Dollars to Dong-Bahts

Plant Exploration in Northern Vietnam and Northern Thailand
8/9/2005-9/2/2005

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Sunday 8/14/2005

We left Den Bien Phu in the pouring early morning rain to search for an Internet café on our way north out of town. Despite repeating the words Internet back to us, our driver continued through the town and was in the country before we knew it. We had to continue to chant, 'Internet, Internet' until he finally stopped and turned around. We finally found an Internet café and three of us logged on, only to have the power in the entire town go out. We were discovering that this is not an unusual occurrence in Vietnam. After waiting for 15 minutes, we gave up and proceeded on our way to Lai Chau.

We drove by low elevation rice fields for what seemed like hours as we skirted the Da river that separates Vietnam from neighboring Laos. The rain finally stopped in time for our first stop, as Hayes jumped out of the van to find an Amorphophallus coaetaneus in full seed. Up the road, we found more of the unknown amorphophallus from days earlier that resembled a giant A. napalensis, growing nearby a giant clump of Alocasia macrorhizos. Hopefully, this giant alocasia is genetic and not due to its growing conditions.

With Laos still just across the river to our west, we passed 3000' in elevation as the forested slopes became rich with banana species. It was always a good sign when we had to look down to see the rice fields. We tried to stop wherever we saw streams running out of the mountains, since these areas usually yielded the most amazing plants. At one stop adjacent to a huge landslide, we found amazing begonias hanging off the cliffs, both silvery rosette types along with a stunning 4' tall angel wing species. Growing among the begonias was an amazing giant selaginella with black foliage, along with a giant chlorophytum. We are a bit low in elevation for good winter hardiness, but there were some cool plants at this site.

Around 4pm, the road dropped again below 1000' elevation as we approached Lai Chau. At this point, we began seeing Amorphophallus paeonifolius. Interestingly, we never saw this species at elevations above 1000' during our entire travels.

We showed our driver in our guide book that we wanted to stay at the Lan Anh Hotel and Guesthouses in Lai Chau. He nodded knowingly and proceeded to drive right past the city and hotel signs, pointing to the Lah Anh. With only small towns ahead for the next several hours, we finally demanded that he turn around and take us back to the hotel, since we were rapidly losing daylight. Begrudgingly, our driver finally got the van turned around, and we headed back to the hotel.

We finally arrived at the Lan Anh to find individual buildings that were arranged in a very quaint village atmosphere, complete with an outdoor dining area located right in front of the rooms, paper thin walls, poorly lit tiny rooms, but loads of ambience. We tried to forget about the barking frogs in the fish pond outside our door that continued barking until the early hours of the morning. Thank goodness I remembered to bring my ear plugs, but the same could not be said for the other members of our contingent. At least the air conditioner worked well.

As soon as we checked in, I returned to the lobby to use their Internet connection. After wasting nearly an hour there with a connection that reminded me of late 1980's dial-up, Hayes and I both hiked back up to the main village to find a functioning Internet café. We were both able to make good headway on email backlogs while we waited for the heavy rainstorm outside to slow. Afterwards, it was back to the hotel for dinner and a night of plant processing.

Monday 8/15/2005

We set out early for the long 7-hour drive from Lai Chau to Sapa. Since we were starting at a low elevation, we made very few stops early in the day. Three hours into our day's journey we arrived at the 1400' elevation, river town of Paso. The amount of new construction was amazing...almost as if they were building a new town. In fact, it turned out that the town of Lai Chau that we had just left was due to be flooded with the construction of a huge new dam nearby, and the entire town is being rebuilt in Paso. We soon passed the new Lah Anh hotel, about which our driver had tried to communicate to us the day before.

As we stopped for lunch at Paso, it was amazing to see how the vegetation had changed within a small span of distance. At Paso, we began to find temperate genera intermingling with the tropical flora. Maples and magnolias were everywhere, along with amorphophallus and a stunning 4' tall, white flowering curcuma.

