Sa Pa – Cocly, Boats, and Jeeps

I just ate a large amount of plain M&M’s and 200ml of Vinamilk.

This morning we recruited our fellow trekker, Englishman Julian, to join us on a day trip to Cocly Market, a remote village market occurring only on Tuesdays and primarily for different tribes to trade amongst themselves. We witnessed a new tribe there today, the Flower H’mong, who dress in really bright colors. We were syked to find out that Tuyen, our previous guide, would be accompanying us on this tour as our guide as well.

The market was cool and I bought a few items but the real meat of the trip was the jeep ride and the boat ride. The jeep ride was bouncy and rugged and muddy in spots, sometimes reminiscent of the minibus ride to Siem Reap. The jeeps are sweet, old dark green military beasts from Russia. This particular truck, which the driver owns, had a hard time starting every time he turned it off. A couple times he honked the horn to make sure there was even power because turning the key did nothing. But eventually it would turn over and rumble to life. After only 20 minutes from the start of our downhill journey we could smell brake miasma. Sure enough about an hour in, he stopped and checked fluids, and then once we were dropped off at the market (a 3 hour drive) he immediately started working on replacing the brake pads or something. He was a good driver but even I flinched a few times at how close we came to large oncoming trucks. One part of the road had some major construction going on and a section was super muddy and rutty and looked impassible to me but he waited for the old ladies pushing their bicycles loaded with fruit, plants, clothes, you name it, to clear out and then he made a run for it. We made it no problem but it’s a 4-wheel drive Russia jeep so it better.

The construction we went through was incredible. Everything is dirty and muddy and chaotic. The workers are out there building the road basically by hand! Seriously, guys are picking up large rocks and carrying them over to their spot and dropping them where they want them. The heat is beating down on them are slowly trudging away and random activities. Some are doing the rock thing on the edge of the road, some are building a barrier in the middle of the road with short concrete slabs, some are lounging under blue-tarp lean-tos, some are kicked back in steamrollers flattening down new pavement, some are shoveling. There is organization, don’t get me wrong, there are different crews working on different sections of road but I had to look pretty hard to see it. Hey, if it works, it works.

We didn’t get to splash any tourists today but our driver did get one Vietnamese guy on a motorbike. He was carrying a big load and almost out of the waterfall puddle but our driver went anyway and got him pretty good. I think the truck drivers love to soak people. The Vietnamese man didn’t react in fierce anger like the tourists though, he just looked at himself and back at us a few times. Vietnamese seem to have a lot of patience and calmness. It’s the reason their traffic system works. We discussed why it works with a Canadian guy during the 3-day trek and he was adamant that it works solely on survival, that the people are in fact angry at each other on the road but in order to not kill themselves they let others ahead of themselves. His adamant stand is simply false though. You can tell simply by looking at their faces that they are calm and patient and really don’t care if they get ahead of someone or if someone gets ahead of them. It’s not a competition. Sorry to tangent off into motorbike street talk again but I love it. An analytical note – Tuyen told us today that Vietnamese can get their motocycle license at 18 and their car license at 21. To be a moto driver, one who drives others for a fee, you have to be 21.

After the Cocly Market experience, we had a boat ride down the Chai River for a couple hours. Tuyen said he likes to make his tours special, so instead of eating lunch at the market, we stopped off at an expansive cave on the side of the river. So I ate lunch in a cave on the side of a very jungly river in Northern Viet Nam today. Yea it was sweet. Like I just said, the side of the river is really jungly and green. I can’t imagine there not being scary animals within the dense shrubbery. One interesting moment was seeing a man’s chest and head floating down the river. He was riding a submerged log. Oh, the river is a river, large and swift. This ain’t you’re grandma’s river. The boat was a rusty pile of metal with a rickety wooden canopy frame and a tarp roof. I’ve never seen a motor like this one before, super long, perhaps 15 feet long. So we puttered down the river enjoying the wind in our hair and the spectacular jungle mountains surrounding us. At the end, we disembarked to the standard mass-sweat-inducing heat and a sticky jeep ride home to Sa Pa.