. Hence my three companions. Apparently we also must have a porter for carrying and cooking the food. In truth, the luggage of my three companions could easily be carried in just one normal backpack. As it turns out, I am carrying more than them, but I am determined not to give in to getting the porter to carry my load.
From Pac Bo it's up a narrow track through secondary forest. It's slippery work climbing on limestone, and it's fairly steep. And I walk slow uphill. It isn't long before my guide suggests I give over some of my gear to the porter. I explain that gear or no gear, I'm slow uphill, and that I don't take rest stops as my muscles don't like cooling down. And that we'd specifically asked not to have porters so I wasn't giving in just yet. After about 3 days they all at last realised that this stubborn lass was going to carry her pack the whole way. Then we all relaxed!
We lunched on a grassy summit then climbed down to a small cluster of five houses in a valley. Here we stop for tea, then corn wine. I'm informed that the rest of the day's trekking time is only short so we are staying here for a while. Mot quite into the swing of drinking corn wine at any hour of the day I go off exploring and am invited into another woman's house, where I am also offered rice wine. The kids are all friendly, and thrilled to get pens from the strange foreigner.
At last we head off, up over another few hills then down to a village and a dusty road. We turned our backs away from China and headed down the road to our accommodation for the night. This is my first homestay, in the house of Nung people. It is a small village, with a cluster of houses set around a covered market. Corn and pig feed are laid out to dry, and the local men are making concrete bricks and sawing planks with huge crosssaws, as they are building a new house. Everyone is extremely friendly and I am soon being walked around the village with pleas for me to take everyone's photos.
Cooking is done on a hearth towards the back of the house. It's all open fire cooking, with a tripod placed over the flames for the cooking pots. Watching the porter and guide prepare our meals becomes a regular evening attraction, sitting on tiny stools around the fire listening to their chatter.
The sleeping arrangements are quite comfortable. I sleep on a comfortable bed with a firm mattress and a really thick blanket. There's even a pillow. It's freezing cold as we are high in the mountains and I am snug as a bug. Under the house live the cows, pigs and poultry but they don't make much noise until the cocks start crowing at some unearthly hour. No sleeping in in this neck of the woods.
I am a little apprehensive about the toilets, but I needn't have worried. Pit toilets are the usual, with some having wooden planks to stand on, others having a concrete floor with a 10cm diameter hole to aim into. I actually get good at this. Toilet paper is abundant, and there's ash to throw over your droppings after. And lots of water for washing up afterwards.
Today we spend mostly walking along dusty roads, heading down the valley. It's beautiful countryside, with karst peaks flanking the road. Although there are small hamlets, there appears to be very little arable land up here and it is a womder they manage to survive. We visit a small school and give the kids pens, and meet many more friendly locals. Tong Cot is a slightly larger village, and we stay in the house of another family who run a shop. The toilet is a clean squat job, and there's even a bathroom, so I manage to have a quick wash. Dinner is as usual washed down with a few glasses of corn wine. 
It's a long day today, along roads that are not paved but covered with rocks which are hell on the feet. Even with my boots I can feel every stone, and am thankful to take them off for a while over lunch and give them some respite. We lunch in a dusty little town where I am amused to watch a mouse crawling around amongst the rubble of a renovation, trying to get to the kitchen. After I've eaten I spy another up on the food bench.
In the afternoon we are forced to take a larger dusty road, rather than a smaller scenic track, as the rain has raised the level of a lake and made the track impassable. After some 25km we arrive at our evening accommodation, in another beautiful valley. I decline the offer to walk to the lake which would be a 6 km round trip. I am exhausted!
The house has a bamboo verandah looking over the rice fields and vegetable patches to some nearby peaks, and the setting sun is creating glorious purples and pinks. One of the daughters is learning English, but too shy to practice it with me, and the mother spends the last hours of sunlight planting a cabbage crop. The toilet here is my first experience at aiming into a small hole in the concrete. I do a better job than some of my companions!! 
Every household makes it's own rice or corn wine, and this house is no different. In fact they are currently distilling wine as we arrive. I'd seen some larger stainless vats at one of the other houses, this one was a much more rustic affair. 
Today we head off on small tracks through the rice fields and up a ridge into another valley. Most of the morning is spent descending into the valley, along a rocky road which we share with the locals returning laden with unbelievably heavy loads from the fields. At the bottom is this gloriously picturesque village set along a stream. I am bowled away by the beauty there is here, though I know it's a tough life. Most now have electricity, and satellite TV, and that has meant they have been able to use power driven appliances to do some of the daily chores. They work all day, and most of it is hard physical labour. But they seem pretty happy to me, without all the stress we seem to have in our lives.
The rest of the day we continue to walk down this valley, which is yet another picturesque area with rice fields giving way to miles of corn and sugarcane, friendly locals and forest covered peaks. The boys are singing songs in Vietnamese and we are all at peace with the world. We go over a pass and into a larger town, again set in a drop dead gorgeous surrounding, and book into a guesthouse. I have a hot shower!!!
