Sai-going, Sai-going, Sai-gone!

Saigon, 4020 km from the start

I'm free!!!! I escaped from the hot and unpleasant confines of National Route 1A this morning and rode into surprisingly civilized and quiet Saigon, vastly relieved to be out of the traffic, diesel fumes and ear-splitting din of the highway.

I think I last wrote from Dalat. My second night in Dalat the hotel was full of local farmers in town for the market, and it was quite possibly the loudest hotel I have ever been in. Graydon's travel tip of the day: try to avoid hotels full of Vietnamese if you want to sleep, as your night will be punctuated by shouted conversations, screams, stomping footsteps, slamming doors and thorough-going clearing of the throat and nasal passages until after midnight, and then starting again at 5 am. I was an unhappy and groggy character that morning!

I rode for 110 km to Bao Loc that day. On the way out of town, a construction worker lobbed a stone at me from atop a three-storey building, then smiled broadly and waved at me. He seemed genuinely puzzled when I swore at him and chucked a rock back. The ride began with a wonderful downhill out of Dalat, and stayed in the highlands all day, giving a slightly cooler temperature and some decent views. Unfortunately Highway 20 proved to be just as busy as Highway 1A, and narrower, so not great cycling from a noise or safety standpoint. I passed a few waterfalls, but was put off going to see them by the Niagara-style cheesy tourist attractions clustered around, and by the 15 tour buses parked in the parking lots. Domestic tourists love Dalat and flock to have their photos taken with locals dressed as Native Americans, turtles, bears, Vietnamese emperors and just about anything else you can think of, while being bombarded with 120 decibels of appalling music and being importuned to buy atrocious souvenirs by hundreds of aggressive salespeople. I did sneak into one very pretty waterfall near the end of the day, when all the tourists had zoomed off to Saigon or Dalat. A little boy, annoyed that I didn't respond to the "Hello!! Hello!!" he was screaming into my face, pinched my arm, hard. I think he was genuinely puzzled when I pinched him back. He discovered that adults have much stronger fingers than children. I spent the night in Bao Loc, a major centre for tea and coffee production.

I rode into Cat Tien national park the next afternoon, after a long downhill back to the sweltering lowlands. Cat Tien is one of the premier national parks in the country and gained fame among nature lovers when a small population of Javanese rhinoceri were found there in 1999. I didn't see any rhinos or any large animals (there are supposed to be deer, leopards, gaur and civet cats), but the place was alive with birds. I recognized lots of them as familiar friends from riding through Malaysia, Thailand and Laos, but without a guidebook I couldn't put names to many of them. I was enchanted by the raucous flocks of parakeets and by the huge, solitary stork I saw sitting on a tree. It was wonderful to be out of earshot of the extreme loudness of Vietnam and the Vietnamese. I was somewhat surprised, wandering around the park HQ, to find the National Park Service operating a sawmill (aren't they supposed to be protecting the forests?) and a karaoke/massage parlour (likely a brothel). Not what you might expect to see in a national park at all. At least, though, they're trying to save the rhinos and preserve bits of rainforest not defoliated by the Americans, although they're allowing settlers from other bits of the country to set up farms in parts of the park which doesn't sound too promising for conservation.

Refreshed by a night of peace and quiet (there weren't enough Vietnamese tourists to operate the karaoke, I guess, or else the torrential tropical downpour killed the noise), I rode out onto Route 20 yesterday and ground out a long, hot day in hellish traffic and noise. The hilly terrain meant that trucks and buses were labouring, and they were emitting enough diesel smoke to give you instant lung cancer. Bored, I counted how many people shouted "hello" to me during an hour; it was well over 60, meaning that if that's average (and I think it was below average), I have had at least 20,000 people shout "hello!!" at me during this trip. I used to think it was a greeting. Then I changed my classification to that of a challenge or a demand. Then I realized that it was the equivalent of zoo-goers shouting at the monkey in the cage, trying to get the monkey to acknowledge their presence. "Yo! Monkey! Look here! Hello, monkey!! Dammit, monkey, look at me!!! MONKEY!!!" The afternoon was spent riding through rubber plantations, which I usually don't like (they seem like sad, sterile replacements for the diversity of the tropical forest), but which at least had the virtue of having nobody living in them.

