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We spent a few days in the Mai Chau area, around 4 hours west of Hanoi. This is hill country, though not like any hill you’ve seen at home. Not so much rolling as flat valley land surrounded by sheer hills rising straight up out of the ground. Everything flat is planted. Everything else is anybody’s guess.

This kind of topography makes for tricky driving, though there are mitigating factors. First is the fact that once you get off the main highway, and maybe the road after that, the paved surface shrinks to something that only aspires to two lanes, meaning that the driver does not have to waste a lot of precious decision-making bandwidth wondering how far to pull over when faced with an oncoming dump truck. The other factor is that the higher bits of road are often up in the low hanging clouds, which seem like thick fog but are softer and billow more and move around in a way that fog does not – the almost complete lack of visibility at these times takes the stress out of pulling out to pass going uphill on a cloud-wet curve, since you cannot see if there is anything coming your way and therefore have nothing to worry about. At least that was our interpretation of our driver’s interpretation of the conditions, since he was steady and steadfast but moderate in all respects including his completely unambitious approach to passing, which seemed to involve some concern that he would bruise the bottom of his right foot if he accelerated immodestly while passing uphill in the rain and fog.

But we got there in the end. And had some great walks among what our guide referred to variously as “tribal” or ethnic” people. Our guide was Viet, the main ethnic group, who speak Vietnamese, the official language. But there is a host of other ethnic groups, who migrated from China or India or elsewhere in south-east Asia at different times and who make up a reasonable chunk of the population here and in Lao, Cambodia and Thailand, as the political boundaries do not neatly correspond to the whereabouts of all the groups.

So the first group we were introduced to were the Thai people, who have their own language or dialect, I’m not sure which. They tend to live in the valleys, and many live in traditional stilt houses with the main quarters upstairs and out of the way if it floods during the rainy season. We were connected to a local man who had moved away when young to work in a large city and who returned to the “easier” life of farming after a number of years. He introduced us to the famous Thai grilled pork skewers, and also to the famous Thai rice liquor, distilled from cooked and fermented rice, which is sold as liquor in its initial incarnation at 50% alcohol or rice wine (although it is not wine) when cut back to about 12%, though we declined a taste when the proprietress of the still took a ladle that might last have been used to clean out a motorcycle exhaust system and scooped a few ounces from a barrel into a lid taken off a gas tank and offered us a hit.

But everyone we met was friendly, and no one acted like we were the intruders we felt we were. Apparently not many western visitors end up here. But they should…