#hmong mu cang chai

[mutant-distraction]

Hmong villager tending to her terraces in preparation for the upcoming planting season | Rice terraces of Mu Cang Chai, Vietnam

Photo Art © ► @jordhammond

[superbnature]

Sunset light over rice terraces in winter by Jarmila

[connor-burrows]

Sunset light over rice terraces in winter by Jarmila

[clogging]

Sunset light over rice terraces in winter by Jarmila

[whiskeygin23]

Amazing Mu Cang Chai by Jarmila

[poleteli]

Йенбай, Вьетнам 

Дэйл Джонсон | Фотография | Карта

[everydayforthewin]

Missing Roads & The piper of La Pán Tẩn

From Sapa we rent a motorbike (about $4.75 per day) to tour the surrounding provinces. The roads in Northern Vietnam aren’t great tho I’m told they improve in the south. Here it seems there is little commitment to infrastructure or so my derriere determines after 10 miles of bouncing down partially paved, partially missing roadways.  Not only are the roads half Motocross course but they are also frighteningly curvy, actually the curves are nothing but for the massive dump trucks, semis and tour busses speeding along them as if they were cruising interstate 80 across Pennsylvania.

But the scenery is breathtaking and luckily I get to enjoy it while Guillem cautiously navigates each turn to avoid skidding out in gravel or running head on into a minivan of tourists. Maybe I should stop tapping him and pointing at every waterfall or stunning valley as it comes into view?

After a night in Than Uyen and having breakfast with a fellow traveler, Sadia, we decide to head a bit west towards what looks like a dense series of rivers and tributaries. 40 minutes later our dirt road abruptly ends in what is now a lake.

Luckily for us there is a boat service to connect you to where the old road picks up again and while it costs more than a hotel room for the night but there’s no turning back now. Getting the motorbike onto the boat is scary, there is no dock, just a dirt/mud slop to the water and boats tethered to stakes and more than a few times I think Guillem and the bike are both going to end up in the lake.

As we motor across the unnaturally blue lake I cant help but think about the submerged homes, like some lost bamboo Atlantis.

Once on the other side our dirt road continues thru a winding landscape of Karsts, fog, meandering livestock and rice fields. The rain turns on and off again with every peak. We stop several times too  don rain gear only to take it off minutes later as we head into a valley and the temperature jumps up to 90º

We reach Mu Cang Chai in the early evening and find a room. The plan is to rest our sore behinds and sleep so we have pleanty of energy for hiking the next day.

Plans be damed … at 6am a woman’s voice starts shouting at us in Vietnamese. Ahh yes, just the local public announcements where they tell residents valuable information such as when they need to evacuate because their valley is being turned into a lake.

Several miles out town we head off the main road onto some paved motobike paths up the hills into La Pan Tan. Eventually all these go from paved to pot hole filled, to dirt and rock and finally to impassable (tho it seems the locals still find a way thru) at which point we jump off and walk, exploring the paths used by villagers to and from the fields.

On one of these walks a couple women have a good laugh dressing Guillem and I in traditional cloths complete with hats. Instead of trying to sell to us one woman wants me to sell my bag which she is now wearing (which she commandeered while disrobing me before playing dress up.) But I’m pretty attached after using all manner of hand gestures and facial expressions to show her how sad I would be to part with it she agrees to give it back, in return I give her and the children who have gathered around to watch this ridiculous scene all the candy I have left over from our mountain hike.

Around 3pm when we arrive in a small village after climbing a winding mud track a few miles off the main road. The homes are crowded closely together on a hillside with small pathways between and as we navigate these we encounter only small children. The oldest child we see in town is maybe 11 and cooking fish for himself and his little brother.

Let me just say here how astounded I am buy kids here and the difference in attitude towards raising them. Everywhere we’ve been in Vietnam we’ve seen children as young as 5 cleaning and taking care of the home and taking care of their younger siblings, cleaning them, watching them, carrying them on their backs as they sell trinkets in the street and feeding them. Imagine, would you trust your own children this way when your 7 yr old says they don’t need a babysitter? Think of the free time you could carve out if only your kids cleaned and cooked for themselves. I’m not saying saying children shouldn’t have a “childhood” where they get to enjoy themselves without pressure of responsibility but maybe …. just maybe we underestimate their capability to take on responsibility when given the chance?

There is one little girl, in the middle and though she is the smallest she looks somehow older than she is, like a shrunken old woman who is full of glee and laughter, she steals my heart, she literally laughs like Santa Clause, holding her belly. I’ll never forget her. 

Many of the children are curious of our presence, a few are apprehensive (one very young boy literally runs inside screaming bloody murder because of Guillem’s beard) but largely Guillem wins them over. Soon we have a gang of 5 between 3 and 6 following (leading?) us though the village. They play and do tricks, climbing water trough and leaping off ever aware of Guillem’s camera and the snap of a photo. As we head away from the village the children follow Guillem, farther and farther from their homes, like some benevolent Pied Piper with a camera for a flute.

