Scroll-painting mountains, Filet de Fido and big climbs in the land of the light-fingered locals

Bac Can, km 580 (or so)

Hello all. It's the end of a long, frustrating day here in Bac Can, dealing with the police.

For the second time in two days, I have had a light-fingered local make off with some of my gear. The day before yesterday, a small and annoying boy sneaked into my room when my back was turned and took my watch, which he had been eyeing covetously for some time. I had to get the police, but as soon as they showed up, the hotel staff became quite concerned and the small boy's whereabouts, a mystery up until that point, suddenly became clear and a minion was dispatched to retrieve the watch. This morning, when I was putting my luggage on my bike here in the next hotel I stayed at, I realized that someone, almost certainly hotel staff, had stolen my cycling computer, an act of sheer Ostrogothic vandalism since it's useless without the rest of the wires and magnets still on the bike. This time I spent 5 hours with the local cops, and a less comptetent lot of investigators would be hard to imagine, so I have little confidence that they'll recover the cycling computer, which is annoying, since I won't be able to buy one here along my cycling route. But at least I got to waste all day in the police station in the process.

So since I last wrote, I have cycled to Halong Bay, one of the must-see sights of Vietnam, then made my way along increasingly obscure back roads here, en route to a national park that had better be worth the effort in getting to! The cycling has been lovely, though, since I left the coast: little traffic, small villages, great scenery and plenty of climbing to get myself back into cycling shape.

The ride to the coast at Haiphong was miserable, trundling along the cycling path next to the country's busiest highway, a cacophonous procession of diesel-belching trucks and kamikaze cars, along pancake-flat landscape buried in concrete and factories. The less said the better. I got to Haiphong and caught a ferry to Cat Ba island, where I found that I had misunderstood the ferry's route and was now 30 km from where I thought we were going to land. I cycled the 30 km in the fading light of late afternoon, past lovely limestone cliffs, arriving in Cat Ba city in the gloaming. I found a hotel and tucked into a seafood hotpot and a few bia hois.

The next two days were spent on Cat Ba. The first day saw me join a group on a boat tour of Halong Bay, an expanse of water littered with hundreds of limestone islets jutting vertically skyward. Very picturesque, like many a Chinese scroll painting. Similar landscape to the Krabi area in Thailand, or (on dry land) Yangshuo in China or Vang Vieng in Laos. Did an hour's worth of sea kayak paddling with a partner who was more of a passenger, and managed to paddle right through a (very thin) island from one side to the other through eroded caves. The second day was gloomy and grey and I spent the day relaxing and body-surfing on some pretty fair-sized swells before heading out for an obligatory Vietnamese culinary experience: dog meat. To show that I'm even-handed here, despite my bad experiences with live dogs, I tried some cat meat as well. It was in a very local spit-and-sawdust sort of restaurant, but great fun. For the record, dog meat is dark and gamey, while cat meat is indistinguishable from chicken. I ran into a pair of foreign tour operators and had to swill down some dreadful rice spirits and go sing karaoke before calling it a night.

I had a hangover the next morning (a hair of the dog, one might say), but the cruise back to shore through more Halong islands was a hangover cure. The riding, once I got to shore, was dreadful for the first few hours, through the coal-production capital of Vietnam. I was completely black when I got to Tien Yen, from the coal dust lying beside the road or falling from passing trucks. The second half of the ride, though, was much nicer, with no coal and little traffic.

From Tien Yen, I headed roughly east, along roads that were less and less well-travelled or marked on my maps. Lovely riding, with no traffic (one morning, I think I saw 5 4-wheeled vehicles all morning, and a handful of motorcycles). The scenery was a bit like Halong Bay on solid ground, with the limestone cliffs forming impenetrable barriers that made the roads curve around tortuously, making the smallest straight-line distance into quite a lengthy roller-coaster ride. Lots of ethnic Tay villages, built on stilts with striking tiled roofs, and plenty of undisturbed forest on the hillsides, although there were quite a few slash-and-burn fires burning in the afternoons. I biked up to a hill station one afternoon, accompanied by a giggling village idiot on a motorcycle, and found a wonderful-looking place to sleep. Peace and quiet, you might think, would reign supreme on an isolated mountain ridge. Not!! Between dog fights, the wind lifting sections of roof up and down, attacks by local insect life and the fact that there was a dressing mirror next to my bed which I crashed into loudly whenever I rolled over, it was the worst night of sleep of the trip.

The next night, in the village of the light-fingered timepiece-thief, I anticipated a good night's sleep, but more dog fights (I now regret much less eating Fido on Cat Ba island!) and the damn village loudspeakers kept me up. Each village in Vietnam apparently has these loudspeakers, which go off at 4:53 am with exercise tapes played at maximum volume, and which also play in the evening (apparently the Communist Party wants its populace to develop a liking for country music). Japan still has something similar in a lot of places; I'd like to think that in Thunder Bay, loudspeakers going off at 4:53 am would have a very, very short life expectancy.

Yesterday's ride was unexpectedly long (116 km, instead of the 60 I had been told), with a late-afternoon jaunt over an 800-metre pass that climbed and descended at a 10% grade. The forests near the pass were spectacular, alive with birds and shrill cicadas. At the end of the day, just before my cycling computer vanished, I checked my vertical metres for the day, and found that I'd climbed 2100 metres. Checking my diary from last summer, that's higher than I did on any single day in the Himalayas. No wonder I was exhausted by the end!

So so far life is fairly good, although I'm still angry about the loss of my cycling computer, which is fairly vital equipment. My legs are feeling pretty strong, and I think I will really enjoy the rest of the mountains of the north. Unfortunately, I'm going to have to treat most people I meet as potential thieves, which is far from an ideal attitude to have to adopt in a foreign country.

