Where's Sebastian?

(PICTURE: The master at work.)

For the last few miles of the hike, we trekked along a well defined dirt road. There was only way to go on the road which resulted in our group being spread out. I would guess that those in the front were maybe five minutes ahead of the people in the back. At some point I suggested that we should stop and wait for everyone to catch up. Frankly, I wasn't trying to be a good leader but was just trying to give my feet a rest since I was hiking in old shoes and my dogs were barking*.

Slowly but surely everyone gathered on the road and took a breather. We did a quick head count and realized that one person was missing -- Sebastian. Nobody seemed to know where Sebastian was and the last report was that he had hung back to take some photos. Naturally, Sebastian's mom Urszula started to worry that her son was missing in the middle of nowhere. Everyone started to assure her that Sebastian would be fine and that he was probably just a couple of more minutes behind. Well, everyone except my cousin Justin who roughly said this with all sincerity: "I don't know. It's possible that he might have fallen off the cliff. I mean, I can see it happening if he was taking a picture and didn't see the edge." After a few people gave him looks, Justin tried to ease Urszula's fears by adding, "I'm not saying he died but he probably just fell really far and got hurt. I could see that happening to me." Most of us found this absolutely hilarious because Justin was really just verbally fleshing out all the possibilities. However, we suppressed our laughter because hearing Justin say this nearly sent Urszula into a panic attack.

Luckily before Urszula started screaming and sprint back down the road, Sebastian came strolling down the path. Yeah, he was just taking pictures.

* Anthony and Mark taught Huyen this idiom while were were hiking. At some point she came up to me and said, "My dogs barked!"

The Trek

(PICTURE: The trekkers on top of the mountain.)

The final event planned for the "honeymoon" was for sixteen of us to trek to an ethnic village and do a homestay. While planning this portion of the trip, we were giving a variety of different descriptions of the hike by the people we asked in Mai Chau. About a week before the trek, we were told that the hike would be 30KM (18.6 miles) and would take eight hours -- one way.

The news of the length and time of the hike made quite a few of our guests a tad bit nervous since not everyone was exactly in half-marathon-plus-five-miles shape. Huyen and I could tell that a few people were actually starting to dread the hike so we figured out an alternative plan. The first day we would hike all the way to the homestay (which ended up being 25Kms/15.5 miles) and then the next day we would walk only 1KM (0.62 miles) and get picked up by the giant pink bus. When first hearing this option my reaction was, "So we're basically hiking to a place that is next to a road?". My worry was that we wouldn't be hiking in the middle of nowhere as I had promised everyone. It turned out that I had nothing to worry about because the hike was absolutely spectacular and took us through completely remote areas.


(PICTURE: A typical portion of the trek.)

Some of the memorable moments were:

1. My sister falling on her butt.


(PICTURE: Hannah's normal hiking position.)

2. Urszula scraping her ankle and thinking she had been poisoned. At some point her hands started to swell which was a sure sign that the rock she cut her ankle on had injected her with something lethal. Luckily we all soon realized that our hands were swollen and it was the altitude and perhaps salty lunch that had given us fat fingers.

3. Me learning my first lesson in marriage - a husband sometimes has to carry his wife's bag.


(PICTURE: Marriage.)

4. Our lunch picnic of sticky rice and bananas. After lunch we all washed our hands in this stream:


(PICTURE: Dana, Anthony, me and Hannah.)

5. JR nearly getting attacked by this angry water buffalo:


(PICTURE: Our guides walking stick saved JR from being lanced by this guy.)

6. Huyen showing off her acrobatics:


(PICTURE: My children will be able to dunk!!!!...on a short basket.)

7. JR using the last disposable camera on Earth.


(PICTURE: JR had this camera left over from when we studied abroad in London in 1999).

8. Hannah being told by an old man that, "you're very beautiful but you have too many spots."

9. Our guide clearly wanting to move at twice the pace that we wanted to.

10. Sebastian going missing...but that's a story for tomorrow.

The Reasons We Brought Everyone To Mai Chau

Without a doubt, Mai Chau is one of my favorite places in Southeast Asia. Here's four reasons why:

Reason #1 that I love Mai Chau: The Natural Beauty

When we arrived, it was dark and everyone couldn't really take in the beauty of the place. The next morning though, the skies were clear and everyone quickly realized why I brought them there.

(PICTURE: The view from our stilt house.)


(PICTURE: Our neighbors.)

Reason #2 that I love Mai Chau: The Stilt Houses

There's just something fun about sleeping ten feet off the ground. At my favorite guest house they have three stilt houses. Everyone was kind enough to give Huyen and I our own house...


(PICTURE: Yes, that's a heart shape we're making.)

...and the other married couple too:


(PICTURE: Anthony and Mark checking out the view.)

Reason #3 that I love Mai Chau: The Shopping

I had told everyone that they could plan on buying all their Christmas gifts/souvenirs in Mai Chau. The women there make beautifully intricate woven handicrafts.


(PICTURE: JR with his soon-t0-be Christmas present for someone and the woman who made it.)

Reason #4 that I love Mai Chau: The Food

Linh Soi, my favorite guest house owner, has quite the chef at her place. At night we dined on fresh fish, spring rolls, mixed veggies, eggs and green beans. For breakfast we had banana crepes with honey right from the comb.


