Day two the fun began in earnest since we were now climbing in elevation and yet had not reached the kind of mountain scenery in which things become stark and treeless. Long rolling valleys and gentle slopes, sometimes dramatic far-off peaks and forever and always the green pastel calming horizontal layer of rice paddies. These fields have been carved by an eternity of generations out of the dark soft soil; mini-dams are piled and fortified with bamboo shoots, pathways are elevated between the sunken drowned pools. All throughout the busy ancestral holdings are men and women in conical hats, their backs bent and their lives up to their knees in paddy water.

I must say here that the road, the famous Route Coloniale Numero Six from Mai Chau to Son La had everything in it to make me as happy as a lark. Little villages with wooden houses and thatched roofs, children beaming at you ecstatically when you drive through…and the longer we drove the farther we got from the cultural sprawl which was the disease of the 20^th  Century. The road north took us to less concrete, less television noise and less psycho-aggressive money grabbing.

Climbing these legendary hills we could look up and see that on certain slopes pine trees – evergreens! – were living in perfect harmony with palm trees. The sun was shining and the car was purring like a kitten. Villages slept in the heat of midday, their meagre streets full of pigs, chickens and water buffalo. I could think of only three words to satisfy my need for expression: I love Asia!

We arrived in Sonla without a hitch and checked into the Government Guest House. In Sonla we did not visit the French prison and we did not visit the hot springs, but instead spent a great morning at the town market taking in the local colour and admiring wonderful diversity of the tribes-people come to trade. There were Tays and Tais, Muongs and Nungs, H’mongs and Jarais, Bahnars and Sedangs, Daos and Edes. Or maybe there weren’t. Who knows? I promised myself that once I got back to Hanoi I would delve into a study of these people.

For here, amongst these hill tribes was a mystery older than time. The French called them Montagnards and the rest of the Asia called them Tribes. The official Vietnamese nomenclature is Ethnic Minorities. And they are everywhere, as beautiful as rainbows carrying with them their age-old rural ways, spirit worship and mountain gestures.