So we have been in the northwest mountains for the last day. We are quite close to Laos, as a matter of fact. The lake resort is super quiet and restful, and today we started with a boat ride down the lake to see some of the fishing weirs as well as a floating island fish farm. Raising catfish is one of the industries here and the floating fish farm actually also serves as a guest house.
Once back from that we drove to one of the local mountain villages called Mai Chau and had an amazing multi course home cooked lunch before starting out on a long walk. There are multiple ethnic minorities in Vietnam, and this village is populated primarily by White Thai. They originally came from the area that is now Thailand hundreds of years ago, but their dialect is now different from Thai. They have a distinctive style of dress and live in houses on stilts. This helps to prevent pests, improves airflow and is a place to house livestock. Historically, when there were tigers in this area, it was a way to guard against harm from them as well. The White Thai have thatched roofs as well.
The people in these villages live on subsistence farming of rice and carp augmented by tourism in the form of home stays. From Trinh we learned that they have 2 rice crops a year here in the mountains, and produce enough rice for themselves, but not to sell. Vietnam in general is the 3rd largest producer of rice in the world. The rice was being harvested here while we were there. It is cut manually with a sickle, bundled and threshed. The rice is then spread out on large tarps to dry before being brought to a place for further milling. This requires further raking to ensure it dries. It’s an all hands on deck kind of work. They then burn the straw left behind after the threshing which the government is trying to get them to stop doing because of environmental concerns but it’s hard to switch practices.
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