The Odyssey of Northeast Vietnam

Hello Everyone:

Sorry about the long delay in posting, but I haven't seen much in the way of real roads, let alone electricity and internet connections, for a while. Now that I'm back on the main road, I may be able to post more frequently, if the connections I do have aren't as slow as they were last night.

Since I last posted, at least a week has passed, so I'm going to break this post up into smaller bite-sized morsels, starting with the inadvertent off-road adventure I embarked on leaving Ba Be park.

First of all, I take back my comments about the Bac Can police. Somehow, mysteriously, my bike computer was delivered to my new hotel late at night, and I got it back as I checked out, to my great delight. Two thefts, two returns. Not a bad average. I wonder if it was because of police enquiries, because the thief realized it was useless without the rest of the parts, or because someone found it and returned it.

The ride to Ba Be National Park was fairly uneventful, through steady rain. I stayed at a lovely guest house outside the park and wandered around a bit, looking for birds and admiring the view. It was raining, though, so the steep paths were very muddy and like walking on ice, so I didn't walk too far. Nice views around the lake, but the trip to Ba Be was more spectacular than the destination.

Before talking about the next day's riding, I should say that my reading material for this trip consists of Homer's Odyssey and Herodotus' Histories. Pretty nerdy, but satisfying the criteria of being long, taking lots of time to read and being something that I might not read all the way through otherwise. I actually wanted to bring a complete Shakespeare, or a Norton's Anthology of English Poetry, but I couldn't find either at my favourite used bookshop in Tokyo before I left.

Has anyone actually read the whole Odyssey? This is the second time I've read it, but it must be 20 years since the first time, and I had forgotten almost all of it. Specifically, I had forgotten how tedious most of it is. Only 4 of the 24 books are actually about the Great Wanderings, the adventures with Sirens and Cyclopes and Scylla and Charybdis and the Lotus Eaters that everyone remembers. Most of it is Odysseus messing around on Ithaka disguised as a beggar, telling lies and plotting the massacre of Penelope's suitors. Anyway, the version I'm reading (not "The Browning Version"; this is the Richmond Lattimore version) has a good introduction, in which Mr. Lattimore remarks that the Great Wanderings seem to occur in some region not of this world, Odysseus having fallen off the map. For the next three days, as I left Ba Be, I felt a bit like Odysseus, subject to lots of impromptu and unforeseen adventures, trials and tribulations, not knowing where my next landfall would be, nor where my next meal was coming from.

While Odysseus' difficulties in getting home were attributed to the wrath of "the Earth-shaker Poseidon" and "far-seeing Helios", and were overcome thanks to "grey-eyed Athena", my troubles were more prosaically attributable to a lack of reasonable maps, and a concurrent unreasonable faith in what these "maps" told me. My "map" of Vietnam is really not worth the paper it's printed on, let alone the $10 price I paid in Kuala Lumpur airport. It shows the major roads with some accuracy, but the secondary roads are a figment of the cartographer's imagination. Roads which exist aren't shown. Roads that are shown don't always exist. I followed the map in trying to get to the town of Na Hang. For the first time on the trip, the road quality failed badly. In fact, it's been a few years since I've biked on a "road" that abysmal; it took me back to some of the bad days in Tibet and Pakistan in 1998. It was less a road than a terminal moraine, a jumble of unconsolidated boulders covered with cobblestone fragments and a thick layer of mud. After a good long while (and yet not too many kilometres) the boulders disappeared, but the mud remained. You know your road isn't going to be good when there are ducks and pigs wallowing right in the dead centre of the roadway. It took absolutely ages to escape the horror of that road; I had to push my bike as much as I could ride it.

By about 3:30 I was in a town where real pavement started and I got excited about reaching Na Hang for a shower and comfy bed. A friendly English teacher drew me a careful map and off I went. The lovely pavement lasted exactly 8 km (and one steep, harsh pass). Then, when the road forked, with the left side leading to a restricted military area, the right fork led to.....the worst road yet. The morning's road had been atrocious, but this one was downright diabolical, with long sections of unrideable boulderfields, bottomless potholes and mud that reached halfway to the wheel hubs. It was not a happy ride, and I had to push a lot of the way. I followed milestones that said that something (K. Mac, to be precise) was only 10 km away. I decided to ask for shelter there. The closer I got, the steeper the climb became. Then it got dark, and I arrived at K. Mac to discover it was the pass separating two provinces. I walked down in the dark for 2 hours (it was too rough to ride) and ended up sleeping, dinnerless, on the floor of a shop, food for ravenous mosquitoes and an object of curious observation for the entire village.