After a restful night in a surprisingly swish roadside hotel, I set off early this morning for the last 60 km. Traffic increased to a furious pace, but then, just as I was expecting truly hideous conditions into Saigon, the roads got wider, green spaces appeared and traffic lessened and became marginally more orderly. I rather liked riding in the streets of Saigon: fairly slow traffic, but no real traffic jams, streetlights that people obeyed, and a few parks and graceful colonial buildings to look at. I took the obligatory "I MADE IT!!" photo outside my guesthouse and set off to see some museums.

The Museum of Ho Chi Minh City was marginally interesting, and the Fine Arts Museum, aside from a few good Cham sculptures, was an eerie, forgotten, half-lit place where bad art went to moulder. The War Vestiges Museum, though, is an obligatory stop in Saigon, full of pictures and displays and leftovers from the wars with the French and the US. Some of the pictures of US soldiers torturing villagers, or of the aftermath of napalm or phosphorus attacks, not to mention the heart-wrenching shots of Agent Orange babies, were enough to make you sick to your stomach. As at the My Lai memorial, I really felt sad that as a species, we haven't inched forward since then, as recent revelations in Iraq have shown. An interesting tidbit was that Senator Bob Kerrey (distinct from his fellow Vietnam vet John Kerry), who was Democratic governor of Nebraska and served two terms in the US Senate, was the commander of a US Navy Seal team which landed in a small village and massacred 21 villagers, disembowelling a grandfather and three of his grandkids. It goes to show that war crimes do pay sometimes (take a step forward Ariel Sharon, Vladimir Putin, Andrew Jackson, Slobodan Milosevic and others too numerous to mention who were elected to high office despite, or even because of, ordering or participating in war crimes against civilians).

So in a fitting conclusion to the Vietnam trip, my planned RnR on the beaches of Phu Quoc Island has been scuttled by the fact that no seats at all are available to or from the island as it's now school holidays in Vietnam. Even the islands here are completely overrun by domestic tourists. I don't know what I'll do; I may take a bus to Mui Ne for a few days on the beach there.

Anyway, I'm glad the cycling is over. It's rare that I say things like that, and reflects what a great cycling destination central and southern Vietnam aren't. My next big bike trip should be the exact opposite of this one: Mongolia next summer with the XTreme Dorks. No traffic, endless skies, no food, little water, nomad tents dotting the grasslands and complete freedom. Can't wait!

Thanks for sticking with me through this trip, audience. Until next trip, I remain

Yours Nomadically

Graydon

Delicious Dalat

Dalat, 3670 km

It's a grey but exquisitely cool day here in the highland town of Dalat, and I am relieved and reinvigorated by the escape from the tremendous sweltering heat and humidity of the coast. I rode up yesterday in the longest and toughest day of the entire trip (2700 vertical metres over 110 km), and although I arrived tired, I was also exultant at having escaped the endless grey ugliness of National Route 1A. It has done my soul a universe of good to have ridden all day on a quiet road through pine forests and to have gotten great views of a pretty landscape.

Two days ago I rode out of Nha Trang hoping to have a big day, to reduce the length of the day to Dalat. Alas, it was not to be. It was, of course, very hot and humid, but I'm used to that now, psychologically if not physiologically. The problem was the wind, which kicked up before lunch and was blowing a full gale by mid-afternoon, reducing progress to a frustrating, soul-sapping crawl. I had planned to reach the city of Phan Ram by about 2, spend an hour exploring its Cham towers, and then ride several hours towards Dalat. Instead, it was 4:30 by the time I struggled into Phan Ram, and with only an hour and a half of daylight left, I decided to cut my losses and put up in Phan Ram. It was surprisingly hard to find a hotel; the first two I found wanted ridiculous sums, and one of them had an explicit twin-pricing policy, with foreigners paying 35% more than Vietnamese. Since being ripped off is not my favourite part of travel in Vietnam, I kept hunting until I found a little mini-hotel for $6 (cheap by inflated Vietnamese standards). I had a good evening, eating a smorgasbord of street food and banh xeo, the shrimp pancakes I have grown to love. I ran into two Ukrainian aircraft engineers working in Phan Ram (there seems to be a lot of military aircraft flying in the Phan Ram skies) and chatted to them in Russian for a while, to the bemusement of the local Vietnamese.

