The Villages of the Central Highlands

As I mentioned in my last blog, there were challenges – I hadn’t anticipated the food being one of the challenges but it was, especially for me. We now know the difference between local food in a tourist area and local food in non-tourist ethnic area. Much of the food looked or smelt unusual (even chicken didn’t look/taste like our chicken). Their spices and method of cooking were also so different. Thank goodness we brought a lot of hand sanitizer as soap was seldom available in the places we ate. The thought of diarrhea on a bike, in remote areas where “happy rooms” were few and far between, was a great incentive to eat light and clean our hands often. We mostly ate rice and freshly baked crusty bread – and we managed fine for the 3 days.

Initially we thought that we would be staying at home stays, but of course there are no home stays in non-tourist areas. We stayed in “guest houses” as there were a few towns along the way. We had our own private room and the “happy room” had a flush toilet so life was good. We brought our own pillows (which we purchased at La Siesta) which made all the difference. I now know that as long as I have a good pillow, I can sleep on a rock hard bed. On day 3, Lar declared that he loved his pillow. This was all part of the adventure.

We visited many small ethnic villages over the 3 days. Most of the villages had less than 30 homes and in many cases the families spoke only their own dialect. From the pictures you’ll see that most homes are made of wood. There were also some cement homes that the government built – they did this when they needed the existing village property to build a new hydro electric dam. The government homes were made of poured cement so the village people couldn’t move the homes if they didn’t like their new location. There was always a central meeting house – a large wood structure raised above the ground with a thatched roof. There were schools, but we never saw children in the schools. Phu explained that although the government builds the school and primary school education is free, they can’t get teachers to come to these remote villages. At best a teacher would come a few days a month. We seldom saw the adults in these villages as they would be working in the mountains. Very little litter in the villages – most of their food and water comes from the mountains so no packaging to dispose of which helps.

We loved interacting with the children and people we met along the way. The children were very timid at first – Phu explained that they most likely had not seen “white face” people before. Phu was so good with the children..and the fruit snacks he brought also helped.

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Our 10 days in the Hoi An area have come to an end. We will miss the staff at La Siesta (especially our very special Hien and Phuong) – they took such good care of us – “cam on”…thank you. We got to know Phu after spending 3 days with him – he gave us a great adventure and always made sure that we were “ok”. It is sad to leave this area.