From Sơn La to Mai Châu to the Ba Vi orphanage, west of Hanoi

Nov. 8: Dien Bien Phu to Muong Lai: Having failed to, I think, properly convey the mud and rain saturation that northwest Vietnam can dispense on the visitor, I offer you this close up of my Oakley trail shoes. They served me well, for 10 days, before Mud Slide No. 7 finally submitted them. Bummer. Them were good Vietnam shoes. Maybe I can shred them for garden mulch….

Nov. 8, evening: We received, and eagerly accepted, an invitation for dinner at the suburban Son La home of a close family friend of Roadmonkey’s Vietnamese expedition guide, Quyet Tran. We arrived after dark, buying flowers and beer at the corner shop before sitting down on floor mats and eating spring rolls, boiled chicken and vegetable and beef hot pot, family style. As the honored guests, we were plied, again and again and again, and yet again, with homemade rice wine, the flavor of which varies in Vietnam between prison hootch and fragrant cherry-blossom grappa.

On this night, the firewater went down rather easily, if far too often. As you can see in this photo, one of the Vietnamese guys, an employee of the family patriarch, poured himself several too many thimble-sized glasses of liquor, producing in him a recitation of what clearly was his only remembered English phrases, rather shouted to all and sundry: “Tenkyu-verymuch!” and “Gude Afta-noon!”

After a dozen rounds of this, he was escorted by his associates to a back room, for a restorative nap.

Eating & drinking with passion: "Tenkyu-verymuch!"

Nov. 9: We spent two nights in Son La, to ride through the spectacular valley, which to my eyes seemed similar to the high-desert Chilean landscape in size, scope and refulgent afternoon light. We peddled past Ox-pulled carts driven by mere children, and I thought this is about as close you get in modern Vietnam to stepping back in time.

A river runs through it: Son La regional beauty.

Later Nov. 9: We spend the night in Mai Chau, a White Thai village area about 7km off the main highway to Hanoi. Below, a shot of our exit from Mai Chau, through a back “road” that winnowed into a footpath straddling rice fields.

Happily sunned and diesel exhausted: (from left) Conrad, Kim, Linh, Lauri and Paul.

The way the lodging works in Mai Chau is this: you arrive and set about picking one of the rentable “guest houses” – ie, a wooden house on stilts with a large communal room featuring stuffed fabric matresses, pillows, blankets and bamboo floors – and begin bargaining with the owner, who lives in the room below or beside the communal room, for a per-person price. We stayed at Guest House No. 19, run by Mr. Hùng and Ms. Mếch, a jovial husband 7 wife team that cooked up a tasty dinner of green veggies, vietnamese spring roll, chicken and beef dishes and, upon our request, several plates of khoai tây chiến (french – or do you say freedom? – fries). Drained by the day’s ride, followed by hot showers, food and cold Tiger beer, we hit the sack early and hard, each body entombed in diaphanous mosquito netting.

Sleeping like the dead, in a Mai Chau wood-stilt guest house.

Getting to know the children at Ba Vi orphanage.

Roadmonkeys assemble playground components at Ba Vi.

Nov. 12: The Ba Vi facility director, Ms. Phương, has the power to get things done fast, and she wielded it with efficient strokes in the days leading up to our arrival. She had, for instance, the concrete platform poured and finished in three days, after waiting more than a week for the torrential rains to end. As you can see below, the concrete was barely dry as the Roadmonkey crew began building the playground, purchased from a company in Hanoi with money we’d raised, $50 at a time, through three summer fundraisers, in New York and Washington.

Roadmonkey begins building the Ba Vi playground, for orphans and local school children.

Nov. 12 twilight: We made rapid progress on the playground construction, taking lunch breaks to eat together with the Ba Vi staff and visit with the orphans.

Workin' it: The Roadmonkey playground for the children of Ba Vi takes form.

Nov. 13: With no time to shilly-shally, our group organized ourselves in to a pretty impressive construction crew. Thank god we found some conical hats (sported nicely by Roadmonkey co-leader Brent Wexler, in between the slides in the photo below), as the sun-baked afternoons kept us running to the water jug.

Why we came to Ba Vi, part 1.

After a ceremony and playground dedication, we cut the red ribbon, officially opening the Ba Vi playground, the biggest, coolest, and certainly most colorful playground any of saw during our 500-mile journey through northwest Vietnam. And how cool is that?

Why we came to Ba Vi, part 2.