Yesterday I awoke late (6:30, an hour after sun-up) and paid the price later in the day. On the way out of town, I visited the Cham towers of Po Klong Girai, some of the most impressive surviving towers and still in use by the local Cham populace, impoverished and marginalized survivors of a culture that once dominated half of Vietnam. The towers were pretty heavily restored, but still had a magnificent dancing Shiva over the main doorway and had wonderfully ornate roofs. I was lucky; while the first tour bus of the day were arriving, I sat down and sketched the towers from a distance, and by the time I was done, their bus was departing. I prowled around to my heart's content completely alone on the hilltop, and just as I was leaving, the next tour bus arrived.

The first 50 km of riding were gently uphill on the coastal plain, and then it got serious, with 35 kilometres of steady climbing that topped out at 1550 metres elevation. Just when I thought the hard work was over, a roller coaster of a road undulated the last 25 km into town. I was racing the setting tropical sun, and I lost; it was well and truly dark by the time I got into the city, which made finding my way to a hotel a tricky proposition, not helped by the hallucinogenic street layout of this hilly city.

Today I explored a couple of the major sights of the town, after a lazy morning spent in bed reading The Ghost Road, a masterpiece by Pat Barker about WWI. I stopped into the Crazy House, quite possibly the strangest, most exuberant architectural folly in the world. Imagine Gaudi designing sets for Alice in Wonderland, or The Hobbit, and you get a flavour. It's supposed to be a hotel, designed by the daughter of Ho Chi Minh's successor as leader of Vietnam. The overall theme seems to be trees, and the whole structure is encased in a web of realistic-looking concrete branches, rather like a huge strangler fig has overwhelmed the house. Inside I don't think there is a single straight line in the building, as the architect allowed her imagination to run riot. The corridors and stairs meander drunkenly inside more concrete branches, while each room is named after a different natural item: ants, kangaroos, hornbills bamboo and the like. Beds, chairs, sofas and tables take on organic, irregular shapes that look amazing but might not be so good for lying or sitting on. The garden is full of avant-garde art and imitation spider's webs, outsized Russian babushka dolls and hobbit's houses. It's quite simply breathtaking, although kitschy at the same time. Perhaps the most amazing thing is that concrete can be moulded into such irregular, rounded shapes. Like all good follies, it's unfinished; like a miniature Sagrada Familia in that respect, as in others.

I also went to see the summer palace of Bao Dai, the last Emperor of Vietnam. Built in 1938, it retains all its original furnishings and fittings. I'm sure the furniture was the last word in taste at the time, but it has aged poorly, looking cheap and shoddy and like what you find at summer cottages in Canada. The bathrooms, too, make you realize how much taste in bathrooms has changed over the decades. Outside, a legion of Vietnamese dressed as cowboys, leopards, cartoon mice and a host of other creatures waited for the hordes of Vietnamese tourists to pay to have their pictures taken with them. It looked like a fairly depressing way to make a living. The biggest lineup, though, was to pay a dollar for the right to dress up as an 11th-century emperor in yellow silk robes and silk riding boots and be photographed.

So, since there are so few news updates to give, it's time for more thoughts that have accumulated under the mullet over the past few weeks.

Musings from Under a Mullet

The other day I counted how many motorcycles on the road here have only one person on them. From a sample size of 100, I arrived at a figure of less than 40%. So 60% of motorcycles on the road here have at least 1 passenger, and frequently quite a few more than that. I wonder how many babies, carried in their mother's arms, die by falling from the bike when it has to brake or swerve suddenly. It's nice, however, to see such efficient use of fuel. I'm sure the average Vietnamese has an ecological footprint that's tiny compared to mine.

On the topic of passengers on two-wheel conveyances, I saw a novelty the other day. Two schoolgirls were pedalling a bike together; the one on the seat pedalled only with her left foot, while the girl on the luggage rack handled the right pedal. Such an asymmetric arrangement cannot be comfortable, you would think. But bodily discomfort does not seem to faze the Vietnamese; you see them seated with all their weight supported on the crossbar of the bike. You try that sometime and see how much that hurts after a while. I saw an entire family of 5 on one bicycle the other day, which I think is my all-time record for people on a bike (other than the 13 I saw at the Beijing Circus).

Having been ripped off more times than I care to remember, it's the exceptions that stick in the mind, like the man who owned a cafe who gave me a free water because we'd had such a good conversation. It's very rare here to be given anything for free, unlike in Islamic countries, particularly in Central Asia, where there is a cult of hospitality to guests. Here in Vietnam, the only cult is that of the quickest and most bucks possible extracted from the stupid foreigner, which is already the universal reputation of Vietnam on the backpacker circuit.