So long until the next post. Hope you enjoy armchair cycling!

Graydon

Impressions of Hanoi

It's a grey, cool, rainy day in Hanoi, continuing a trend of deteriorating weather since my arrival. I've just finished my third and final day in Hanoi, and an early-morning departure beckons tomorrow, east to Halong Bay.

I have really, really enjoyed touristing in Hanoi. I had been warned that Vietnam was one never-ending ripoff, but so far (fingers crossed) it has been nothing of the sort. The people I have dealt with have been unfailingly polite, pleasant and nice to me, especially when I've been lost in the far outskirts on my bicycle.

Hanoi is a city of motorcycles; they outnumber cars about 15 to 1 on the streets, filling the full width of the street; at a stoplight this morning, I counted 14 motorcycles abreast in a 4-lane street. The traffic is alarming at first, in that there appear to be no rules at all, but everything seems to flow at a leisurely pace, as everyone adjusts to other motorcycles to allow two or three separate traffic streams to pass right through each other at a large intersection. I think it's a system of genius, something that could be taken as a model for traffic in other countries stuck in gridlock.

I went to pay my respects to Ho Chi Minh, one of the Holy Trinity of communist mummies (along with Lenin and Mao). In comparison to the Maosoleum, where I was in December, the guards are far stricter, and the building itself is more austere, but there's the same religious atmosphere of a Catholic saint's tomb: the hushed awe, the dimmed lighting, the busts of Uncle Ho for sale outside.

I also dropped in on the "Hanoi Hilton", famous as the prison where captured US pilots such as John McCain and Pete Peterson (former US ambassador to Saigon) were held during the Vietnam War, but celebrated by the Vietnamese more as a place where the French locked up, tortured and guillotined Vietnamese nationalists during their colonial administration. I don't think I'd like to have been held there by either the French or the Vietnamese. I hope that someday places like Guantanamo Bay or Abu Ghraib will be nothing more menacing than a museum.....

Lots of lovely stuff for tourists to buy here: lacquerware, silk, masks, jewellery and the like. Although I'm not much of a shopper, a day spent wandering the warren of streets in the Old Quarter, each block specializing in a different handicraft, is fun, rather like browsing through the bazaars in the Middle East, except with far more motorcycles.

Great food so far, quite cheap. The best culinary bargain, though, has to be the draft beer (bia hoi) for sale at 2000 dong a glass (about 13 US cents) at little sidewalk booths. One intersection in the Old Quarter has a bia hoi joint on each of the four corners and is packed with cheapskate tourists like yours truly every night.

So the plan is to ride to Halong Bay tomorrow, spend a few days poking around the karst islands of the area, then make a big arc towards the Chinese border, through the mountains and hill tribe villages and national parks of the North, to Dien Bien Phu before returning to the coast and trundling down to Saigon. Can't wait to hit the open road! I just hope that my tender knees will stand up to the climbing involved.

Peace and Tailwinds!!

Graydon

In Hanoi

35 km from start
Hanoi Backpacker's Hostel

Hello everyone:

I'm sitting in the lobby of this hostel, about to turn in for the night. I flew in this afternoon from Kuala Lumpur on cheerful, friendly Malaysian Airlines (a welcome change from recent flights on dour, gloomy, cheapskate airlines like Northwest and United). I'm pretty excited about the fact that I won't see the inside of an airplane for the next two months. For someone who likes travel as much as I do, I really don't like flying very much at all.

Or taxis, for that matter. I was very glad to be able to reassemble my bike, repack my luggage and ride to Hanoi under my own power. It was a pretty dull ride (pancake-flat, along a charmless expressway clogged with motorbikes), but at least I was riding. I'm a bit concerned about my knees, which have been tenderized by learning to telemark ski this winter, so this was a perfect intro to cycling again. I found my way through the incessant waves of motorcycles that wash over downtown Hanoi to this spot in the Old Quarter, signed up for a dorm bed and went for a wander.

Each of the streets here seems to specialize in one kind of shop; I wandered along Paint Street, Sheet Metal Street, Plumbing Street, Motorcycle Repair Street, Silk Street and Clothes Street to Lock Street, where I bought a stout chain and padlock to secure my bike. Tomorrow I will wander around some more, see the Ho Chi Mummy and a museum or two and eat more yummy food while trying to get a handle on a few words of Vietnamese.

So far Vietnam reminds me strongly of China: the look of the restaurants and shops and signs, the people's faces, the faintly Communist layout of some of the streets (grand processionals a la China and the ex-Soviet states).

Stay posted for more (and, I hope, more interesting) updates from Vietnam.

Off to Vietnam Tomorrow

Greetings from an internet cafe in Tokyo.

Another year, another bike tour. After thinking that I was going to go to Iran this spring to finish my Silk Road tour at last, visa woes and expensive plane tickets conspired to thwart the plan. (That, exacerbated by my chronic disorganization this winter.) So it's time for Plan B, going to Vietnam, a country I haven't been to yet (it will be number 66 on the list when I get there on Sunday). I haven't planned my trip out very well yet, and I feel very underprepared compared to usual. I just bought the Lonely Planet Vietnam guide today, and I don't have a map yet.

My basic plan is to fly into Hanoi, spend a bit of time in the limestone cliffed islets of Ha Long Bay, then ride around the mountains north of Hanoi before heading down the coast on the infamous Highway 1 (a longtime Hanoi resident told me today that I was taking my life into my own hands by riding on it) to Hue and Hoi An, ducking into the Central Highlands for some hills and cooler weather and finally ending up in the urban madness of Saigon. If I have time, I will nip into southern Laos for a brief visit, and finish up on Phu Quoc Island, allegedly the most beautiful island in the world.

Stay posted for updates, pictures and maps of the route!

Peace and Tailwinds

Graydon