Soi is an incredibly friendly and welcoming Giáy woman, and she runs a fantastic homestay in Ta Van. After ten years of hosting homestays, she speaks nearly fluent English and snippets of a variety of other languages, including Danish.

Soi’s house is located down a side road that splits from the main street near The Bamboo Bar. It took us many wrong turns to arrive, since the marker on Booking.com’s map placed her house up a hill on the opposite side of the road. We ended up in someone else’s yard before realizing we couldn’t find it and enquired at a bar. After being pointed in the right direction, we realized that we made one of many U-turns below a sign proclaiming “Mrs. Soi’s Homestay –> 30m”. Cue face-palm moment.

The large room that forms the front portion of Soi’s house is used for homestays. Beds are located around the room’s perimeter both upstairs and downstairs, and there is a large open space downstairs for dining. The kitchen and bathrooms are off to the right, and the back of the house is used solely by the family. There is a sizable covered concrete courtyard in front, surrounded by a low bamboo-decorated wall. There is another courtyard between that and the narrow street that is encircled by a small garden of both decorative and edible plants. The road that runs in front of the house is only a road in the sense that motorcycles can carefully traverse the steep cracked path - a car would never fit. Soi’s three cats and the neighbor’s two dogs have the run of the inside and outside of the house, although Soi doesn’t like the dogs and will swat them away. One daring dog was still able to sneak into the house right after dinner and eat up the chicken neck bones that Soi dropped on the floor for the cats.

The first night, we shared the house with two Australian women and a party of 8+ Vietnamese tourists from Hải Phòng. The tour guides were old friends of Soi’s, and were very talkative and engaging. One of them spoke English with a strong Australian accent, since he’d learned English primarily from Australian tourists. He recounted a story of how two tourists had spent a day helping him improve his English, including teaching him the difference between “how much” and “how many.”

During dinner, one of the Vietnamese tourists, with Soi acting as translator, asked Jake and I what our relationship was. When I responded that we’d been dating for four years, the immediate follow-up question was, “Where’s your ring?”

The next day after the Vietnamese tourists departed, Soi complained that she was still really tired, because too many people had been snoring. Some of the snoring was so loud that as we sat around the fire in the evening, everyone suddenly started turning around and looking for a nearby mooing water buffalo - someone upstairs had just fallen asleep.

During the middle day of our two night stay with Soi, we relaxed at the table in front of her house and in the village of Ta Van. We walked down to the river and perched ourselves on rocks, edited pictures and read Wikipedia on Soi’s porch, sat in various coffee shops, and photographed water buffalo.

The second night, we shared the house with a trekking tour of Danish and Swedish tourists from Hanoi. Their tour guide explained to us that Soi’s colorful plaid headscarf is a traditional Giáy garment. Giáy villages used to grow cotton to make clothes, but because of low import costs, cotton products are now purchased and different crops are grown instead. According to the guide, other minority groups, notably the H’mong, have adopted the practice of wearing these plaid headscarves. Soi also explained to us that her black, somewhat blousy pants are traditional Giáy clothing.

After dinner, we joined the tourists at The Local Bar for drinks and a game of pool. Our pool game reached a bit of a stalemate (none of us were shooting very well) and then randomly ended. A bystander threw his hat and it accidentally landed on the pool table, knocking the cue ball into a corner pocket. We shrugged, shook our opponents’ hands, and called it a good game. Jake and I then decided to call it a night and headed back to Soi’s house to sleep.

We woke up early the next morning to take a picture with Soi and her husband, and also to see her off; Soi was headed to a wedding in Lào Cai. After a breakfast of crepe-like pancakes (there seems to be a pattern here regarding homestay breakfasts served to Westerners, since Soi cooked cháo for the Vietnamese tourists the day before), we packed up our bike and headed in a similar direction to Phố Ràng on our way to Hà Giang.