As I move through the country, I'm amazed at the tremendous variety in facial types that I see here. I thought that most Vietnamese would look roughly Chinese, but, especially in the central and southern coastal areas, there's a lot of Malay-looking faces. Other places, in the mountains mostly, there are people who look Polynesian, with bigger noses and lips and strong cheekbones. It seems to me that Vietnamese culture has spread from north to south over the centuries without necessarily displacing the people, so that the great variety of indigenous tribes have been absorbed into Vietnamese society, giving it this tremendous diversity. I just wish that the great diversity of traditional tribal clothing that I saw in the northwest were to be seen everywhere, as it's easily the most interesting feature of modern Vietnam.

Looking at the role that the average male plays in Vietnamese society, you have to wonder why the women keep them around. I suppose you could argue that this is the case in most societies, but the average man here defines his virility and social utility by the 4 H's: Hondas, hookahs, hooch and hookers. While the women work in the kitchen and the fields, the men gather around to drink themselves silly (at 7 am!), to criticize the world over their bamboo water pipes, to drive around aimlessly on their motorbikes, or to patronize the local houses of ill-repute. It's not an edifying sight. I'm sure that the local men, seeing that I ride a bicycle, don't smoke, don't visit the brothels and have a solitary beer at the end of the day are convinced that I must not really be a man.

The women here are more muffled against the sun than anywhere I've ever seen. When women go out on their motorbikes in the 38-degree steam bath of midday, all you can see of them is a hint of the eyes. They're wearing sun hats, face masks and, if they have a short-sleeved blouse on, shoulder-length gloves, all in the name of keeping their skin as white as possible. It's amazing the lengths they'll go to; I saw a woman wearing a jacket over a turtleneck sweater the other day. I would die instantly of heatstroke if I had to wear that many layers. But people here don't seem to sweat at all; their sloth-like torpor for most of the day probably helps, but I sweat just sitting indoors. They are cut from sterner stuff.

It occurred to me the other day, in a blinding flash of insight, that the old French word for Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, Indo-Chine, was a perfect description of this area. Geographically half-way between the two great cultural well-springs of Asia, Vietnam was always a frontier between the Indianized and Sinicized worlds. The north, around Hanoi, was part of China for 12 centuries, and the Vietnamese culture is deeply Chinese in its style: Confucian, Daoist and Mahayana Buddhist, not to mention using Chinese characters until 150 years ago. The centre and south looked to India for its culture, with the Funan and then the Cham importing Hinduism and Theraveda Buddhism, Indian alphabets and architecture. Some people see the victory of the north in the Vietnam War as the final victory for Sinicized culture over Indianized culture here. Whatever the case, I think as a tourist I find the Cham architecture and art to be far more interesting than the northern Vietnamese. Go India!

There's a principle in quantum mechanics that you can't observe the state of a system without altering the system in the process. This is a good metaphor for my effect on the typical Vietnamese roadside village. Before I arrive, life is continuing its placid usual pace. As soon as I heave onto the horizon, one excited shout alerts other people, and suddenly the village is alive with excited hollering, kids running, boys pursuing me on bikes, farmers turning around from their planting to have a good look at me. It means that if I want to take a photo of someone working in their fields (plowing with buffaloes is particularly photogenic), I have to work very fast before they're alerted by their neighbours and stop what they're doing to stare at me. I'm sure that it takes quite some time for the excitement to die down after I pass. I'm the Quantum Disturbance on Wheels.

I cannot for the life of me crack the southern Vietnamese accent. I'm having so much trouble communicating these days that I'm getting very frustrated. Even the phrase "how much does it cost?", which is "bao nieu" is not understood a lot of the time. It drives me mad, but of course the fault is my own, since I'm sure my accent and lack of tones does make me sound like a gibbering babboon to Vietnamese ears.

The other day, while talking to the two Ukrainians, I realized what one of the great annoyances of Vietnam is. Everyone absolutely shouts at each other, even when talking face to face. The Vietnamese who were discussing us some distance away drowned out our own attempts at conversation. The whole culture is remarkably immune to noise: loudspeakers, traffic, horns and the ever-present cacophony of karaoke. Rather like China in that respect, and a bit wearing on the nerves after a while.

