Khanh village, Hoa Binh provice
Trip Start
Sep 17, 2011
1
2
8
Trip End
Oct 01, 2011
Where I stayed
Cuc Phuong National Park
Somewhere in, International
Thursday, September 22, 2011
This was beyond any doubt my most remembered and cherished day. It was trully a traditional day of Vietnamese hospitality and culture. Once again the bus took us from our wonderful lakeside bungalows with lunch provided by our hosts to the start of our trek. Sadly we had to split at this point into two groups. The open dark green swimming pool I had found on the net was now no longer a mystery. There it was ready for a carnival with frogs in it, no pumps no filters. Luckily I was going on the trek with Mr Viet. He is an amazing man with such passion and knowledge for his beloved primates. First stop was the Ancient Tree for a snack. The track was easy, wide and flat but all this was soon to change as we headed off deeper and deeper into the mountains. The track disappeared and re appeared many times. We stopped to rest mostly at either the bottom of climbs and or at the top of them. The going was hard and hot , we sweated and slurped our way through about 6 hours of beautiful forest. The most amazing land features of limestone sink wells were everywhere and some could have swallowed our bus.
We were able to very occasional glimpse far away destinations through the thick forest. We saw only habitat that day till we came to the very last downhill . It was a glorious sight through the twilight of the day the Muong Village buildings nestled on the opposite slope.
We stumbled into the village only to find we were first the rest of our group was nowhere to be seen. I discovered the children and we played a spontaneous game of whose afraid of the bearded white man.
The bus and the exhausted walkers arrived with tales of endless steep stairs and we politely listened knowing we had not seen a stair all day. Men were given a seperate house to the women, we stayed in the Village leaders house. The feast and celebration was held in the womens house where a large banquet was prepared for all of us. Green tea and a lovely local rice wine was supplied in a sort of shot glass. The evenings entertainment was traditional dances and songs performed by the ladies followed by our preformance of songs and our participation in the bamboo dancing routine. There was even more alcohol to finish off the night which involved a large clay pot with multiple metre long straws for a communal slurping. This was prepared specially by the women for us and them. We then all retreated to our allocated houses to find our bed rolls all spread out on the floor made up complete with mosquito netting.
