Tucked in among the rugged mountains of northwest Vietnam, the rippling curves of Mu Cang Chai’s rice terraces, filled with lime-green shoots, spill down gentle slopes in graceful steps. The scene is so gorgeous I have to remind myself that this is not AI.
How this place has been kept under wraps for so long is puzzling. Admittedly it’s far from the highways and until now there has been no luxury place to stay. But a new hotel, Banyan Tree’s Garrya Mu Cang Chai, perched on a cute hill with 360-degree views, is proving a huge draw.
Most visitors to northern Vietnam are lured to the hill town of Sapa, about four hours’ drive north of Mu Cang Chai and about 25 miles from the Chinese border. However, while Sapa was once the jewel in the crown of Vietnam’s mountain tourism industry, it’s now an ugly pile of tangled concrete with an overtourism problem. Savvy visitors often skip it altogether.
Even locals have moved out. As Louis, Garrya’s bartender, mixes me a cocktail of local Tu Le green rice wine, yuzu, yoghurt, vanilla and matcha, he confides that he left his home village near Sapa in search of peace. Happily the only noise disturbing the evening at Garrya’s open-sided bar is a chorus of frogs.
The hotel is a beauty, the bamboo roofs of its buildings constructed in such a way that they appear to float, pillarless, over floors of forest green, black and corn-yellow marble. Under the main dome, the hub of the property, is the bar and the Refresh restaurant, with tables on a wraparound terrace for those winning views.
Downhill, along a helter-skelter of tree-lined roads, is the 8lements Spa with its hydrotherapy circuit and a heated pool beneath another staggeringly good-looking bamboo roof. Beyond, and fringing the hem of the hill, are the 110 rooms, including some standalone villas.
My Wellbeing Pool Suite is just a few steps from everything. My bed looks out beyond a huge bathroom — with a circular tub — through to a small private infinity pool sheltered by a pitched bamboo roof. From my pool I can gaze at the paddy fields — that is, when I’m not alternating between the freeze and the burn of the steamy hydrotherapy stuff or eating my breakfast by the main pool, listening to the tweets of the common tailorbird.
I had landed in Hanoi the previous morning and set off on the five-hour car journey to Mu Cang Chai straight away, saving a proper look around the capital for the end of the trip. The road wound through wild-tea terracing, low-slung rice paddies and fields of corn, with trumpet flowers decorating the roadside like lanterns.
After a brief stop for a lunch of beef wrapped in betel leaves, via a few switchback roads and the eye-widening Khau Pha Pass at 1,200m in the Hoang Lien Son mountains, I arrived at the Garrya in time for the prettiest afternoon tea. My apple and yuzu tea, green rice and white chocolate bonbons and passion fruit macarons were accompanied by the hypnotic sound of a Meo bamboo flute. That melody, my nightcap and the frogs on surround sound meant an easy drift into a deep sleep after my long journey from the UK.
By the time I wake the following morning in the fresh mountain air, I feel deeply rested. At breakfast I order hot, aromatic chicken pho and on-trend cold salt coffee (no, me neither, but there’s nothing like a salt blast to rearrange facial features and kill jet lag). Wooded peaks, huts on stilts balanced on slopes, smoke wisping skyward and a patchwork of cinnamon and green-coloured terraces circle the property. It’s all utterly mesmerising.
Fuelled up, I head out with my tour guide, Phenh, on the back of his motorbike, to climb the steep Mam Xoi (Sticky Rice Tray), a flat-topped hill coiled with emerald-green terracing. It’s rightly regarded as one of the most beautiful spots in Vietnam. All around us cascading terraces glitter with water. May and June here are known as the “water pouring” season, when water is channelled through to the fields. In some of the ripple-edged paddies, quivering lime-green shoots had appeared.
Many visitors like to come in mid-September through to October, when the rice seedlings flush to gold and Hmong farmers begin their harvest, but the months of April through to July, with the glassy water mirroring the sky and green rice shoots emerging, are still a knockout. If you visit in winter you’ll find wild white peach blossoms, like snow, blooming across the region. Then, from late December to January, you’ll see pink peach flowers. In February the Garrya wears a winter coat of white plum blossom, in March and April white Hoa Ban flowers spring up, and in May and June purple phoenix flower.
