A strong, agile local young man led us deep into the village. The population was sparse and the road was very bad. We had to leave our motorbikes behind and walk. “Never mind, just take us to the most difficult place and see how it goes.”
Scenery in the afternoon mist
We had to wade through mud, climb rocks, and sometimes had to swing across streams. When we reached deep into the mountains, we saw that the people's lives were more difficult than we could imagine. Growing corn and beans was not very effective, and most people relied on cinnamon trees.
But cinnamon grows very slowly and does not bring in much income. Although cinnamon is grown everywhere here, it still cannot solve the economic problem for the people.
As a charity worker from far away, I also feel sad when thinking about the fate of people living under the mountain here.
I ask the question: what joy and beauty do they enjoy, when they spend their whole lives in the roofs (residential areas) nestled on the sides of towering mountains?
We were arranged by the locals to stay with a family in the village. This house had the best living conditions. A great spiritual gift was opened when I was lucky enough to stay here: a simple wooden house nestled gracefully on the side of a high mountain.
Imagine, the sun has just set, the last rays of sunlight have just disappeared, I walk into the yard. Here, cinnamon is spread out to dry covering the yard. I drop down on the chair on the porch, eyes half-closed, inhaling the sweet scent emanating from the dry cinnamon bark, in the sweet cold that slowly spreads into my thin shirt.
Almost every house here grows cinnamon. They harvest the bark, cut it into small pieces and dry it neatly in front of their yard. While admiring each piece of cinnamon, I was startled with delight when dew fell on the porch.
I could clearly hear the sound of falling dew, which probably only happened in the late afternoon on a high mountain like this. And the image I had imagined many times in my head, now happened before my eyes: in the magical afternoon mist, the woodcutter couple carried a bundle of dry firewood on their backs, leisurely walking down the mountain.
They walked slowly, talking about something, which I guessed was very emotional. Then the mist blurred the figures. All the details before my eyes faded into darkness, leaving only the strong scent of cinnamon, which I could feel more clearly the colder it got.
Sweet sleep
We had a warm dinner with the host family. Even though they had not known anything about us before, I was very touched and thought that perhaps the most beautiful thing that is always available in each person here is hospitality.
It is difficult to find anything more beautiful than the hospitality shown to strangers. When it takes place in a house far away in the mountains like this, it touches the traveler even more.
The owner gave me a neat bed in the living room. As I settled down on the bed, I listened quietly to everything, as if afraid of missing out on memorable moments like this. In life, it is not easy to meet again.
The cold, wild mountain air made my feet a little numb. But there was something very warm and comfortable that gradually spread, becoming more and more obvious. Why was there a strong scent of cinnamon in the bed?
In the flickering light of the oil lamp, I looked around the bed, but couldn’t see any cinnamon. But why was the scent of “high mountain jade cinnamon” so clear here? I sniffed more, and discovered the scent of cinnamon right under my back. I stuck my head down, and was surprised to see dried cinnamon piled tightly under the bed. It turned out that I was lucky enough to sleep on a pile of fragrant cinnamon.
-Hard to sleep in a strange bed?
The homeowner came in from the yard, saw me making a ruckus, and immediately called out. I sat up, turned up the lamp, and chatted with the homeowner.
Sitting on the fragrant cinnamon bed, I listened to the owner talk about the ancient cinnamon trees in Tra Van. There are still about 100 ancient cinnamon trees here, over 100 years old. The Ca Dong people and even the Kinh people here respect these trees very much, they consider them forest gods protecting the village.
“April is the peak season for cinnamon harvest. In the 1980s, 1 kilo of ancient cinnamon trees cost the equivalent of 1 tael of gold. But now, most of the cinnamon is new varieties with low value, causing cinnamon growers to have an unstable life,” the old farmer said sadly.
The hard but beautiful story of cinnamon lulled me into an unprecedented sweet sleep.
The next morning, before saying goodbye to my host and going down the mountain, I slowly looked back at the bamboo bed filled with cinnamon underneath. I remembered how I had slept a fragrant sleep here.
I will always remember the sweet scent in the cold of Nam Tra My mountain. And I know that the people on the mountain top are not completely disadvantaged. They have things that the people on the plains never have.
Source: https://baoquangnam.vn/giac-mong-dep-thom-huong-que-3142178.html
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