[pangeen]

Hmong and corn

Mu cang chai,Vietnam by saravutwhanset

[southeastasianists]

A Hmong woman watches the sunset over the Mu Cang Chai rice terrace

[rapeculturerealities]

It was 8pm on a scorching summer night when Tien, a quiet, timid teenager, left her home in a coastal province of central Vietnam, supposedly to spend the night at her cousin’s. Or at least, that is what the 16-year-old had told her family. In fact, she planned to leave the village to escape the pressure on her to get married. Hoping her cousin would help her find a job, she slipped out the door.

It was nearly two years before she would return, by then having endured horrors beyond the imagination of most teenagers. The cousin she had trusted, rather than finding her a job, had sold her to a human trafficking broker in China who resold her as a bride. Tien became part of a depressing new statistic: the growing number of impoverished Vietnamese children being sold into forced marriages in China.

Tien had realised early on that something was amiss. “I gave her all of my money and my ID card,” Tien recalls. “She told me, ‘we’re going to find work. You said you wanted to leave that village so I’m taking you’.”

Her cousin had promised to take her to the big cities in the south, but instead they headed north, to the capital Hanoi. They switched vehicles in the capital and Tien fell asleep. When she woke, she was in China, where her cousin abandoned her after selling her to a trafficking broker.

Tien soon learned the broker had already matched her with a husband. She put up a fight, refusing to leave the broker’s house for four months, but eventually gave in, having met a fellow Vietnamese who told her the only way to escape the country would be to learn Chinese – and that the best way to do so would be to marry. So she let her broker find her a new match.

Tien’s ordeal is far from unique. Disappearances like hers have become so frequent in some rural areas of Vietnam many villagers assume that if a girl has been missing for more than a couple of days she must already be on the other side of the border.

Official statistics from Vietnam’s Department of General Police show that between 2011 and 2017, there were 2,700 reported cases of human trafficking, involving nearly 6,000 victims mainly from poor families in rural areas, with little access to education or economic opportunities. The official figures are widely thought to be dwarfed by the number of unreported cases. Police say selling children as brides is rife in provinces near the border with China and is on the rise.

In China, where men outnumber women by 34 million – more than the entire population of Malaysia – websites offer foreign brides to fill the gap. The service comes at a price, usually somewhere around the 10,000 yuan (US$1,500) mark.

The stories of the women who end up becoming these brides are nuanced. Some are lured into China with false promises of jobs and better lives, but end up forced into marriage or even brothels to become sex slaves. Some are tricked by someone they trust – a relative, a friend, even sometimes a boyfriend who promises to marry them, but instead sells them. Some girls are drugged, then taken across the border.

Other girls are given up voluntarily by families who are made to believe they will receive a dowry (often “less than the price of a buffalo”, villagers would say, usually between US$600-US$2,200), but instead find their daughters have been kidnapped and sold on.

Once the women have been married off, various forces conspire to keep them in China. Some are effectively imprisoned by their new husbands, others are too afraid to return as the stigma they bear means they will be unable to marry again in Vietnam.

Ma Thi Mai, a Hmong woman in her 30s from Sa Pa, an impoverished rural town in northern Vietnam, was sold by her boyfriend. “After my first husband died, a man got my number from an acquaintance and tried to reach out to me,” she recalls.

They soon became infatuated with each other – or so she thought. Within just two weeks he had asked her to leave her home in the terraced hills of Lao Chai village to visit his family in Lao Cai, a border city separated from China by a confluence of two rivers. It is notorious as a crossing point for human traffickers.

As they crossed the river in the dead of night on a raft, Mai was unaware they were entering another country. She had never travelled that far from her hometown.

“I did not know it was China until I saw the signboards in different letters and the people were speaking in a different language,” Mai says. “He sold me to a Chinese woman, who then sold me to other men.”

Mai became a modern-day slave. She was sold and auctioned at least five times, and was kept constantly on the road. Angry men would threaten and beat her if she protested or even wept. “They sold me like an animal,” she says.

Dang Thi Thanh Thuy, a case manager at Hagar International in Vietnam, an NGO that provides help for women and children who have escaped sexual slavery and human trafficking, says victims suffer psychological traumas that can scar them for life.

“The initial responses of women who have been rescued can be either panic or disassociation, depending on their ways of coping with trauma,” she says. “If they are frightened or agitated, they might even try to commit suicide, break down or scream. But if they experience emotional numbness, they feel depressed and have no motivation to do anything.

“All of these reactions are rooted in their insecurity. They no longer feel safe and protected.”

Lao Cai is infamous for trafficking. Ethnic minorities and children in Lao Cai are often the traffickers’ main targets, according to a report by Unicef in 2016.

