Random Musings, Vignettes and Thoughts

A few disconnected thoughts from the road, accumulated over the past few weeks.

Why is it that, as I've gotten further south, where it's hot all the time, it's become harder and harder to find cold beer and decent ice cream? Most places, I have to have ice cubes in my beer to make it drinkable, and ice cream is as scarce as hen's teeth. Don't people here find it as hot as I do?

On the other hand, with every kilometre further south I get, the more people know how to speak at least a little English. American influence lingering from the war? Or just more tourists around, so more commercial incentive to learn? Or just a more city-based, educated society, with better English teachers?

With more exposure to tourists, the South is also more of a place for getting ripped off. You can see it coming; the sly grin, the look of grasping avarice, the discussion amongst the locals about how much they're going to charge the foreigner. I hate it; the only antidote is to ask the price of absolutely everything and be prepared to walk away, to bargain and to reprimand.

I thought I'd seen every possible method of rowing a boat during my travels, but the other day I saw a completely new idea. A kid lay on his back in a rowboat with his feet tied or taped to the oars, and he pedalled his legs as though he were riding a bicycle, alternately dipping the oars in the water. Ingenious.

The recently-completed rice harvest featured some very impressive feats of transport: oxcarts piled high with rice stalks, farmers staggering under loads balanced over their shoulders on a length of bamboo, and my personal favourite, the harvest bicycle. Two wooden racks hang from the bottom of the bike frame and support enormous piles of rice stalks, completely enveloping the bike. The driver pushes the bike with the aid of two long poles, one attached to the seat post and the other to the handlebars. In the Dien Bien Phu war museum, they mentioned that these bikes were used by Ho Chi Minh's army to transport up to 200 kg (!?!) of supplies at a time. Something to think about the next time I curse my heavy luggage.

I pick up more and more fellow riders these days. They're always schoolkids trying to impress their friends, and they rarely last very long, but occasionally somebody stays with me for 4 or 5 kilometres. Very occasionally it's a bike with two kids on it; they take turns pedalling as fast as they can. It's nice to see them expending more energy than the average citizen of Vietnam.

I watch milestones on the highways religiously. Usually they give distances to the next town, or the next major city, or the one after that. Recently, though, the milestone painters have been getting adventurous; I went for 25 km without seeing one nearby town mentioned. Instead, I learned the distances to Saigon, Nha Trang and a host of other towns 1000+ km away. Good for general knowledge, but bad for trying to figure out how far it's going to be to a decent lunch stop. The last little while, though, it's been back to the nearby towns. I wonder if each province's milestone painters have autonomy over which distances they're going to give?

I love the various cycling styles that you see around the world. Here in Vietnam, they have a couple of methods of riding two to a bike that I've never seen elsewhere. My favourite is when one rider sits on the saddle and the second one sits on the luggage rack and they both pedal at the same time, the one at the front putting his feet on top of the other one's feet on the pedals. Often I see boys riding around alone on a bike but sitting on the luggage rack with the seat right in their chest, which can't be comfortable. I've seen three on a bike a few times, with the third person sitting backwards on the handlebars, quite a feat of balance. You also see people on motorcycles pushing (with their feet) or pulling (with their hands) friends on bicycles. I wonder why it is that, like in Japan and China, everyone rides around with tires that are almost flat, and seats that are much too low, with their knees sticking out sideways like Charlie Chaplin or Groucho Marx walking. Of course, the smallest kids can't really fit on the bikes, so they either ride through the frame, or on girl's bikes sitting right on the cross-bar which has got to hurt after a while.

I've now been offered 8 daughters to marry (everyone is in shock that I'm 37 and unmarried) and 4 children to take away with me. I explain that neither wife nor kid will fit on my bike, but I think the mothers concerned aren't convinced by my excuses.

Things you think about while cycling. Lots of men in this part of Vietnam wear mustaches. Here's the question: are there more adult men with mustaches in the world or without? Indian subcontinent, the Middle East and Latin America are mustache countries, while most of Europe and North America and China are not. It will all come down to the swing countries in Africa and SE Asia. What do you think? I think it's pretty close to 50% of the world's men that have mustaches.

I've been surprised by how few cycle tourists I've met here in Vietnam. Four on Cat Ba, one in Sapa, three groups in the NW and exactly one on the coast. I would have expected more, but maybe it's the wrong season, and maybe long-distance cyclists go through Thailand and Laos into China, rather than diverting into Vietnam.

In Hue I met a bunch of South Vietnam Army vets working as motorcycle guides. They were pretty bitter about how they were treated by the North Vietnamese after the war, being sent to re-education camps and finding it hard to get jobs. They also mentioned that all the well-maintained war cemeteries all over the country are only for those who died fighting for the North; the South's soldiers get no memorials as they were imperialist lackeys.

