Tribal dreams in Vietnam
Karaoke with the locals in Da Lat
Epic love poem inspires art, study
Happy December 2004, Vietnam Art Gallery subscribers!
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This month we feature stories from travellers to Vietnam's technicolor shores. Read about trekking through the Hoang Lien mountains, karoake Da Lat style, and a maths teacher with a not-so-hidden passion for love poetry.
=============== CONTENTS ===============
- Tribal dreams. While on a trekking holiday in the high country of Vietnam, Gary Tippet discovers the enduring spirit of the H'mong. Go >>
- Karaoke with the locals. Dear Diary - 20 November 2004: Oh what a night! Hanging out in beautiful Da Lat, we decided to give karaoke a try last night.
can often make an impression on a traveller that will remain with them for decades to come. Go >>
- Epic love poem inspires art, study. Nearly 200 years after its creation, the 3,254-verse poem, The Story of Kieu, remains a masterpiece. It tells the story of a beautiful, gifted, and virtuous girl who was driven to sell herself to save her family. Despite seven marriages and three suicide attempts, she is presented as being pure of heart and faithful to her first love. It's a story that still captivates the hearts and minds of Vietnamese people. Go >>
- Featured artist. A much loved artist amongst our customers, Hoang Minh's work is starting to get the attention it deserves from art collectors beyond Vietnam's shores. Go >>
=== Tribal dreams ===
We were in the magical north Vietnam, on a trekking trip through the mountains. Looking around me, the scenery was even more vivid than the brochures had described.
My teenage son and I had signed up for an invigorating five-day stroll through the Hoang Lien mountains, in the country's north-west corner. Except "stroll" is a bit of a misnomer.
As we joined our small tour group and met our local guides, Huan and Du, he proceeded to set the scene: "Up to heaven today, down to hell tomorrow." It was meant as reassurance, his way of telling my son and me that it might be a long, long way up today but it would be all downhill tomorrow. But something went badly awry in the translation: if this was the way to heaven, what awaited on the route to hell?
We took a stop-start Russian jeep through mudslides and thick fog to the hamlet of Ta Van, in the valley 20 kilometres from the tourist hill station of Sapa, and started climbing. Four wheezing, aching hours later we were still ascending - and finally realising that each time our guide Huan suggested "We take the short cut?" the sensible response should have been "Please God, no!"...
Huan had a disdain for the usual definition of track or any slope under 45 degrees. So we clambered and slithered up what seemed little more than faint scrapes in the dirt; rock-strewn gullies that would turn into creeks at the first drizzle; and crumbling, soapy inclines where even the scrub struggled to hang on. Glimpses of a proper path, paralleling us a tantalising 500 metres away, added to the torture. Then, late in the afternoon, we topped the Hoang Lien range at about 2000 metres, headed down to the Arcadian illusion of Seo Mi Ti and the pain went away.
The declining afternoon sun was pinking the mountains above Seo Mi Ti. The valley was long and wide and brilliantly green, its grey-timbered, windowless homes keeping such careful distance from each other that the place couldn't fairly be called a village.
We staggered down to Seo Mi Ti, lung-busted, calves and quads burning, shirts salted with sweat from a half-day of hard climbing through the ragged, slippery foothills of Vietnam's highest mountain, Fansipan. But this lush bowl of serenity and the shy smiles from the villagers we passed were instantly reviving.
There are somewhere between 6 million and 8 million hill tribe people in Vietnam. The French named them Montagnards, or mountain people, a word perfumed with a colonial-era sort of romance.
Du, our ever-sprightly guide, offered us insight about the locals as we entered the village of the H'mong. "There are many different H'mong," Du told us. "Red H'mong, Green, White and Blue H'mong and Flower H'mong." The 200 people of Seo Mi Ti were Black H'mong, short, nuggety and reserved, dressed in the distinctive home-spun hemp clothing dyed deep black-blue with natural indigo. The old grandmother who served us tea kept a deep barrel of inky water and soaked cloth in it three times a day for a month to get the perfect shade.
