Travel Diary >>> Mu Cang Chai - camping & paragliding
Written by: Mu Cang Chai - camping & paragliding
It was such an unpleasant experience when I tried to keep harmony with fastidious fellow travellers. However, it’s life, we have to willing to take any risk it brings to us.
Mu Cang Chai is a mountainous region located in the north of Vietnam, which is famous for the natural beauty of the mountains and the cultural diversity of ethnic minorities. I came here to join a paragliding event in the framework of the yellow rice season festival of Yen Bai province.
It was a great trip. I had an opportunity to admire the terraces in havest season, majestic mountains, and spectacular paragliding jumps. It was the first time I had saw people paragliding. The colourful paragliders flying in the sky like big birds. The pilots screamed in excitement for a successful flying and the spectators kept praising to pilots and their spectacular jumps. To be honest, I was jealous with pilots for what they could see when flying in the sky.
The most wonderful thing in the trip was experience of camping besides a streams in Thai Lim village, which anyone should try at least one time in his or her life. The feeling of sleeping a colourful tent, listening to the sound of stream, watching a starry sky was so romantic and peaceful. I kept opening the tent door at night until it was beginning to dew heavily. 6am, I was waken up by laughters. I opened my eyes and felt awesome to see a whole blue sky and mountains under the sunlight through tent door. This was not normal view you can see everyday.
For two days, my main menu was grilled black pork. A guy in the group had ordered a black pig from a Thai family, and asked them to cook as traditional ways of Thai people. We had chopped pork and grilled skewers wrapped in phrynium leaves, and cardamon wine.
There was a French girl in my group, and she met some funny situations just because she was a foreigner. Some local people asked for taking a photo, a journalist asked her for interviewing about the paragliding event. I suddenly became a reluctant interpreter. These days, Mu Cang Chai was full of young travellers from other provinces.
The biggest mistake in the trip is trying in vain to wait for a chance of parasailing. My efforts were not only pointless, but my face was also sunburn and turned red . I thought it was my fault, because I stopped use sun block due to allergy, and I have never had a serious sunburn like this, and took a week to recuperate. This was a big lesson.