I wonder sometimes why some people are so good at picking up what I'm trying to say, and others are so bad. I undoubtedly speak Vietnamese with the worst accent known to man, but sometimes I'm frustrated by my listeners' inability to make the connection. I asked a lady the other day the way to Vinh Moc, a nearby (12 km) famous war site that thousands of tourists visit. To get there, you have to turn right at the corner where her shop is located. I asked in my execrable Vietnamese "Is this the road to Vinh Moc? I want to go to Vinh Moc." She didn't get what I was asking, and tried to show me the way to Vinh, a city 250 km away up the coast. I kept repeating "Vinh Moc" and she kept on not getting it until her neighbour said something like "He's asking for Vinh Moc, dummy" and pointed me in the right direction. Another time I asked for "bia hoi", the key phrase for "draught beer". I knew this restaurant had it because I could see "bia hoi" on their sign outside. The owner did not understand what I was saying and kept pulling out various bottles of beer: Bia Hanoi (OK, close), Bia Heineken (not so close) and Bia Tiger (no resemblance). If you were a bartender and someone asked for a glass of "drift beer" or "druft beer", you'd likely get the idea that he wanted a draft, wouldn't you?

OK, I have to get some sleep before hitting the road south tomorrow.

Xin Chao!!

A-Hoi An

Hello Faithful Readers:

I'm in Hoi An, not far from Hue, where I last wrote, so this will be an shortish update.

My last day in Hue was spent cycling out into the countryside in search of some imperial tombs from the 19th-century Nguyen Dynasty. It was a lovely day, if a bit hot, and I really liked the excursion. My first tomb, Gia Long, which took absolutely forever to find as it's off the tourist trail, the beaten track and even the dirt road. When I finally got there, though, it was love at first sight. A couple of water buffaloes and their minder were my only company. The tomb complex, a series of red-brick pavilions and pillars and enclosures, was in ruins. Very atmospheric ruins. I love overgrown, deserted ruins, and these were what I was looking for. The Nguyen Emperors liked their tombs to be surrounded by water, so there were ponds thick with water lilies and lotuses. There were wildflowers growing through and over the stairs of the memorial temple, and two huge pillars stuck their heads up through the surrounding forest. It reminded me a bit of Sri Satchanalai in Thailand, although, given its recent date, a better parallel would be Ayutthaya. In December I had a look at some of the Ming Imperial tombs outside Beijing, and I much preferred this one; a more human scale, less overwhelming bombast, and the key ingredient of water.

I bumped, ferried and pedalled my way back to the main road and had a good look at Ming Manh and Thieu Tri. Ming Manh was in much better shape than Gia Long, and it gave me a better idea what Gia Long must once have looked like. There were a few tourists, but at times I had the whole beautiful, graceful, harmoniously laid-out complex to myself. The actual grave of Ming Manh was at the back of the complex, underneath a sizeable tumulus of earth overgrown with pine trees. This is exactly the same as the tombs of the Tang and Han emperors outside Xian in China. Apparently the 200 servants who buried the body were all beheaded afterwards to make it more difficult for grave-robbers to find the exact location of the corpse. The amazing thing to me is that this is not something that happened 3000 years ago (the Egyptian Pharaohs played the same trick on their grave-diggers), but rather 160 years ago. This is the sort of behaviour that causes revolutions amongst the people. Thieu Tri was more like Gia Long, and I pottered about happily for an hour or so among the ruins.

That evening, to my great delight, a local camera repair shop fixed my digital camera. When he unscrewed the camera body, a piece of metal fell out, which is never a good sign. I had been contemplating disassembling the thing myself, but when I saw how complex the wiring was inside, I was glad that I hadn't. $10 very well spent, I think.

The next day I got up, had a final enormous traveller's breakfast (musli with fruit and yoghurt, banana pancakes and fruit shakes) and hit the road. It was a sizzling hot day, and I had a big climb in front of me into the coastal mountains and Bach Ma National Park. I got to the bottom around 11, dreading the heat of the climb, but I was saved by the stupidity of park regulations. "No bicycles or motorcycles allowed on the road into the park!" I was told. When I asked why, I was told that it was too steep and dangerous, and would I like to rent a jeep for $25 to ride up. I pointed out that surely a bicycle was environmentally friendlier and less likely to scare the animals and birds, but logic will never get you anywhere in the face of otiose bureaucracy. I decided that if the park management were that dense, I didn't want to give them my money, and I cycled away in annoyance.