After lunch, we continued the climb in elevation as we made our way to our evening destination of Sapa. We were fascinated to watch the right of way crews which consisted of women from a nearby village with hand sickles, whose job it was to keep the grass on the highway right of way slopes closely cropped. We can attest to their effectiveness is cutting both the grass as well as some potentially wonderful ornamental specimens. Only near the larger towns would we later encounter men with gas-powered string trimmers. After fighting through the nearly impenetrable vegetation further up the mountains, we wish we had commandeered a member of the road crew to join us.

After we passed 3,000' in elevation, we began to see hedychiums again, especially a stunning 9' tall species that we first thought to be Hedychium coronarium, but upon closer examination, Hayes determined that it was a different species. The other very prevalent species here was Hedychium maximum, a stunning yellow flowered species, also growing to 9' tall. Wade found a dwarf 3' tall form of the same plant or possibly a different yellow-flowered species. The gingers were almost never found on flat ground, but obviously preferred steep slopes, which made obtaining samples quite challenging. By this time, the rain had become so torrential that we had trouble just keeping our footing on the slick clay soils and rocks, not to mention making it hard to closely examine the plants we were seeing.

As we rose above 4,000' elevation, the rains lightened some, and we began to see more ferns, many of which were gigantic. The ferns grew alongside the hedychiums as well as an amazing array of begonias. As we topped 5,000', we began to see even more new plants. A stunning colocasia with an C. antiquoum 'Illustris'-type leaf pattern and very thick leaves caught my eye as we sped up the mountain. Nearby, we began to find disporums and more nice ferns including pteris, woodwardia, elaphapglossom, pyrrosia, and coniogramme. We even found our first plants of the common Chinese Arisaema consanguineum. The amorphophallus that we found in this region looked like the winter-hardy A. dunnii.

The rain had given way to fog, making it hard to see the plants in front of you. I was shocked when we looked up to see that the entire top of the bank was in flower with what we thought was the heat-hating Lilium nepalense. Upon returning home, I discovered that we had stumbled onto the very rare L. poilanei...a close relative of L. nepalense. It was growing here in the most unexpected of sites...and it was growing by the thousands. The rock cliffs were also adorned with more gesneriads than I had ever seen at one site...where are all the gesneriad experts when you need one?

As we climbed past 6,000', we began to find Astilbe, probably Astilbe grandis growing with pyrrosia and adiantum ferns. One of the most shocking finds among the rocky cliffs at this elevation was the giant lace-cap hydrangeas, probably H. heteromalla, that were in full flower among the hedychiums. These stunning 10' tall x 15' wide shrubs were topped with white lace-cap flowers, often with blue stamens. Growing nearby was also Cunnighamii konishii and two species of buddleia, although we saw no signs of flower buds. As we walked back to the van, two young boys emerged from the mountains, each with a large rat-like critter attached to a rope. They were delighted to show off their catch, which was most certainly destined to be the evening's dinner.

Since it was getting late in the day and we were all thoroughly soaked from being out in the pouring rain since noon, we reluctantly packed it in for the day. We crossed over the Tram Ton Pass at 6,700' and then descended about 1000' into the mountain resort town of Sapa.

Since we had stayed at some dumpy hotels recently, we thought we would check out the well-known 4-star Victoria Sapa Hotel. We arrived to find the rooms were $130 each, when we had been accustomed to paying around $12-$20 per night. Oh well, it was off to the Son Thuy hotel that our driver had suggested. As we expected, the place was a dump, but a cheap dump, and they did have large rooms for plant processing. We were desperate to have laundry done, since the hot, humid weather had caused us to deplete our clean clothes supply quicker than anticipated. We dropped off our laundry with the promise that it would be ready by the next evening.

Dinner at the hotel was probably the worst of the trip. The menu choices were almost non-existent, and everything they served as meat couldn't have been chewed by a new Cuisanart food processor. They had no soft drinks available, only water, Heineken beer which was only slightly stronger, and wine. Alan ordered wine, which turned out to be a recycled water bottle filled with the Vietnamese version of moonshine...certainly not what anyone was expecting.

I had been in contact with Uoc Le Huu, a young Sapa travel guide, who had guided Dan Hinkley and Bleddyn Wynn-Jones on their botanical expeditions to the same region several years earlier. Uoc spoke great English compared to our driver, so we were delighted when he came to meet us at our hotel and agreed to be our guide and translator for the remainder of the Vietnam leg of our trip.