(PICTURE: Dinner.)


(PICTURE: Breakfast.)

Masters of Impersonation

Another day, another video you really can't see. This is really something I think the wedding guests will appreciate and everyone else will say, "You all drank too much weird rice wine to think this was funny." Well, perhaps sadly, we really didn't drink much wine but still found this to be hilarious at the time. Unfortunately I turned my camera on too late as I missed the cream of the crop impersonations. Here's the gist of what you're going to listen to: Lily and George, two of our two Australian guests, were asked what they think of American accents. Soon enough someone asked them if they could impersonate Americans. Well, that turned into George impersonating a Canadian while Lily did her best American voice (which definitely sounds like a lot of Southern Californian girls I met while living in LA). The beauty of this part of the impersonation though is that it evolved into them doing American/Canadian people impersonating Australian people. Wrap your head around that while listening to this:

Prank

I've written in the past how my cousins are notorious for falling asleep at Thanksgiving meals. Really though, they're notorious for falling asleep everywhere and anywhere. To show that they haven't lost a step, both Justin and Dana passed out at our bonfire in Mai Chau. They were dreaming away for a solid twenty minutes before someone had the genius idea of pulling a prank on them.

We all started to get up when our movements woke Dana. Naturally we pretended that we were gonna wake her up anyway and only pull the prank on Justin. We quickly gathered our stuff and executed the plan: We would all hide about a hundred feet away, behind a tree, and yell, "JUSTIN!!!". Justin, half asleep, would wake up in the middle of a field in Vietnam and wonder what the hell had happened.

When we started to sneak away, my amazingly brilliant wife thought of the perfect element to the plan to make it over-the-top hilarious -- Huyen asked a local villager who was nearby to go wake up Justin. So let me summarize the prank set-up: an old-ish village lady was about to wake up my cousin who was passed out all alone on a field in the middle of nowhere in Vietnam. Sure, it was probably a had to be there moment but I still find this video to be funny...despite not really being able to see anything on the video:



NOTE: The flashing light at the end is Justin shining his flashlight at us once he knew what the deal was.

Bonfire

On the bus ride into Mai Chau, we gave everyone two choices:

Choice 1: A bonfire with karaoke.

Choice 2: A bonfire with villagers singing traditional songs and playing games with us.

Thank goodness everyone picked choice 2. However, we ended up getting a taste of both as the only other tourists in Mai Chau decided to do karaoke right near us:


(PICTURE: The locals singing and dancing for us...while Vietnamese tourists sing karaoke in the background.)

After about seven White Thai traditional hits, the locals had us all grab hands and dance in a circle while singing, "Nhu Co Bac Ho Trong Ngay Vui Dai Thang", a song about Ho Chi Minh. I had promised everyone a horah and this ended up being pretty darn close. You know, minus the lack of lifting people in chairs and the addition of singing about Ho Chi Minh.

(PICTURE: Dancing in a circle. Eventually we all linked hands and alternated people between White Thai and non White Thai.)

Anyone who knows me knows that I love camping. My experiences in Mai Chau have always been the closest to camping I've come in Vietnam. We had a great bonfire that night and ended up playing a hopscotch type game that Justin and I had played two years earlier at the same exact spot. After a couple of days of craziness, it was a great evening of relaxing in an open field with friends, locals and a little bit of local wine:

(PICTURE: Dana and Hannah making the local wine; a very elaborate process which has one pour water into fermented rice.)


(PICTURE: Everyone drank the wine out of long straws made of bamboo.)

The Road To Mai Chau

(PICTURE: My mom in front of the stilt house where we ate lunch on the way to Mai Chau.)

After our relaxing boat ride, we headed for the White Thai village of Mai Chau. The way we were going was not the road 99% of tourists takes since most people go to Mai Chau from Hanoi and not from Ninh Binh. In a perfect world, getting to Mai Chau should have taken about three hours. However it took double that. The road was covered with pot holes which had us traveling at around 10MPH for a solid two hours which meant a few more bathroom breaks than we had on the original schedule. At one point we stopped at a roadside quick-e-mart (which in Vietnam means a woman with a table of snacks and a small freezer in front of her house).
(PICTURE: My parents with the big pink bus.)

You can imagine the woman's surprise when 24 foreigners got off a large pink bus and asked to use her bathroom. The woman obliged and we all bought a bunch of drinks and snacks from her. Clearly this was the first time anything like this had happened in this area because everyone quickly meandered out of their house and stared at our big pink bus. After a 20+ minute rest stop, we got back on the bus and continued our journey. Unfortunately were were behind schedule which meant the sun set before we arrived in Mai Chau. The problem with this was:
1. I wanted everyone to see the beautiful views from the mountain pass that leads to the village.
2. Not only couldn't we see the views, but the fog on the mountain had a visibility of about ten feet. This meant that not only could our driver barely see in front of our bus as we inched along a very high, narrow mountain BUT it also meant the big trucks coming down the mountain at us couldn't see us. I can tell you, there were a lot of nervous people on the pink bus for about forty five minutes.


(PICTURE: The view from the mountain pass a few days later. This was about 1,000,000 times clearer than when we first took the pass.)