About an hour later, a little boy walked to the far side of the road as I was passing, waited carefully for traffic coming both ways to be clear, and threw a handful of rocks at me. Luckily his aim was poor, and the few pebbles that didn't miss me entirely rattled harmlessly off my spokes. However, of all the obnoxious things that little (and not so little) boys do to me on my travels, throwing stones is by far my least favourite. In Pakistan and Tibet I was regularly pelted with stones, and I hate it. It's so unfriendly, dangerous and unnecessary. Unfortunately for this little Vietnamese boy, the gap in traffic made it easy for me to wheel around and give chase, which he had not counted on. I pursued him down a little road and he darted into a yard and was gone. As I returned to the highway, though, I spotted him hiding close to the scene of the crime. I put my bike down and ran after him, and this time, since I was on foot, it was hard for him to escape. I was yelling at him, and he was shrieking in what seemed to be genuine fright. At last I caught up to him in a little tea shop next door, and the look of pure terror on his face as he hid behind the adults made my day entirely. Without having actually to hit him, I was able (I hope) to put sufficient fear of God (or at least of avenging foreign cyclists) into him that he will never again throw rocks at passing tourists on bikes. I cycled away happy at having done my good deed for the day.

My smiles were increased by my next two detours from the main road. First up was Suoi Voi, a lovely series of swimming holes in a cold mountain river. Huge boulders separate the pools and provide privacy and peace, and my overheated body was glad to soak in the cool water for a while. Shortly after that, I found my way to Lang Co, a thin sandbar peninsula separating the South China Sea from an inland lagoon. On the uninhabited northern stretch of the beach, I swam and bodysurfed and read my Louis de Bernieres book and swam some more. When I rolled into the main tourist town area of Lang Co, I was glad I had swum where I had. Lang Co was a busy strip of hotels , all of which were full, or at least the first 10 I asked at. I finally found the last room in town, a concrete sweatbox, had a meal of crab (I ordered clams, but apparently the English menu got mixed up between the two) and tossed and turned all night in the heat on my rock-hard tiny bed, listening to passing trucks blasting their air horns.

Yesterday I awoke a bit groggy. "Lang Co is so quiet, isn't it?" asked the woman who ran the hotel. "Quieter than what? An atomic bomb?" It really was one of the most remarkably noisy places of the whole trip. I started the day with a couple of peanut butter baguettes (baguette sandwich stalls seem to be everywhere now, to my delight; I hardly saw any in the north) before tackling the pretty Hai Van Pass. It took 54 minutes (yes, I counted) to sweat my way to the top, 450 metres above sea level), where I had great views back to Lang Co (everything looks more beautiful from far above, I find) and ahead to Da Nang. The descent was wonderful, and I sped into bustling Da Nang.

The only thing I did in Vietnam's fourth city was to go to the Cham Museum. The Cham empire, originally centred around Da Nang, was a contemporary of Angkor, and, like its more famous neighbour, was a Hindu state that looked to India for cultural influences. There were lots of worn, weathered statues of Vishnu and Shiva, and I spent a couple of hours taking pictures and trying to sketch a few statues. I'm really looking forward to seeing some of the major Cham temple ruins over the next week or so as I head south.

I sped out of town to China Beach, a favourite RnR site for US troops 40 years ago, where I had the best meal of my trip so far in a seafood restaurant overlooking the South China Sea, and then relaxed on a deserted strip of beach for a couple of hours. During the second hour, a Vietnamese teenager came up to where I was lying and sat there, staring at me, watching me read. His capacity to withstand boredom was phenomenal. I finally got up and left, and he remained, gazing at me, until I had vanished around the next bend in the road.

The ride along the beach road to Hoi An was pure misery, through endless potholes, construction and dust. It was worth it, though. Hoi An is lovely, an oasis of history and architecture in the cultural desert that is most of modern Vietnam. I spent today happily wandering the old streets, poking around old Chinese merchants' houses, relics of when Hoi An was the major international port of Vietnam from 1600-1850. Now, like Venice, it basks in the warmth of its bygone glory and packs in the tourists. I think I will spend another couple of days here, lounging in the best hotel of the trip so far. I slept so well last night that I don't really want to leave my enormous bed and cool, dark bedroom. Tomorrow a visit to My Son, a major Cham site, is on the books.

Until next time,

Tam Biet!

Graydon

On My Hue,,,,From Misery to Happiness

First, a couple of inspirational quotes to live by, at least for a bike tourist.

"To a nomad, the weight of his luggage is the price of his freedom."

"You can always make more money; you can never make more time."

Thanks to my friend and fellow world traveller Sean Cash for pointing out the first one!

I'm sitting in my guesthouse here in Hue, the old capital of Vietnam, replete with French toast and muesli and mango shakes, revelling in a couple of days of backpacker comfort. It's been a week since I last updated you, my faithful readers, on my whereabouts, so I will try to make it short but pithy.