The next day I rode out along steadily improving roads and got to Na Hang, a major town. You would think that I had learned my lesson about this map by now. But you would be wrong. I had a huge breakfast and then headed for what my map showed to be a major thoroughfare to a place called Viet Quang. The fact that nobody I asked could tell me the road to Viet Quang should have been a clue of what was to come, but I was convinced that both my maps couldn't be wrong. (Homer would have called this hubris, I think.)

They were. The road rapidly became a dirt road, and then gradually deteriorated as the surrounding scenery got more spectacular, with limestone pinnacles soaring skywards over Tay tribal villages on stilts, surrounded by verdant rice paddies. The steepness of some of the grades was amazing, and I figured out that only motorcycles could make it over the passes; four-wheeled traffic was non-existent. At 2 pm I dropped into a prosperous little town and again quizzed the locals about the way to Viet Quang. Great confusion and consternation, and when I eventually was sent to the local English teacher, he explained that there was no road to Viet Quang, but there was a way to Ha Giang, a city much further north. It was a rough road, and he couldn't recommend it, but he could give me directions. He and the other teachers did their best to convince me that I would never return; the people in these villages didn't even speak Vietnamese! And there were no hotels or restaurants! And they were poor and uneducated and wouldn't know how to deal with me! It's funny how people always believe the worst of their nearest neighbours.

Armed with a list of village names, I set off into late afternoon. There was no longer any pretense of a road; this was single-track off-road riding, complete with grades of up to 25% (far too steep to ride either up or down; I could barely walk my fully-loaded bike down some of the hills). The limestone topography meant that there were no valleys that actually drained anywhere, so the road just kept going up and down like a rollercoaster. Around dark, I dropped into the hamlet of Phuc Yen. I ate instant noodles in the local shop, and then accepted an offer from one of the curious onlookers to stay at his family's house. They were of the Tay tribe, as was everyone in the area, and their wooden house on stilts was beautiful, built of tropical hardwoods, with a high ceiling and very spacious inside. They fed me again and I had to drink the vile rice spirits that seems to fuel half of Vietnam. After a few toasts, I begged out but the father and son kept going to the end of the bottle, and the old man had to be helped into bed. I chatted with the family over tea, then collapsed into bed under a mosquito net and slept the sleep of the dead.

The next morning I wandered around taking pictures and admiring the area, before saddling up and heading off. I stopped into the corner shop for more instant noodles, and discovered half the men of the village pounding back the first rice spirit toasts of the day at 7:40 am. No wonder so many of the men I meet seem to be pickled by 4 pm, given how early they start hitting the bottle!

It was another day of harsh riding. I had to change my brake pads, as I'd worn clean through the previous set over the past few days. More ups and downs, more mud, more rocks, more wonderful views of picturesque villages. Around noon I came into a Lost World of limestone caves, overhangs and waterfalls and spent a happy hour swimming and relaxing, a welcome break from the rigours of manhandling the bike. It was less cycling and more Himalayan trekking while pushing a bicycle. Finally at 2 o'clock I plummeted into Ngoc Minh, ate noodles in front of a huge audience of town drunks, and headed off towards Ha Giang. I had been warned that this strectch too was going to be awful, but as soon as I saw trucks on the road, I knew that it couldn't be anything like the mountain goat tracks I had just survived. It only took 2 hours to pop out onto a paved road, where I feasted on as much food as I could devour before sleeping for 10 uninterrupted hours. I had only missed Viet Quang by 45 km.......and come out heading north, not west as I had anticipated.

All in all, it was a wonderful experience in terms of the hospitality I was shown, the views of the inaccessible areas I was able to see, the nature and the sheer adventure of it all. I just wish I had known what was coming.....thanks, Poseidon! Not.

Next instalment: into the Northwest!