Our guesthouse is soon full with a group of French, who are going trekking for 3 days. As they haul their huge trolley suitcases up the stairs I am wondering just what sort of trekking it is. But they are only doing a measly 10km a day, and have porters carrying their gear. I feel very adventurous in comparison.
We've survived four days on the road, so after dinner we take another bottle of corn wine back to the guesthouse and have a few celebratory drinks.
There is a small market going on in the morning, with a few women dressed in the beautiful hand dyed indigo clothing of their minirity group. After breakfast - yes I am now a fully fledged corn wine for breakfast drinker - we take a local minibus up and over a few passes into another valley. I get the front seat, along with another woman and her daughter, while the others must pile in the back with the other twenty passengers.
We set off along a river. Soon the terrain heads upwards as we cross through into another valley, past a beautiful waterfall in the middle of nowhere. The weather is sweltering hot today and we are all feeling the heat. We lunch by the river and some of us go for a swim.
The rest of the day we follow the river, along small tracks then a larger rocky road. We pass a waterwheel used to irrigate the rice terraces. The heat is really energy sapping so we take a couple of shortcuts to avoid a few river bends and at last are at our homestay. I am exhausted, and the river is just a bit too far away for a swim, so it's a rather public wash on the outside verandah. Actually it wasn't all that public, everyone else was too busy to bother noticing a westerner having a wash in her underwear.
Today's a fairly easy day of walking, especially as the weather is cooler and overcast. We climb over yet another pass and continue down a large valley planted with taro and sugarcane. The taro harvest is in full swing, so there are whole or chipped taro lying everywhere drying. We find some cut cane that's fallen from someone's load and have a natural sugar treat as we walk.
Ta Lung is a dusty border town, and our guesthouse is a mere 500m from the border gates. Everywhere there are bicycles with large sidecars. They are used for loading up with goods for transporting between here and China, as the border cannot be crossed by trucks. The pileup of these laden bikes at the Chinese immigration gates in the morning is a sight to be seen.
We descend into yet another gorgeous valley, with only a few houses, where we have lunch. Our host is very generous with the corn wine and we are a bit tipsy by the time we leave. This isn't such a bad thing as our climb this afternoon is even steeper than this morning. Soon I too am singing along with the Vietnamese songs - not that I know the words!
But the climb isn't so bad, and we descend into the valley in which we are staying. The rice harvest is in full swing so I join them for a bit of manual labour before we trek the final kms to our homestay. We apparently invite them all over later for a drink. Hoang tells me you can get the whole village drunk for about $5!!
I started the day with a visit to the local market, where the pork arrives freshly killed on the back of a motorbike and butchered while you wait.
Then we boarded a boat for a cold misty ride down river, which was wonderfully eery with the mist rising up and limestone cliffs appearing out of the fog. 
We visited a local village where the rice was being harvested, and passed through a river cave, walked to a waterfall, and then motored through into Ba Be lake. The lake water is a lovely green colour and is surrounded by vegetation fringed limestone peaks but I wouldn't say it was drop dead gorgeous scenery. Am I getting jaded?? 
After lunch we headed north to Cao Bang, where we farewelled our driver as tomorrow I start walking!
Hagiang and Dong Van region is limestone mountain country, inhabited by Hmong and Dao people. Tay live in the valleys. We chance upon an awesome local market where the colourful women are drop dead gorgeous. Some are fascinated by my white skin, and the Dao women are keen to look at my jewellery. I return the interest by checking out their jewellery! 
The mountain passes are steep, winding and very photogenic. Somehow the locals eke out corn crops on the rocky mountainsides, though the government does financially support them as they are unable to grow enough food. Dong Van Pass, between Meo Vac and Dong Van indeed lives up to the hype as one very picturesque part of the country.
Now a visit to Hmong territory isn't complete without a drink with the locals. We spy a group sitting by the side of the road so we stop to join them for a few drinks. This is where I master the Vietnamese saying for "bottoms up", and here the cups of corn wine are bowls. Soon Joe and I have lots of new brothers and sisters! 
But Joe isn't feeling well again, and by the late afternoon he is too tired and sick to even go for dinner or a walk around town. I wander the back streets but Dong Van isn't much of a town unless there's a morning market on. 
More
The highlight of the day is a stop in a dusty little village in the middle of nowhere. Our guide informs us that Lo Lo people live here but don't wear their colourful costumes daily as they are impractical for field work and the predominant local group is Hmong. We go to a house and one of the girls dresses up in this beautiful clothing which is handmade, dyed, embroidered, appliqued and then embellished with beads and pom poms. Mindboggling stuff! 
Further up the road are Hmong women shirring the skirts that they wear - the amount of time spent making their clothing really shows how much they still value their culture, as it would be so much easier just to buy readymade clothes.
Joe is becoming increasingly dizzy and fatigued and has decided to return to Hanoi for medical tests. We go for dinner at a Hotpot restaurant where the ingredients in the pot vary from normal beef, to offal, to veges including yummy mushrooms, to noodles. It all tastes good so I try not to look too hard at what I'm putting in my mouth. But not really the sort of meal for someone struggling to eat anything.