I last wrote from the horrorshow called Sam Son Beach, a dreadful eyesore just outside Thanh Hoa. I was very glad to see Sam Son disappear behind me. I put in a long, dull day in the saddle, riding 147 km along flat, busy, ugly National Route 1A, Vietnam's answer to the Trans-Canada or Route 66,. It's a never-ending strip of motorcycle repair shops, restaurants, shops and people, with a fair amount of traffic, including buses that scream along at dangerous speeds, blowing their horns to scatter motorcyclists and bicycles from their juggernaut-like path. It was rice-harvesting time, and lots of folks were out in the fields, scything, carrying bundles of rice or driving oxcarts (or pushing adapted bicycles) groaning under huge loads of rice stalks. It was grey, humid weather, so not many photos, and I was glad to get off the road and head to another beach resort at the end of the day. The happiness lasted about 100 metres, when I realized that the last 8 km was going to be on the dustiest dirt road in Vietnam. Cua Lo Beach was cut from the same rotten cloth as Sam Son, but at least the water was cleann, Lots of "Moses boats": wicker baskets daubed with pitch and used for fishing.

The next day was also not too memorable, aside from the number of mentally ill tramps wandering the roads (at least 10, one of whom ran out to the road and took a swing at me). I met a couple of English teachers during the day, one of whom spoke pretty decent English. It seems that as I head south, a few more people actually speak a few words of English other than "Hello! Money!" The landscape became sandier, with coastal sand dunes protecting a marshy network of backwaters used for fishing, shrimp farming and, of course, growing rice. In the middle of the day, I came across the aftermath of a fatal accident; one of those runaway buses had run over two unfortunate motorcyclists; the motorcycle was trapped under the bus' front axle, but there were no signs of what could only have been the corpses of the riders. Huge pools of coagulated blood surrounded the hats and sandles of the motorcyclists, which were still lying in the road, nearly 100 metres before the bus. The bus must have hit them broadside while it was driving on the wrong side of the road, probably overtaking at high speed in the centre of town. After that memento mori, I have tried to be even more cautious than usual when in the vicinity of trucks and buses. At day's end, I found myself in a nowhere little town, staying in easily the most squalid accommodation of the trip, reminiscent of a Chinese truck stop. At least it was also the cheapest place I've stayed. I entertained an adult English class for a little while; their teacher had spotted me riding in. The students are going to work as construction workers in Dubai, and are trying to get a modicum of English before they leave. In Sam Son and especially in Cua Lo, I met a number of Vietnamese who had worked in Malaysia and picked up a smattering of English. Being just about the poorest country in ASEAN, I'm sure that Vietnam exports a lot of workers desperate to earn a bit more money than they do back on the farm.

The riding, and my mood, took a dramatic swing for the better the next day. It was a Three Swim Day (as opposed to a Three Dog Night). Route 1A finally swung close to the coast, and I kept passing deserted white-sand beaches getting pummelled by a pretty decent set of breakers. I stopped every once in a while for a swim, refreshing the body and soul beyond measure. It's so much easier to put up with heavy traffic and deafening air horns when you're still drying off from a dip in the surf. I also had a small pass to climb, at the mountainous border between the old French protectorates of Tonkin and Annam, and since it was Sunday, the traffic on the road was greatly reduced. I spent almost three hours off the bike at lunchtime, eating clams at a beachside restaurant, swimming and playing guitar. The day's 100 kilometres barely registered, and I slept in another beach hotel outside Dong Hoi and feasted on crab.

As I passed through Dong Hoi the next day, there were plenty of reminders that I was approaching the DMZ, the old border between North and South Vietnam and scene of some of the heaviest fighting and bombing of the war. Old French concrete pillboxes lined the beach road, and in Dong Hoi itself, a church blown to pieces by American bombs stands as a mute reminder of what the place was like 40 years ago. I rode through oppressive humidity towards the DMZ, and by lunchtime I had arrived at Vinh Moc, a troglodytic reminder of the human will to survive. Vinh Moc was a fishing and farming village just north of the DMZ that was destroyed by American bombing in 1966. Rather than flee north, the locals decided to stay put and live underground, rather like some Cappadocian villages in Turkey did during Arab invasions in the 7th century. They dug kilometres of tunnels to live and shelter in, and a network of trenches to get to and from their fields in safety. They somehow survived until the end of the war, despite fierce bombing and shelling from offshore battleships. What's now a fun day out for tour groups, wandering through a darkened subterranean labyrinth, must have been truly hellish at the time. I'm amazed that I encounter absolutely no anti-Western bitterness from the population of areas like that, many of whom must have lived through horrific experiences in the war.