Somewhere amid the green tiers of Mam Xoi we meet Su, a Flower Hmong grandma who can’t remember her age. The Hmong make up about 90 per cent of the people in this region, with the Flower Hmong a subgroup so named because they dress in colourful, heavily embroidered clothes. Inside the wooden home she shares with six other family members, Su’s 12-year-old granddaughter is cooking chicken, flames licking in the smoky darkness while she glances at a tablet screen. It’s a reminder that even remote communities aren’t lacking in modern tech. Phenh tells me that local lovebirds like to text in Hmong, helping to revive the language.
I raise a glass to that back at the Garrya over a very good lunch of smoky pork belly sautéed with bamboo shoots, followed by a light, delicious local green-rice panna cotta bathed in pandan syrup.
After wonderful food and spellbinding views I’m reluctant to leave. But my mood lifts as I’m driven 180 miles south to the secluded Avana Retreat via mountain villages and fields of bananas, tapioca and corn.
The Avana Retreat is built into the embrace of a limestone mountain near Mai Chau, a touristy town favoured by weekenders from Hanoi, three hours’ drive away. My textile-filled suite is the size of a small house and overlooks jungled gardens teeming with life. Some 36 rooms, villas and bungalows are tucked into a steep hillside and are discreetly screened by a fertile, steamy riot of trees and plants.
I stroll down the hill to the infinity pool with its 180-degree views of the Mai Chau Valley, where the sun is strong, buffalo bells jingle and golden butterflies flit lazily in the heat. I could have spent all my time wafting around the resort, chatting to the staff drawn from the ethnic Muong and White Thai communities, smelling the jasmine, listening to the waterfalls and eating complimentary cake by the pool, but Avana offers some lovely things to do.
Van, who has been creating indigo batik for more than 30 years, has already heated the beeswax before I arrive at her class. The moulds to create patterns — butterflies, leaves, dragonflies and flowers — are inspired by nature. I’m underdressed in leggings, I feel, next to Van, who is elegant in pink, blue and indigo, a traditional embroidered Hmong dress. The only telltale sign of her work is the indigo dye that has stained her nails. As we pattern and craft a batik piece together, she tells me she designs the patterns herself, grows the indigo plants too, and sells her work at Mai Chau market. When I ask about her nails, she giggles and shrugs.
There is more laughter as I try and fail to carve a carrot into a decorative flower with a knife at a cooking class. I do graduate with a certificate, though, and help prepare tasty grilled beef stuffed in a bamboo tube, and grilled catfish. Vietnamese food is irresistible, bursting with herbs and umami flavours.
Some of the country’s drinks are questionable, however. Hien from the Black Thai community is elegantly dressed in a black velvet dress, neon green sash and indigo blue cap while stoking a fire used to distil “happy water”, aka rice wine. She does a brisk trade with villagers but the liquor burns my throat. It’s soothed only by a follow-up cup of herbal tea. A restorative foot bath of betel and pomelo leaves, ginger and hot water is welcome too, as earlier I’d walked to Hien’s home in a valley from my new base at Pu Luong Retreat, 90 minutes from the Avana Retreat.
That morning I’d woken to another million-dollar view. Clouds, hanging like brasserie curtains, tried to conceal a ring of mountains that tower over a circular valley where bright green paddies descend neatly down to the valley floor. Buffaloes mooched about, red dragonflies and violet butterflies hovered, and the only sound was the frogs and the four-note melody of the puff-throated babbler. Tuan, my walking guide, and I breathed in the air as we meandered along valley paths heaving with life — upright betel nut palms, drooping fig trees and a lychee tree so large it shades a whole house. Villagers tended to their ponds, which they cover with bamboo slats to stop kingfishers stealing their fish. An amphitheatre of terracing sparkled in the sun and bamboo waterwheels turned as the chuckling stream water plopped through, channelled to rice fields. Just when I thought I’d found pastoral bliss, a clang of karaoke startled.
When a thunderstorm boomerangs around the valley, we retreat from Hien’s and revive on hot, strong Vietnamese coffee back at the lodge. Later, when the blue sky is unveiled once more, I dip into the infinity pool. My soundtrack? A chorus of more frogs.
I wonder if there could be anywhere more sublime than these rural hideaways of northwest Vietnam. I’m rested, with skills acquired, mountain air breathed and wonderful food eaten. Ready, I think, for that dive into heady Hanoi.
Claire Boobbyer was a guest of InsideAsia, which has 11 nights’ B&B — including two at Garrya Mu Cang Chai, two at Avana Retreat and two at Pu Luong Retreat — from £2,564pp, including transfers, activities and some extra meals (insideasiatours.com); and Vietnam Airlines, which flies direct from Heathrow to Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City from £599 return (vietnamairlines.com)
