Good morning SE Asia!: 27/10/13

Our room was one of the ones ending in an '8' in the hotel Cong Fu which meant we had a full room height window overlooking the animal market end of the sprawling Bac Ha menagerie. We had set the alarm for before 6 as the market was said by the guidebook to be in full swing by 7am or earlier and all done before noon. Now, I don't know if it has changed much since that was written in 2012, but when we drew the curtains at 6am, there was noone there, let alone the hubbub of braying, squealing and crowing beasts that we had imagined. Just a few guys setting up tarpaulins and moseying about. It did turn out later that we were overlooking the part of the market that sold pet animals like songbirds and also donkeys and small horses, not food animals like pigs, dogs and buffalo.

We had some nice breakfast of a western variety in the hotel and headed out. I did the typical tourist thing of being sucked into the first stall we passed and picking something up only to be forced in my still sleepy state into some haggling. It was a nice H'mong style handmate bunnet, very nice and fitted me well. The lady took a while to come up with a price for it and I immediately went in at half that. Cue 3 rounds of back-and-forth and I secured the attractive head warmer for a bargain 110,000d (£3.30). Done deal! The stall next door sold the same hats and just to see how much I had managed to save, I asked for the price again. She started at a going-in price of 100,000d. Damn that hurt. I liked to whinge about that for the rest of the day to Johanna's dismay.

The market was indeed as expansive, colourful, pungent and busy as we had expected. I am sure that there was nothing you couldn't have bought here. The locals were out in force and in the early stages we were some of only a handful of tourists. We tried to cover as much of it to take it all in before revisiting the interesting parts for a better look. We stopped at one stall in the food section to buy some Clementine oranges (which were some of the best ever) and we saw some bottles of orange coloured juice in old water bottles that looked like a smoothie or something, so after a bit of chatting and realising we were not able to work out what it was from hand gestures, I had a sniff and a swig. Turns out it is the hottest homemade chilli sauce in the world - ever. Holy moly that was painful. The girl in the stall thought it was quite funny. We would have bought one but it would have been rude to take it into each restaurant we visited!

We sat and watched one little strip for a while where the local ladies were sitting and selling all sorts of dried things; tea, chillies, mushrooms etc. and we ate our oranges, weary for the early start. By then the day-buses had arrived and the inundation of picture-hungry tourists was in full-swing. Most just snap away at anything and everything much like us, but it disturbed us when some of the more 'photgraphic' tourists got right down in the faces of the people and take closeup pictures whilst the obliging locals just smile back uncomfortably. I am sure it gets annoying for them and it just looks out of place, like photographing animals or something. Maybe we are just cynical... If we take this sort of photo, we zoom in from far away, seems more polite!

Pictures say more than words in this case, it was definitely something to see and we have to thank Alex for the great tip again. Cheers fella!

We spent the afternoon and some of the evening in a small cafe in town, the owners were a young Vietnamese couple with a baby on the way and really nice. We did some Skyping to our families and had a menu del dias for 100,000d each. Nice food.

When we got back to the hotel we met Mr Cong Fu again (had met him the night before as he shared his granddaughters' toy buggy and slid all around the dining room with her on it), and he insisted on smoking some Vietnamese tobacco again as I had a try with him the night before. The Vietnamese way is to smoke the tobacco in a large water bong. There tends to be a bong sitting at most busy cafe's and in hotel lobby's with a pouch of tobacco that most locals seem to use for free if they get something from the café. Mr Cong Fu's bong sits in a bathroom flip-top-bin full of water and the odd bit of flotsam like three-in-one coffee packets that might add a tiny bit more flavour. Then before he fires it up he adds a swig of hot green tea from the pot for good measure. We worked out through Jin the receptionist that Mr Cong Fu smokes each loading in one go, most people get 3 drags out of it. He is proud of this fact. I tried and nearly passed out. Then afterwards, lots of super strong green tea is imbibed. Cheers Mr Cong Fu!