the mountainside. Inside I saw a campfire and
a bed of dried thao qua fronds. This is where
the harvesting crew would eat, sleep, and roast
black cardamom pods for the next two days.
The site was humming with activity because
Cho had recruited nearly a dozen friends,
neighbors, and relatives to help shoulder the
workload. “We’re cousins,” said one of them,
Giang A Thao, when I asked why he’d agreed to
do Cho such a big favor. “We help each other.”THE CARDAMOM HARVEST BEGAN early the
next morning after a breakfast of rice, instant
coffee, and greasy slabs of salted pork that had
been cooked on the campfire. The cardamom
plot—2,100 plants in all, according to Lang’s
father—was split between two gently sloping
mountain valleys. Cho divided the group into
two teams, and they began scrambling up paral-
lel streambeds. Each farmer carried a machete.
The basic idea was to extract raw, red pods
from a plant’s base while also clearing nearbyexample, and an uptick in extreme weather in
recent years has disrupted the crop’s year-to-year
supply. Sarah Turner, a geographer at Canada’s
McGill University who studies Vietnam’s black
cardamom industry, told me there was a high
probability that the recent extreme weather was
linked to climate change.
“Now farmers are faced with either trying to
find a new cash alternative or basically waiting
to see if things might get better,” she said.
Lang’s family is a case in point. Lang and
husband Duong, who is from the Muong ethnic
group, don’t need cardamom for security,
because they run a trekking agency. But Lang’s
brother Cho, who never had much interest in
being a tour guide, still sees it as a key to his
prosperity, despite the financial risks.
THE PATH TO CHO’S CARDAMOM wove upward
through waist-high brambles that scratched at
my bare legs. We were nearing 7,000 feet, having
started the day at about half that elevation. Lang,
vegetation. That way, barring extreme weather
events, the plant would have room to grow lots
of new pods before next year’s harvest.
For long hours the farmers silently navigated
the streambeds, stopping only to drink water
and wipe their brows. The air was colder here
than in the valley below, and the sun had ducked
behind some gathering rain clouds.
By late afternoon they had trudged back to
camp and built a fire big enough to roast and
smoke a few refrigerator-size mounds of raw
cardamom. I watched as a few pods turned
from candy-cane red to coffee brown, giving off
a heady medicinal smell in the process. Roasting
them was essential because it would signifi-
cantly reduce their weight, making it easier to
carry the harvest down the mountain.
The farmers opened a bottle of ruou, the
Vietnamese equivalent of moonshine, to
celebrate what looked like an impressive haul.
There were rounds of shots and more rations of
salted pork. We eventually nodded off beside the
fire, huddling for warmth as the wind whistled
through the cardamom fronds.who treks for a living, was visibly winded. But
Duong looked nonchalant. “Even if I walked
farther, I could still smoke,” he joked, a cigarette
hanging rakishly from his mouth.
We arrived at the campsite around sunset and
greeted Cho, who had arrived earlier to set it up.
I paused to take in the scene. Hundreds of carda-
mom plants the height of basketball hoops, each
with thick, electric green fronds roughly the
size and shape of banana leaves, lined a nearby
streambed. The fronds seemed to move through
the forest in waves, following the stream’s con-
tours, as if they were swirly brushstrokes on a
van Gogh canvas.
High above the cardamom stood old trees
whose mossy trunks and craggy branches soared
hundreds of feet in the air. Some had a shaggy,
Seussian look. I wondered how these exquisite
specimens had managed to survive here for so
long, even as large swaths of northern Vietnam’s
forests were logged for timber.
The streamside campsite was basic: a giant blue
tarp hoisted on bamboo supports over an earthen
bunker that Lang’s father had once hacked out of
I paused to take in the scene: hundreds of cardamom plants the
height of basketball hoops, each with thick, electric green fronds.A JOURNEY WITH SPICE 141