The men wore simple tunics and shorts, the women more elaborate outfits: skirts, aprons, a cylindrical pill-box hat and strips of cloth as wrap-around leggings. Their tunics were decorated with subtly patterned embroidery and they wore their entire tiny fortunes as silver hoop bangles, necklaces and cluster earrings.
As the moon rose we slept that night on the pounded clay quadrangle of the school after taking our meal and litres of anaesthetising rice wine with the teachers - four ethnic Vietnamese indentured into the highlands - who shared a single room and a pair of beds, a wonderful view down the valley and the demeanour of exiles.
We'd walked in about mid-afternoon of Du's "down to hell" day - which started out closer to Nirvana: an amble through a gentle valley, skirting terraced paddy fields and strung out villages, crossing musical streams on a primitive aerial ropeway and an old suspension bridge. Then, after lunch, it fulfilled its promise.
"Bum-skiing," said the ever-smiling Du. Which meant one of us had lost our footing on the greasy track and completed the descent on our backside. We'd short-cut again, slip-sliding on a skinny trail tunnelling through dense scrub - " be careful of snakes' - and boulder-hopping across rivers. Honey thorns whipped arms and calves, adding blood to our perspiration, which at least made life easier for the leeches.
Ta Trung Ho was respite. A Red Dao community that had not seen foreigners before 1996, it was made prosperous through trade in medicinal Thao Qua, the seeds and leaves of black cardamom. "A very special medicine, very expensive," explained Du. "People put it in their food for flavour or boil it in water for their bath. It is good for the complexion and perfume and stops aches and pains and the flu."
The Red Dao are among the most distinctive of the hill tribes. Our host, Mr Phan, wore a beret and bomber jacket but his wife and daughters dressed in traditional style: Bright scarlet tunics, overlaid with panels of embroidery. The married women shave their hairline and tuck the rest into large, elaborate tricorn turbans hung with beads, silver and coins.
After a happy feast of duck shared with the Phans and their neighbours, we went to sleep that night on a raised platform in a corner of the Phan's timber home, Mrs Phan sitting by the fire, embroidering by the anaemic light of a single electric globe, her kids writing characters with some coloured pencils we'd brought them.
We had trekked for two days through Than Phu, a Tay people village of thatched stilt houses set in a crescent around vivid green rice paddies; Ban Ho, another Tay centre where we stayed with the local village head and policeman, whose life mission seemed to be hospitably disposing of the town's rice wine surplus - "One more? Just 50 per cent?"; and Sin Chai, a sleepy Dao hamlet.
The rain came on our last night and we bum skied and stumbled through the morning mud to Su Pan, a drizzle-grey roadside strip where we met our jeep for the trip back to Sapa. A couple of kilometres later we were bogged floor deep and had to be towed out by an earthmover's truck.
When we pulled off our clay-encrusted boots there were 50-cent-sized heel blisters to be lanced with bamboo slivers. The nails of my big toes were deep blue and would fall off a few weeks later. We were filthy, sweaty-ripe and leg-weary and when Du asked if we'd enjoyed ourselves we told him we'd gladly turn around and do it all again.
=== Karaoke with the locals ===
Dear Diary - 20 November 2004: Oh what a night! Hanging out in beautiful Da Lat, we decided to give karaoke a try last night so we took Hng (pronounced hung) the courier from the bus, out with us for a laugh. The karaoke here is like it is in Japan - with a small private room to yourselves complete with its own machine. As this is Vietnam it has four languages to choose from - I had enough trouble with English.
Drank plenty of the local wine, taught Hng how to do 'New York/New York complete with steps and Ba Ba Ba Ba Barbara Anne.... two and a half hours flew by and we staggered out into the cold night.
We were going to see if Hng was ok the next morning and realised we must put his name first before asking "if he was well" (work it out for yourselves!).
Had a full days trek in the mountains from 8 a.m. to 4.30p.m. Started in the low lands with tea plantations, the first stream we crossed just had 2 logs laid side-by-side, great fun as they were wet and slippery. Or two guides Fouk and Khan said they had 'better' bridges for us to cross later.
