Somewhere on the road to Bắc Hà, we saw a boy walking with a white bag. The road was steep and I asked whether he needed a lift. I thought I would drive him a few kilometers up the road. I had no idea, he was on the ride for the next 15 km or so. He told me that he was 16 years old and he was heading towards Bắc Hà, which was the place we were going to. At one point, we had to wait for the road to get cleared by a back-ho. A car driver from Hanoi asked the boy where he was going and he answered that he is going to look for work. I had no idea, the boy was on a one-way trip to seek work and thought he was quite young. He mentioned his younger brother was also out there. A while afterwards, we see a construction site, and he said that he would stay there. As he gets off the bike, a man invites us inside the tents, where the construction workers sleep. Every worker has a bed, mosquito netting, and some belongings. We are long used to hard beds (Vietnamese tradition, it seems), but beds based on a rollable bamboo flooring is the real minimum.

The man invited us for tea, then rice wine, and finally to thuốc lào (common bamboo smoke pipe), which we politely declined. We offered fruit, and left some ceramics form Bat Trang there. The boy stayed in the background and was very shy speaking. We talked for over half an hour with the man and learned about the life of construction workers. His family and two children live south of Hanoi and he has been working in construction for a long time already. He was very hospitable. They have ladies who cook, but otherwise they pretty much live independently on site. We noticed the workers were splitting rocks outside, indeed very hard work in very hot weather (above 30 deg C).  A lot of the workers looked very young, others were in their 30s.