The next day was time for one of the more quixotic excursions of the trip, a day-long dash to the old battlefield of Khe Sanh to give a short, solo concert. Carrying only my guitar and camera, I rode 66 km up into the mountains near the Lao border. I had forgotten how much easier it is to ride with no luggage, and I went like the wind, setting the fastest average speed of the trip despite the fact that it was a 500-metre climb to get to Khe Sanh. The battlefield, site of a major Marine Corps air base that was used to try to disrupt supplies moving along the Ho Chi Minh trail, is now in a peaceful, pretty setting, with drying black pepper from nearby plantations perfuming the air. The battlefield was deserted, so there was no audience as I sang three of my favourite war songs: "Letter from Bilbao" by Lowest of the Low, "The Band Played Waltzing Matilda" by someone whose name I have never been able to remember and, the inspiration for the whole idea, "Khe Sanh", the unofficial rock national anthem of Australia. Probably just as well that there was nobody around, as my voice sounded out of tune even to myself. The comment book in the museum was interesting; lots of US veterans had come to visit, and while most of their comments were thoughtful, there were a few along the lines of "America: home of the free, land of the brave. We won this battle!" which reminds me of the comment attributed to a vet visiting the DMZ. He said to an old North Vietnamese Army officer that the US had never lost a single battle during the entire war. "Entirely correct," was the reply, "but also irrelevant, isn't it?" There seems to be more bitterness among the US veterans than among the Vietnamese whose country was bombed into Swiss cheese. The ride back was through a biblical downpour that shorted out my cycling computer; it still hasn't come back to life three days later. Along the road I was passed by a hurtling truck; half an hour later, I came on another tragic tableau of the same truck stopped beside the mangled wreckage of a motorcycle.

The day before yesterday I rode through tremendous heat and humidity to get here to Hue. Along the noisy, dull road I ran into my first cycle tourist since I left the northern mountains. Charlie was an interesting guy, who had spent the last 4 years wandering the world on his bike. We exchanged stories and ideas for bike trips over a few cold sodas; he reckons that the Carreterra Austral in Chile was his favourite road, so I should get down there sometime to check it out. I skirted the massive 19th-century Citadel and entered the relative civilization of Hue. I always find that cities with history feel more civilized and less like chaotic, overgrown villages than do Johnny-come-lately urban sprawls. I found a great little hotel in the backpacker ghetto and set out to stuff myself with lots and lots of good food.

Yesterday I awoke tired and jaded (the beers I had the night before with Doug, a British backpacker, may have played a part) and lazed about all morning. In the afternoon I took my bike out to see a few sites. The Citadel, scene of the fiercest fighting in the 1968 Tet Offensive, is largely in atmospheric ruin, but there are a few restored or surviving structures to look at. As it's built in red brick, it reminds me a lot of Ayutthaya, its near contemporary capital of Thailand. Hue was only the capital for 100 years or so, but it remains an important cultural and religious centre. I rode out through fields already being prepared for the second rice crop of the year to an old wooden covered bridge, and then back into town to a lovely old pagoda and a series of Chinese temples. The pagoda was where the first Buddhist monk to burn himself to death in Saigon came from; his car is still on display. The photos of the event appeared in every newspaper in the world, along with the callous remarks of the Vietnamese First Lady: "It's a barbecue party. Let them burn themselves and we shall clap in delight." In true religious fashion, there's also a certificate that the monks heart was unaffected by the fire and is an official Sacred Heart Relic, good for miracles and prayers.

So now another day of touristing and dining well in Hue awaits. Today's project is the royal tombs lying outside the city. It's amazing how much touristing around the world goes on royal tombs: think of Xian, Beijing and the Egyptian Pyramids. I feel refreshed by having some culture to look at, rather than yet more concrete and uniformly ugly highway towns. My next stops should be Bach Ma National Park and then the old trading town of Hoi An, before the long push towards Saigon. I have racked up 2567 km so far, and the highway signs are telling me that Saigon is only 1060 km away, so I'm more than two thirds of the way through the trip, although only halfway through the time allotment. Lots more time for loafing on nice beaches ahead!

Peace and Tailwinds

Graydon

On the Trail of Ho Chi Minh

Sam Son Beach, outside Thanh Hoa

I'm sitting in the armpit of Vietnam, a beach resort of such tremendous grottiness and sleaze that it makes Pattaya look attractive. The water, a muddy brown colour, is so full of floating garbage that it makes it look like the local dump got flooded. At least it distracts you from the dirty brown scum of foam at the waterline, the origins of which I don't want to think about. I am the only whitey in town (big surprise there! Who in their right mind would come here?), but it's packed with groups of Vietnamese men in town to drink and whore in the multitudinous "massage parlours". There are no commercial transactions here that don't qualify as ripoffs, or attempted ripoffs. I will be happy indeed to roll out of here tomorrow.