Domestic violence is common in Lao Cai, even though in many cases the women there are the main providers for their family. The area is popular with backpackers and many Hmong women make a living as trekking guides or by selling souvenirs. Those who can’t speak English and have nothing to sell often survive by working on farms. Others look north to escape the poor living conditions.

Mai married her first husband when she was 14. By the time she was sold into her second marriage – sometime in her mid-20s, she is not sure of exactly when – she had already had two children.

Since she returned home – she escaped China by flagging down a police car – she has received neither psychological nor physical support, despite having reached out to local authorities.

She now spends most of her time toiling in the fields to support her sons.

Meanwhile, the “boyfriend” who kidnapped her walks around freely, despite having been reported for the crime. She saw him recently at the local church, wearing her Hmong xauv necklace.

“His father works for the local government,” she says. “I’m sure if he could sell me, he must have sold other women too. He was very experienced and knew what to do.”

“I wish he was in prison, because what he did was like killing me. He sold me, he stole my stuff. It still hurts so much when you think about it.”

At a nearby village in Ta Van, clay houses with thatched roofs are clustered together in the mountains, overlooking beautiful vast swathes of green terraced fields in the sunny May weather.

There, in their nearly empty, unequipped houses, two mothers, Sung Thi Ku, 54, and Giang Thi Su, 40, count their days waiting for news of their missing daughters.

Both of Ku’s daughters are in China – though neither has ever told Ku what they are doing there. Ku believes they were both sold to traffickers after leaving for China voluntarily, and blames their husbands’ families. “My first daughter’s husband told her he did not want her any more. His family mistreated her, and she wanted to leave for China, so she did with her friend,” Ku says.

In the five years since her eldest daughter left, Ku has heard nothing from her. Ku’s younger daughter left home at 21, about two and a half years ago. Soon after the 2018 Vietnamese Lunar New Year, Ku received a call from a Chinese number. It was her younger daughter.

“She told me to work hard and stay healthy, she was staying in China and she had a family and a child already,” Ku said.

“She told me she cannot come back to Vietnam.”

The other mother, Su, is still in contact with the daughter she lost. One day, her daughter had come home with a group of Chinese people who asked Su for her daughter’s hand to marry. Su did not know they were human traffickers at the time, even though things did not feel right.

“They kept touching my daughter’s hair, body, hands,” she recalls.

“They told us to trust them, that we could come with them to China for one or two days if we wanted.”

Su warned her daughter not to go with the people, but her daughter left anyway, accompanying the group with a friend and the friend’s father. They stayed at an inn near the border, and when the friend’s father woke up the next day the Chinese group had vanished along with the girls and without paying the dowry. The girls were just 17 years old.

Su’s daughter, now 20, was married to a man whose first wife had died. He does not allow her to return to Vietnam because he fears she would run away. She is not even allowed to call.

“I was angry and I cried a lot,” Su says, breaking into tears. “I thought those people did some magic to my daughter, that is why she did not listen to me any more.”

Out of the six thousand victims identified by Vietnam’s Department of General Police, only around 600 have returned to Vietnam.

Among them is Cau, a Hmong student who was kidnapped by the aunt of one of her friends and taken to China when she was 17. The aunt then sold both Cau and her own niece to traffickers.

The traffickers took Cau across the country, to Zhejiang where Cau met many young Vietnamese women, from Son La, Lai Chau, and even her own hometown Mu Cang Chai, who were eager to meet her.

“I met a 14-year-old girl who had been kidnapped and was married to a 36-year-old man,” Cau recalls. “I asked her how she knew I was in town, she said her Chinese husband had told her there was a Vietnamese girl who had just arrived. She also came from Mu Cang Chai, and she told me she missed her hometown, so she wanted to see me and talk to me.”

After three months, Cau managed to escape the house where she was being kept and ran to the nearest police station. Her description helped the police to locate the house where she had been held.

The Chinese traffickers were arrested, but the Vietnamese ones had already escaped. Her friend is still missing.

Vietnam lacks a comprehensive repatriation mechanism to reintegrate human trafficking victims into ordinary life. Women who voluntarily went to China – even those lured under false pretences like the daughters of Ku and Su – are considered “off record” and do not qualify for any of the state initiatives offering financial or psychological support. The same is true of those women who, like Mai, escape their traffickers and return to Vietnam under their own steam.

Yet these women are in some ways the most vulnerable. Their wounds never completely heal because of the social stigma and discrimination they may experience. “In our society, there is still a common response towards human trafficking: victim-blaming,” says Thuy, the case manager at Hagar. “Many people still label the victims as ‘bad girls who deserve to be trafficked’, or ‘lazy, greedy people who want to earn money easily’.

“Such reactions exacerbate their past traumas, and can easily traumatise them again. They come to perceive themselves the way the society does, and start blaming themselves.”