These turned out to be 2 suspension bridges like you see in Indiana Jones. With rusty steel wire instead of ropes and what looked like sides off packing cases for the rungs. You had to concentrate as the bridges swung with each others' steps. Workplace Health and Safety - forget it. There were only 2 others in our party, Karl and Karyn from Sweden, ya.
The lunch on top of the highest peak with the river rushing below and just the sound of the wind in the pine trees was something else. It was so quiet you could hear people talking on the other side of the valley. This must have been why, a little later when coming across a group of locals picking coffee beans they greeted us with "Hello", "How are you?" in good English, before we had a chance to speak. They must have known for at least 20 noisy minutes that we were on the way.
Today I've learned; Ca Mon (like they say 'cam on' in Easter Enders) for Thank you, My Chow for Hello, and Dam Bik for Goodbye. Waiting for some other useful words.
With the rain pouring down at the end of the hike my dad started whistling 'Singing in the Rain', the 2 Swedes started singing along with him - and the Vietnamese guides joined in. A jolly time was had by all.
== Epic love poem inspires art, study ==
Nearly 200 years after its creation, the 3,254-verse poem, The Story of Kieu, remains a masterpiece.
In Kieu, author Nguyen Du (1766-1820) tells the story of a beautiful, gifted, and virtuous girl who was driven to sell herself to save her family. Despite seven marriages and three suicide attempts, she is presented as being pure of heart and faithful to her first love. It's a story that still captivates the hearts and minds of Vietnamese people.
In Ho Chi Minh city, researcher Pham Dan Que is a man obsessed with The Story of Kieu. When Que's not making a living by teaching mathematics, he's devoted to the study of the country's most beloved and respected literary work. At the age of 69, Que has written 10 research papers on the subject of Kieu.
Written in the old Vietnamese script called Nom, the 19th century story captivates the reader as they follow the adventures of Kieu, and the trials and tribulations she encounters in an older, feudalistic Vietnam.
So acclaimed is the epic poem that its author Nguyen Du has been named by UNESCO as a World Personality.
"I have devoted my time to research the work's publications, translations and readers," Que said. "The Story of Kieu has been translated into many languages."
At least 10 copies of the French-language version have been published in France and Viet Nam since the 19th century, Que said.
The first French version of the story in two volumes was translated by Abel des Michels and published in Paris in 1885. Further versions have been published in France on average every decade since.
Que's research shows that at least seven authors have penned sequels to the work, all in verse, from as early as 1896 to the latest, created in 1990.
Que said many cultural activities in Vietnam are based on The Story of Kieu, including meetings organised in which poetry lovers recite verses or tell fortunes by reading a page from the text.
His research shows that Viet Nam's first movie, made in 1924 in Ha Noi, was called Kim Van Kieu, after the work.
Painters have also been inspired by Kieu's story. Artist Nguyet Dinh featured verses from the poem in a calligraphy work on 1m by 1.6m paper. The 50kg work is Viet Nam's heaviest book, and is kept at Nguyen Du Memorial House in Central Viet Nam's Nghi Xuan District in Ha Tinh Province.
Following is an excerpt from the poem:
No more than one-hundred years of life on earth have people,
The character of talent and the character of fate, nearly always hate each other.
Countless things gazed make for a painful heart.
It is not strange to despise beauty - a private tempest,
The blue sky has acquired a habit of lashing rosy cheeks with jealousy.
==== Featured artist: Hoang Minh ====
A much loved artist amongst our customers, Hoang Minh's work is starting to get the attention it deserves from art collectors beyond Vietnam's shores. Vibrant, simple portals to languid moments, Hoang's works easily delight the eye and lift the spirits.
Hoang Minh - Game 3 - $300 - more >>
Hoang Minh - Game 1 - $300 - more >>
Nguyen Nguyen - Lotus 2 - $400 - more >>
Nguyen Duy Nhi - New 97 - $130 - more >>
Thank you for reading! We wish you peace and good fortune for the coming month!
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