So the last time I updated the blog, I was a day out of Sapa. I rode 2 more long, hard, hilly days to get to Dien Bien Phu, the place where the might of the French army proved no match for the preparation, tenacity and artillery of the Viet Minh guerrillas in 1954. The riding to get to DBP was fun, not to mention unexpected; my "map" again provided little clue as to what was coming up. On the first day, I climbed a very minor hill and then flew downhill for more than 20 km to the bottom of a valley, passing a very taciturn Dutch couple on bicycles coming the other way. I spent the rest of the day undulating up and down the walls of a river gorge on quite a peaceful, pretty road, surrounded by the sound of singing birds. It was the last really hot day I had, reaching the customary 40 degrees around noon. That evening, in old Lai Chau (they've renamed several towns in the area, so that I wrote my last post from new Lai Chau, and then rode all day to get to old Lai Chau), it bucketed down rain with tremendous lightning, cooling down the air temperature for the next week. I sheltered in a restaurant with a Swiss woman and her motorcycle driver. They had crashed earlier in the day when a truck ran them off the road, and the driver had cut his foot badly. He was a fount of local knowledge and great fun to talk to.

The next day was a big day for climbing, with my altimeter showing 2150 vertical metres by the time I got to Dien Bien Phu. I had three major passes and lots of little climbs. Luckily it wasn't too hot. I entered the area inhabited by the Thai minority, the best-looking tribe in Vietnam, at least as far as the women go. They all sport big buns or beehive hairdos that tower over their heads, and when they put on a woven headdress or a conical hat, they look like some of Dan Ackroyd's Coneheads. When they have their heads uncovered, they have a small disk on the bun of hair that gives them the look of Shiva. Faces like the apsaras at Angkor Wat, long black high-waisted skirts and surprisingly tall physiques complete an alluring look. I'm not sure whether the Thai here are related to the Thai of Thailand, but I would imagine they're the same.

I rolled into the flat agricultural plain of Dien Bien Phu under clear late afternoon skies. Everyone was busy harvesting rice, and it looked very pretty and peaceful, a world away from how it had looked 52 years ago. The French, trying to pin down a marauding Viet Minh army that was rampaging through Laos (the border is only 20 km from DBP), flew thousands of troops into DBP to cut off their supply lines. This was a very, very foolish move, as the French found themselves surrounded, outnumbered 5 to 1 and pinned down by artillery fire and anti-aircraft guns that the Viet Minh had lugged in through the jungles, over some of the same passes I cycled over. When the battle began, the French artillery chief, who had told the commanding colonel that the Viet Minh wouldn't have any artillery, realized his error, shouted "It's all my fault" and threw himself onto a grenade to erase his shame. The rest of the French held out for 57 days before surrendering. The French lost 3000 dead and 12,000 taken prisoner; the Viet Minh lost 25,000 troops but won the battle and, soon after, the war, as the French government gave up on holding Indochina. As the commanding general Vo Nguyen Giap said to a French official at negotiations a few years earlier "You can kill 10 of my soldiers for every one of yours that we kill. But at those odds, we will still win and you will still lose." Words that the Americans might have taken to heart and saved themselves, and Southeast Asia, two more decades of misery and war. I toured some of the battlefield memorials, including the French memorial stone and the Vietnamese cemetery. I always feel drawn towards war cemeteries, perhaps since if I had been born at the wrong time, I could easily have been drafted and ended up fertilizing a Vietnamese ricefield myself. I'm also generally a fan of the invaded underdog in situations like this: the Chechens, the Iraqis, the Afghans, the Vietnamese, the people of Darfur. Too bad they don't win more often.

I rolled out of Dien Bien Phu the next day feeling tired; early mornings and long days of climbing were catching up to me. Luckily the day was relatively short and easy, with only one real pass to climb. On the way, I rolled down a river and saw dozens of villagers waist-deep in water, panning for gold. I wonder if they find enough to justify the effort.

The steepest pass of the trip awaited me the next morning; it averaged 8 percent grade for 9 kilometres, and was really quite vertical on its switchbacks. Near the top I had a long chat with an English motorcyclist on his way to Mongolia, and then, coming down the shredded wreck of a road on the other side of the pass, I met a group of 6 Norwegian cyclists. We gabbed for a while, and they gave me photocopied guidebook pages and maps that made the next few days less of a mystery. No sooner had I left them, but I met a Dutch guy on a bike. Strange that after meeting so few other tourists, I ran into so many inside an hour. I slept that night in Son La, a bustling provincial capital. In a restaurant I sat next to a group of Meong women and kids who were in town for the market. Looking at them, you could see that for them, life was a struggle; they looked poor and down on their luck, unlike the Hmong in Sapa who make a good living selling stuff to tourists. This may have to do with the tremendous population pressures on the land; most hills are cultivated right to the top, with attendant erosion and landslide problems. These people might well have been farming some pretty marginal land.