Back in Hanoi, Tien, now 21, has gone back to school and is starting a new life. When she first returned to the country, neighbours made her feel unwelcome.

“When I got back, I felt like there was a wall in front of me, especially when I talked to other people,” Tien says. “I was very afraid. I didn’t want to talk. Many people would make jokes out of my pain and thought it was funny.”

Her past came back to haunt her. The family in China she had escaped from recently contacted her to try to persuade her to return. She changed her sim card, fearing they might one day track her down.

Now she doesn’t tell people she meets about her past; none of her schoolmates are aware of what happened to her. She has regained her self-confidence, something she attributes to being encouraged to continue her studies by the staff at Hagar.

“It feels like a dream I’ve had for so long,” Tien says. “I’ve learned to forget about my past and feel more integrated into society.”

Tien’s ambition now is to become a social worker, just like the ones who brought her back to life.

[north-vietnam]

Rice terraces in Mu Cang Chai (Yen Bai)

Mu Cang Chai is in Yen Bai. You can see there beautiful rice terraces, nature and the ethnic groups of Hmongs. This place is not so visited by foreign tourists and travelers and from here you can continue to Sapa.

How to travel from Hanoi to Sapa/Lao Cai

Weather in Vietnam and what to prepare

[connor-burrows]

Amazing Mu Cang Chai by Jarmila

[dariomarcollection]

Vietnam Mu Cang Chai Hmong tribe woman

[whiskeygin23]

Sunset light over rice terraces in winter by Jarmila

[hellotravelur-blog]

5 Gloriously Green Destination Places To Explore!

There’s no end to the number of beautiful places to visit, but we’ve scoured the world to find the most serene and exhilarating green destination places.

These top 5 spots get our vote for the lushest hues and the most spectacular vistas anywhere.

1. Tortuguero National Park, Costa Rica:

Along the coastline of the protected Tortuguero National Park is the famous sea turtle nesting areas. But, the surrounding jungles, with their extraordinary biodiversity this green destination is a heaven on earth for the nature-loving travelers among us. You don't have to walk the entire length of the park to explore. The marked trail along the beach is used to mostly observe the turtles nesting, but we recommend you to get a boat to see and explore the park. You can still get in that workout by rowing rented canoes and kayaks. Guides are essential to show around the best nesting sites. They are inexpensive and plentiful.

2. Black Forest, Germany:

If the words Black Forest brings an image of the decadent dessert cake to your mind and not this verdant region in Germany, we have got a treat for your sore eyes! Nestled in southwest Germany, the settings of many Brothers’ Grimm fairytales draw inspiration from the bucolic towns of the Black Forest. Germans love their physical activity, so once you finish up your kayaking, hiking, and/or cycling holiday, you can ease those aching muscles whilst relieving your travel experiences with your group at one of the many world-renowned spas this green destination has to offer.

3. Mitre Peak, New Zealand:

Mitre Peak is about 6,000 feet tall and is notoriously difficult to climb. If the adventurist in you wants to add this to a green destination to your ever-growing travel diaries, we totally recommend this. It juts straight up off the coast of New Zealand’s south island at Milford Sound. Mitre Peak is technically a fjord – if you’re down Milford Sound way, don’t miss this stunning vision hulking over the tranquil drops of the Sound. Talk to your travel planner to get to this lush green destination. You will definitely yearn to go back when you think of the travel memories from this trip.

4. YenBai, Vietnam:

YenBai is a large agricultural region inhabited by Hmong rice and corn farmers in the People’s Republic of Vietnam. The harvest season in mid-September is a popular and vibrant time to plan a vacation to this exotic green destination and experience a unique culture. Mu Cang Chai terraced fields are the most famous landmark of Yen Bai. Visit in May-June or September-October, to witness the marvelous terraced rice fields. Visit during December - January if you want to experience a comforting dip in the hot springs amidst the cold winter of the North.

5. Isle of Skye, Scotland:

We’re gonna let you in on a secret. Though Ireland is known for its sprawling green destinations, there are parts of Scotland that put this moniker to shame. To whit – the Isle of Skye. Whether you fancy village life, hiking, or bird/whale watching. Portree serves as an ideal point to witness the island’s many hidden gems. Don’t take our word for it – just plan a trip and go there. You will not be disappointed. Enjoy quiet mornings and evenings by staying the night in the Isle of Skye to explore the island when it's still tranquil. This also means you don’t have to rush around so much and can enjoy a leisurely dinner and evening walk after a day of exploration.

[i-wish-peace]

SUNSET AT MU CANG CHAI RICE FIELDS Photography by © (Tran Minh Dzung). A Hmong woman watching sunset at Mu Cang Chai rice terrace. This region of northwest Vietnam is poor and relatively undeveloped but in credibly rich in natural beauty. It has been recognized as one of the most unique landscapes of Vietnam.