Ban Ho Village

The wooden floor of a stilt house is warm underfoot. Beneath a row of trees, the Mường Hoa stream murmurs. In the late afternoon, the smell of cơm lam drifts faintly through the kitchen smoke. Cơm lam is sticky rice cooked in a tube of young bamboo over a fire. This is how the village of Bản Hồ welcomes a guest.

Bản Hồ is a commune in Sa Pa, in Lào Cai Province. Unlike the villages around the town of Sa Pa, it lies much lower. The Lào Cai newspaper says it is about thirty kilometers southwest of central Sa Pa. Upstream, the Mường Hoa stream passes the terraced communes of Lao Chải, Tả Van and Hầu Thào. By the time it reaches Bản Hồ, it is in its lower course. For that reason the air is warmer here, and winter is not as bitterly cold as in Sa Pa. The landscape is a wide valley of low hills, hillside rice fields and patches of fruit trees.

Most of the people in Bản Hồ are Tày. The Tày are one of the peoples of northern Vietnam. The Lào Cai newspaper reports that the Tày of Sa Pa live in the lowland communes. These are Mường Bo, Liên Minh and Bản Hồ. In the village, wooden stilt houses of the Tày stand on level ground, and here and there among them are the ground-level houses of the Dao. A Tày stilt house has a high floor, a roof and a wooden staircase. Tools are kept on the ground level, and the floor above is where the family lives.

The Tày here farm the lowland fields. The terraces are not stacked as thickly as at Lao Chải. They spread wide across the valley and weave in among garden plots. Tày women grow cotton, spin the thread and weave cloth. The community also keeps dances, songs and instruments that have been handed down through many generations. The Lào Cai newspaper counts Bản Hồ among the first places in Sa Pa to take up community tourism.

Within the commune there is also the Tả Trung Hồ waterfall. The Lào Cai newspaper places it in the hamlet of the same name, and its water begins in the old forest of the Hoàng Liên range. The water pours down white, like a broad ribbon of silk laid across green rock, between tall trees. Close to the fall, the roar is loud, and cool mist rises into the sunlight.

A length of cloth hanging on a porch holds many hours that a Tày woman has spent at her loom. Cotton is twisted into thread, the thread is set on the frame, and her hand sends the shuttle back and forth, line by line, until the cloth is whole. Around the village, the sounds of weaving, of rice being pounded and of children at play still mingle with the voice of the stream, as they have for generations.

On the porch of a stilt house, the Mường Hoa stream murmurs close by, and kitchen smoke climbs high into the late afternoon. The village stays where it is in the middle of the valley, warm and peaceful, as if it has stood beside the stream through every ripening of the rice.