My personal pet peeve here is the lack of change. As soon as I pay for something, the pantomime begins: looking in pockets, at the back of the cash drawer, in biscuit tins, in the kitchen. It's invariable; there are no small bills or coins to be found. Certain countries are like this: India, Indonesia and Uzbekistan spring to mind. The state of cash drawers here doesn't help in the search; rather than having bills sorted by denomination, there is a hopeless higgledy-piggledy mess of paper that is impossible to sort through efficiently. Third World is definitely a state of mind more than a state of poverty.

Well, off to watch the French Open tennis and the World Cup before setting off on the last 3 days of riding tomorrow morning. Hope everyone's busy seizing the day. Remember what Thoreau said: "As if you could kill time without injuring eternity! The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." So stop killing time by reading this blog and get back to living!

Tam Biet!

Almost There

Nha Trang, 3440 km from the start (and less than 500 from Saigon)

I'm in the bustling beach tourist town of Nha Trang and I'm not impressed with it. Partly it's that it's a noisy concrete jungle like Surfer's Paradise or Ibiza, and partly it's the contrast with the absolutely perfect beach I have just arrived from. Whatever the case, I'm not lingering, and should be on the road first thing tomorrow morning.

I think I last wrote from Hoi An. I spent an extra, unexpected day off the bike there when I overslept and decided it was too late to set off that day. It was a nice day, spent sketching, playing guitar, reading and eating, and was well worth it.

My first day back on the bike was the first day of June, which brought home to me how little time I have left; I fly out of Saigon on the 21st of June. I laid down a big day of 144 km in tremendous heat. Luckily the ride was interrupted by a few sights to see, most notably two Cham Towers. The Cham, an Indianized state along the central and south-central Vietnamese coast, built a whole series of tall red brick Hindu temples that have survived to the present as just about the only really old structures in the country. In Hoi An I did a day trip to My Son, the longest-occupied and biggest Cham temple site. What the ravages of time hadn't done to the My Son temples, US bombs and helicopter-borne sapper teams did, and the biggest temples there were blown to smithereens in 1969 to prevent the VC from using them. On my ride south from Hoi An on June 1st, I took a look at two temple complexes, Chien Dang and Khuong My. Amazingly, although these towers loom high over the countryside at 25 metres in height, I managed to bike right past both of them, located 50 metres from the road, even though I was specifically looking for them. I really liked both sites, as they were utterly deserted and allowed me to poke around and take photos at leisure. There were some bits of sculpture frieze left on the buildings, which to me always really makes a building interesting. Architecture is OK, but sculpture stirs the soul of this ruins-hound.

At the end of that day, I followed an endless dusty dirt track to a beach near Son My. That name may not mean much to you, but one of the tiny hamlets in this district was called My Lai. Ring any bells? By coincidence, in a week when the US military is being investigated for an alleged massascre (or several) of civilians in Iraq, I visited the site of the most notorious massacre of the Vietnam War, in which 500 civilians were gunned down, blown up with grenades, raped and bayoneted by US soldiers in March, 1968, in reprisal for attacks on US troops. The next morning, I visited the memorial site and its museum. Only one soldier, Lieutenant William Calley, ever faced disciplinary action for this massacre, and he served 3 years of house arrest before being released. Helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson, who stopped Calley's platoon's rampage by interposing his helicopter between civilians and Calley's men and training his heavy machine gun on the US soldiers, died sometime in the last year and I read his obituary in The Economist. The obit mentioned that when he testified at a US Senate hearing into the case, one senator told him that "the only soldier who should be court-martialled for what happened at My Lai is you, you traitor." This kind of "my country right or wrong" attitude is, sadly, all too prevalent today.

I left the Son My memorial deeply moved, and even more impressed than ever by the Vietnamese capacity not to hold a grudge. Anyone over the age of 45 in that area would have known someone personally who died in that massacre, and yet the older people I saw along the road were uniformly friendly and smiling and welcoming.

A short day (78 km) brought me to the pretty bay of Sa Huynh, where I ate well and loafed on the beach all afternoon. On the way into town, I met a 12-year-old girl whose parents ran a little shop who spoke good English and was completely self-possessed and calmly confident. I really enjoyed talking to her. I meet a few Vietnamese who speak good English, but most of them are either working in the tourist trade or English teachers. To be that good at English while living in a nowhere highway town is remarkable, particularly as she told me that she had never talked to a real live foreigner before. It was one of the really positive, soul-warming encounters I have had with the Vietnamese for a good long while.