I thought about this the next day as I rolled along a new, wide, smooth, gently-sloped road. It had been so long since I'd been on such a good road that I absolutely flew, and I had time to contemplate things like the Ecological Footprint calculation that I had my friends do recently. For a subsistence farmer, it's pretty obvious what your ecological footprint is; it's the area of land you cultivate. I'm sure that the local farmers have a much lower ecological footprint than I, an overconsuming Westerner, do. but there are so many farmers in such a small area that it overloads the environment. If the local farmers keep having large families, most of those kids will have no alternative but to flock to the cities since there will be no land left for them to farm. Quite a contrast to Canada, where we each use lots of the planet's resources, but where we have, by dumb luck within our borders, so much land and so many resources to use that we still have lots of room per person.

Musing about stuff like this, I covered 118 km and stayed in a town called Moc Chau, a higgledy-piggledy arrangement of houses around limestone pinnacles. I stayed in the Lonely Planet-recommended hotel, and regretted it, as it was one of the noisiest nights of the trip. Lots of prostitutes, lots of customers, high heels stomping around at all hours, karaoke echoing through the hallways, somebody hauling a wheeled suitcase out at 3 am, and, the final insult, loudspeakers broadcasting 100 decibels of exercise tapes at 4:50 am. I really don't know how the Vietnamese get any sleep at all, unless they have hearing damage that blocks it all out.

Two days ago I left Moc Chau, had one more big climb and then coasted downhill into the lowlands. I turned south on the Ho Chi Minh Highway, supposedly following the route of one of the Ho Chi Minh trails of the war, and fought my way 50 km south to Quan Trung, a surprisingly pleasant little town tucked among the limestone cliffs lining the Song Na river. Along the way I passed literally millions of white butterflies, and a bamboo forest which was being processed into chopsticks.

Yesterday was a red-letter day for riding, as the valley opened up and I flew along on flat roads, past rice harvesting and clouds of schoolkids on bicycles, through an ancient royal citadel and on into Thanh Hoa, a decent-sized city, and another 16 km into this dump. The riding was so easy that I did 155 km, despite long breaks for beer and food and ice cream spaced throughout the day. The only real downer was being spat on (right in my face) by a motorcyclist coming the other way; too bad I didn't have time to lob a pebble into his path! I did decide to take a day off, though, my first lazy day in 2 weeks, to give my legs a rest. I just wish it was in a more salubrious town.

The plan now is to stick to the coast, more or less, and head down into the tourist sites of the central coast and down to Saigon. I hope that the next lowland towns I come to have fewer lowlifes than here in Sam Son.

I'm wading through Herodotus right now, loving all the anecdotes and diversions. The following is my current favourite quote. So deadpan, it might come from a well-written Lonely Planet.

"Aside from the fact that they prostitute their daughters, the way of life of the Lydians is very similar to our own." Not the sort of sentence that you read every day.

Until next time, tam biet!

Graydon

On the Roof of Vietnam

Lai Chau, 1200 km from the start

I'm in a small, dusty town on a road to almost nowhere. I've put up for the night in a cheap but dubious-looking hotel that seems to double as a brothel, as many cheap hotels do around the world. It wasn't the only choice in town, but they all seem pretty similar.

So I'm a day down the road from Sapa, the tourist mecca of northern Vietnam, where I spent a couple of nights, before and after climbing Fansipan, the highest peak in the country. I took two surprisingly quick and easy days to get to Sapa from Bac Ha. The first was mostly downhill and flat, which was just as well as my destination city, the border town of Lao Cai (border with Yunnan province, China) was an absolute oven by the time I arrived at lunch time. There were a lot of Chinese tourists in town, riding around in numbered buses, wearing matching flourescent baseball caps and looking bemused. Now group tourists often look bemused, as they seem to switch their brains off as they enter the tour bus, but these tourists looked particularly befuddled as there's precisely nothing of interest in Lao Cai. I hope they were at the start of a longer tour going to other places in Vietnam, because otherwise it would have been a rather dull visit to the country.

