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Well what to do after levering yourself out of your railway compartment at 7:00 am except grab some wicked strong Vietnamese coffee and a bowl of Pho and then head for a market. This short post follows that lead.

The train disgorged us in Lao Cai, on the Red River, in the Sa Pa province, at a station a few hundred metres south of the Chinese border. Our guide waved at a couple of nearby high rise apartments and said “that’s China” in the same breezy tone that she used when telling us shortly afterward that (i) Vietnam’s last war was with China and (ii) naive local Vietnamese minority women are sometimes lured across the border and then “sold”. Nothing about that made us feel more relaxed. We drove along a river that forms the boundary between the countries for a little bit, noting the formidable fence topped with razor wire installed on the Chinese side ostensibly to keep the Vietnamese out but working equally well, one might think, to keep the Chinese in.

Anyhow, off we went to the weekly Black H’Mong market at Coc Ly, high up in the hills overlooking a big hydro dam. This is the real deal. While there were some western tourists like us wandering around, the crowd was mostly locals from one or other of the nearby minority ethnic groups, mostly dressed in the traditional garb of their group, by which they can readily be identified if you know what to look for. Everything was on offer – colourful containers for carrying pesticides or just water on your back to the fields; the ubiquitous rubber boots that everyone wears for field work if not going barefoot (we saw one guy working a rototiller uphill in a steep field while barefoot, which may not be exactly according to the user’s manual); replacement hoe heads; fabrics embroidered and dyed but not to be looked at for more that 1.3 seconds unless you want the proprietress to pounce on you as an obviously motivated buyer; piles of roots and spices; great huge jumbles of truly lethal looking rat traps that implied truly lethal rats. And, as they used to say, that’s not all. There was produce of all kinds. There was also (spoiler alert – I included no pictures of this next category) an area where animals were sold – small black pigs sold to be raised into bigger pigs; goats sold to be braised, not raised; and others who were thankfully sold out so that we would not have to be told exactly what that was all about.

And then we got all of that out of our systems with a little boat ride down the Chay River. Or rather two boats, as there is a dam half way and you have to exit the first boat, after the boat turns for shore and you scan the bank for the jetty, and then realize that of course there isn’t one but there is a gap between two rocks that leads to a rocky path that is not quite vertical and so therefore counts as the “landing”, walk about a kilometre described cheerfully as “a couple of hundred metres”, and then scramble down another path while keeping an eye out for water buffalo to leap from the last bit of dirt above the water line to the bow of the second boat. No problem. It was a beautiful ride down a lazy river and between jungle covered cliffs among the high mountains of Sa Pa. And it meant that we did not have to repeat the trip up on the usual one lane two way road with excellent views of the valley floor from the passenger side of the vehicle, unimpeded by anything so woke as a guardrail.