A longer day, of 127 km, brought me to the major town of Quy Nhon on June 3rd. It was made longer by my attempts to add 3 more Cham towers to my collection. I missed one of them (again!) after nobody I asked had any clue and all gave me conflicting directions. By the time I found someone who knew, I was an hour down the road and loath to turn back. I did, however, find another tower not in my guidebook, as well as the site of the second Cham capital. The Cham, over the course of centuries, were pushed southwards by the Chinese-influenced Vietnamese state centred around Hanoi, and sometime around 1000 their first capital, near Hoi An and My Son, fell to the Vietnamese and they moved a few hundred kilometres south. This second capital was the one which the Khmer kingdom of Angkor captured in the 13th century in a campaign depicted in great detail on some of the temple and palace walls of Angkor. Not much left these days except for fragments of a wall and one tower under restoration. From the central hill, I spotted another tower in the distance to which I duly headed. This one, Banh It, was the most atmospheric of all, atop a hill, buffeted with cool gale-force winds and contrasting wonderfully with the blue sky and distant ocean. I lingered there, sketching and taking photos, before setting off into the teeth of the gale into town. A boy on a bicycle passed me and he and I raced all the way into town; he did well and kept up with me, but stayed drafting behind me; when I dropped back and made him lead, our speed dropped dramatically. I managed to cycle past yet another Cham Tower in the process, and had to backtrack to see it. It was a good day; 4 Cham Towers and two swims.

The wind continued the next day, making the ride to the Soviet-style new town of Tuy Hoa longer than expected. I entered town along a new boulevard wide enough to land a 747 on, found a hotel and then went out to check out the inevitable Cham Tower (another nice hilltop location, but crowded with picnickers). I ate my favourite Vietnamese meal (nem lui, roll-yer-own kebab spring rolls) and crashed, tired out by the wind, the heat and the appalling dullness of National Route 1A.

It was a perfect day to make a detour off the hated highway. Unfortunately, the detour didn't happen until after I stopped for a swim and came back to find that someone had filched my watch and emptied my wallet (which only had the day's budget in it, luckily). As it was the third time I'd had things stolen in Vietnam, I can now officially state that travelling in Vietnam is as risky for your material possessions as is travelling in western Europe (where I also had things stolen 3 times; that time it was more valuable things, though). Luckily the thief, who had to work fast, didn't realize that my camera equipment was all in my camera bag on the front handlebars, or I would really have had a fit, instead of just muttering imprecations as I rode off. In my annoyance, I forgot to attach my swimsuit to the back bag on my bike to dry, and it blew off somewhere along the road.

In an annoyed mood, then, I cycled 22 km onto a peninsula just north of Nha Trang to the Jungle Beach Resort. I once ate every evening meal for a month at another Jungle Beach Resort, on Havelock Island in the idyllic Andamans, and this one was very similar. At the end of a road, with zero traffic, far enough from a village to hear no karaoke or motorcycles, backing onto dense jungle, with a long, deserted beach out front, it was just what I had been craving. I realized that, aside from the nights I spent on Mt. Fansipan and one night in the Northeast, it was the only time I haven't stayed in a decent-sized town with all the noise, annoyance and general unpleasantness that that entails in Vietnam. It took a place like this, developed by a Canadian guy, to escape from the horrible model of tourist development that Vietnam has chosen for itself.

I spent two days doing very little, and loving it. I swam a lot, I read a lot (devouring Joe Simpson's magnificent The Beckoning Silence), I played guitar, I contemplated chess problems, I watched the sun set and the wonderful southern stars come out. I ate exquisite meals, chatted with the occasional other guests (practicing my French and my very rusty Russian) and completely unplugged from Vietnam. It was by far the nicest place I stayed in Vietnam and it was rather sad to realize that this was because it was insulated from the ugly, annoying aspects of modern Vietnam. I certainly hope that Phu Quoc Island is another haven of tropical peace at the end of the trip. Until then, I'll grin and bear it, and keep a closer eye on my possessions.

It was a short spin into town today, which was just as well as it was harder than ever to ride along the squalid, noisy, smog-choked strip of misery which is Route 1A. Tomorrow, though, should be my last full day on 1A before I turn off to Dalat and then take a coastal road most of the way to Saigon.

I was going to mention lots of details, musings and random factoids, but I'm tired and eager to watch some French Open tennis. I'll just say that I've had a haircut (in Hoi An) and it wasn't nearly as traumatic as haircuts usually are for me. It's much shorter on the top and sides, so it's a bit of a mullet, but I think it will grow in well. It's already bleaching white blond in the fierce sun.