The next day I set off very early for a long climb to Sapa. Lao Cai is at about 100 metres above sea level and Sapa is at about 1450 metres, so it was clear that the road was going to be up, up, up. As I got going by 6:30, it was humid but not too hot, and I got up to an altitude where it was slightly cooler and breezier by 9 am. It was a perfectly paved road, and I could see why the government had spent so much effort on it. I was passed by at least 40 minibuses transporting tourists up to Sapa from the Lao Cai railway station. I also met my first bicycle tourist since Cat Ba island, a member of a Kiwi mountain biking group; the other members were taking trails down to Lao Cai, but she had had a crash the day before and decided to stay on pavement. The views were lovely, looking out at complex systems of rice terraces that are just being flooded now for planting. Seen from above, the water shimmers and looks quite strange, intersected as it is by all the terrace walls. From time to time I saw farmers riding wooden sleds behind water buffalo as they smoothed out the mud in the terraces. Before I knew it, I had covered the 38 kilometres to Sapa and was back in the land of mass Western tourism: endless souvenir shops, banana pancakes on the restaurant menus and several faux-French upscale restaurants lining the main street.

Sapa is a market centre for the surrounding highlands, and you see members of the local Montagnard tribes in town to buy and, in particular, to sell souvenirs to tourists. The two biggest tribes in the Sapa area are the Dao and the Black Hmong. The Dao women wear enormous red headdresses and shave their hairlines to accentuate the size of their round faces. It's quite an unearthly look, reminiscent of old Flemish portraits. The more numerous Black Hmong women wear indigo-dyed shirts, aprons, shorts and leggings, and enormous silver earrings and necklaces. Interestingly, the Black Hmong men also still wear traditional indigo trousers and shirts, unlike the men of most tribes who wear Western dress. The Black Hmong must surely be among the shortest ethnic groups on the planet. Lowland Vietnamese are already slight, tiny people, but they absolutely tower over the Black Hmong. I would guess the average height of the women to be about 4 foot 9, with a lot of older women significantly shorter. From a distance, some of the women look as though they must be about 9 years old, until you realize that they have a baby on their back. Swarms of Hmong women surround tourists on the street, trying to sell jewellery and weaving and, if that fails, hashish and opium.

I spent an afternoon wandering around and taking pictures of the fabulous outfits, and then booked a guide to climb Mt. Fansipan, the 3142-metre mountain that towers over Sapa. It was a wonderful, leisurely 3-day climb (it could easily be done in 2 days, or even 1 very, very long day, but I was feeling lazy). My guide and I climbed for 4 hours up to the base camp on the first day, through an enormous area of forest that burned down 20 years ago and is only slowly regenerating. Camp was in a lovely forest glade beside wonderful swimming holes; if only the guides and camp maintenance people didn't turn the area into an enormous garbage dump and build the camp toilet directly over a stream!

The next morning we marched off under cloud and rain to the summit. It was a remarkably steep ascent, up limestone faces covered in dense rhododendron forest, clinging to exposed roots and rock faces for balance. Some of the trees were blossoming, making for beautiful surroundings. After a while we entered dense bamboo groves and finally open grassy areas before reaching the fog-enshrouded peak. No views at all, but the walk was lovely. It took us longer to descend (3 hours 20 minutes) than to ascend (2:50) as it was so slippery underfoot that we ended up sitting down and picking our way down on our butts.

The third day we awoke to pouring rain and set off late downhill. It was even more slippery on the return path, which took a different route than the ascent. As the heaviest member of the group (I had joined an Austrian couple and their guide), I fell much more than they did, and was quite frustrated and sore by the time we got down to the river. We had great views though as we walked down an exposed ridge, looking at the other high peaks in the area.

I was pretty sore by the time I got to Sapa, mostly from preventing myself from falling, and so I was glad to get back on the bike for the first time in 4 days. Today's ride was pretty vertical, with a climb to a 1930-metre pass, a huge downhill through lovely scenery, and then another long, hot climb to a 1300-metre pass before coming downhill to this point. When I heard that I had another pass between me and my intended overnight stop, I decided that I'd had enough for the day and found my dubious hotel. It was another hot day; 41 degrees at noon. I was hoping that the mountains would cool down the air, but no such luck. The tribes around here are different than in Sapa, including some whose women wear black turbans with huge silver dishes on top that makes them look like cartoon Martians. Lots of rice planting going on

So now the plan is to make it to Dien Bien Phu, the remote spot where the Viet Minh guerrillas destroyed a French army in 1954, in another 2 days, and then head down to the coast south of Hanoi for some flat, easy cycling along the coast. I anticipate lots more sweaty climbs before I get to the beaches along the coast. I'm looking forward to more views of rice terraces, limestone peaks and colourfully-dressed tribal women before I return to modern Vietnam.

So until I find another working internet connection, I hope that May finds you all happy, healthy and having more fun than a barrel of monkeys. Or than a Canadian cyclist in Vietnam.

Tam biet!