All Summer Long

A Spanish guy is feeding chicken and vegetables to a dog under the table with chopsticks. In fact, this dog, who is forever wandering the home-stay in search of something he’ll never find, has sampled a vast range of dishes tonight. He’s had the pork, the chicken, the vegetable. Someone asks the question: “What does he usually eat? I can’t imagine them having tins of dog food around here.” Someone else brings into the discussion the notion of rabies. Is it really appropriate to dip our utensils in the mouth of something that we do not know?

After Mi left us in Sa Pa last night, we lost the hotel. Guests from the other hotels in the area were floating around in golf buggies. They were being ferried up and down a hill that we must have climbed ourselves three times already in search of our room. With little time to memorise the details of our surroundings when we first arrived, the hotel simply could not be found. To learn of our position on the Earth in those few seconds would have been like counting debris in a whirlwind. Impossible.

Of course, we made it in the end. I had an unsuccessful breakfast in the morning and swept my own whirlwind through the dining room when, after filling my bowl with muesli, I walked over to the milk jug and banged my head on a beam. The cereal flew everywhere. It went over the buffet, in the milk, on my head. A woman gasped in shock at the scene—it’s common that people gasp when I ceremoniously bang my head—and I just had to limp away and put it all behind me whilst my wife just laughed continuously. Watching this sullen dog lick the residue from the chopsticks reminds me of the kind of day that breakfast predicted.

The trek itself was free from Mi. Our tour guide has been replaced by a Vietnamese duplicate of Jack Black. He led us through the rain along a wide path that twisted through fog and fields. The best time to come to Sa Pa for the views is apparently the end of September/early October. We’re too late. Nevermind. The contoured rice fields are really the defining features of Sa Pa, as well as their colossal backdrop of mountains, and we saw plenty to understand why the region is recognised for its natural beauty. The walk was really special, although we were soaked through to the bones, and it cemented Sa Pa as one of our favourite places we have had the pleasure to visit in Vietnam.

The rest of the group had abandoned the tour early because of the rain, but we had to continue through the downpour given that we were the only ones staying overnight in the village. An Irish guy called Ollie wanted to walk with us but he had been outvoted by the others and there would only be one bus back into town today. When he asked the guide what he could do for the rest the time during which he had been expecting to trek, the guide suggested a visit to the “snow festival” in town. We set Ollie straight on the fact that this particular snow was actually just a huge piece of polystyrene that had been blasted across the roads. Ollie, quietly furious, argued his case to the guide and eventually joined us for the final kilometres into the Tu Van village. And that’s pretty much everything that happened in between the disappearance of Mi and the appearance of us in the home-stay.

Tired from the walk, I’m now given a jolt as the dog has started barking at some cat that’s appeared, another tired-looking fixture of the home-stay. The two have been separated and the cat is walking precariously on a beam suspended above the dining area. She looks shiftier than her nemesis. Who knows what she’s eaten, prancing about as she is with the smug look of something that’s been fed by hand.

The head of the family brings out a few bottles of water and a thimble each to drink it from, which no one touches until it turns out it’s not water at all; it’s rice wine! …some lethal moonshine he’s produced from a PVA glue canister that he’s now holding above his head like a trophy to show us the excessive volume of spirit he’s planning to charm us with. Nicola, I and everyone else all blindly make a toast.

Things become progressively hazy as we drink the wine like locals with all of our new friends. At one point there’s a power outage and the host’s wife is manipulating a circuit breaker in our room. There’s a suggestion that the dog has started to drink and he’s running the length of the room with absolute conviction.

We’re lost in a discussion that gravitates between German law and the merging freeways in Los Angeles. As he seems to be sitting outside of the conversation, I offer the host a shot of rice wine and he refuses. “I drank too much last night,” he says. “Look, my lips are swollen.” This bodes well for us. He’s kissing the air and I’m unsure how it wasn’t obvious before; he now looks like he’s been stung! Behind him, the dog is being sick. In patches all across the room, there’s a greater volume of food on the floor than we were ever served. The cat has climbed into bed with one of the guests. Maybe rice wine is the tonic and the map that could have guided us last night to our missing hotel. Somehow we make our way to our room.

I can’t feel my legs when I wake up in the night. I see the Vietnamese Jack Black, somewhere in the drugged transitions between dreams. He’s laughing at our shoes, and he’s telling us that tomorrow the ground will be slippery.