A taste of Vietnam

 

 

Unconscious and bleeding heavily, two people carry the limp, helpless body into the street, a motorbike comes to a halt and she is quickly loaded on with a third person to behind to hold her upright. Just moments before as I drifted off to sleep I was woken by the sound of footsteps outside the door which was soon followed by a very loud banging sound, like a door slamming, followed by a second, third and fourth bang each one more aggressive than the last. The sound of breaking glass fills us with fear, what the hell is going on? People are talking very loudly, arguing it seems. I edge towards the curtained window to peek through the slit to try toget an idea of the situation. We are already regretting having chosen the cheapest hotel in town. Perhaps the pink lighting and the large 'Massages' sign just behind should have been a warning, though this is all too common in this part of the world. We want to leave but it feels more unsafe to open the door and risk getting involved than holding tight and hoping things settle down. The voicescontinue for quite some time and through a slit in the door I see a man hastily packing things into a bag, from the other window I see 5 or 6 people climb into a taxi and leave, finally we are able to breath easy and get some sleep in preparation for another tough day ahead.
Vietnam came and went all to quickly, we were welcomed and fair welled by endless mountains with not much relief for tired cyclists in between either. The small villages were brimming with wonderful, beaming children all yelling "bye bye" continuously like wee stuck records, each one too cute to not acknowledge. The adults were for the most part happy to give us at least a smile and a wave, or invite us for a thimble sized shot of the rather potent local 'wine'.
The immense diversity of these mountain people was evident from the ever changing pallet of colours and styles of the women's outfits, each one of spectacular intricacy and decadence, painstakingly handmade with utmost care. The advent of modern materials is replacing these works of art with printed substitutes as well as more modern but far less faltering attire. The men and children have all but abandoned these traditional clothes.
The all too familiar site of massive earthworks for hydro dams made for two rather dirty, dusty cyclists at the end of each day and made me a little sad to think that all these old villages we were passing through will soon be drowned beneath the 'progress'.
The catastrophic loss for the French and Vietnamese armies during the wars in the 50's made Dien Bien Phu an ideal place for a day off to explore the remnants of war and to ponder how it is possible that just half a century later we can freely visit this place and be welcomed so warmly. The 38,000 lives lost seem all so pointless now as we sit at the border checkpoint with the officers on their lunch break and sip tea from tiny porcelain tea cups, ready for more adventures in Laos.

 

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Ni hau (or not)

 

The bed bounces as the grating sound of poorly sung karaoke seeps through every corner of the room to make sleeping a far off dream. This relatively expensive Chinese hotel room provides little comfort to tired cyclists.
Chinese hotel rooms will have, without fail, cable TV, free soap, comb and shampoo, dirty walls and condoms. Bath tubs, air conditioning, vibrators to quote: 'make your pleasure with or without your sex partner', buzzing switches, mosquitoes, nightclubs and noisy sex next door are all part of the surprise when you get to the room (or try to sleep). The price varies wildly depending on who you ask, what is written on the wall is never the actual price and the price has no connection to the quality of the room, this is China!
A month in China was enough to see that this is a country full of history and cultural diversity. I had been a bit unsure about cycling here as I had heard lots of stories of communication difficulties and hassles with hotels etc. This certainly wasn't the case for me. People reacted quite differently to a hairy white guy, many just stared as if I wasn't human, these people usually reacted to a wave or hello. It became a bit of a game to try to guess who wouldrespond to my "Ni hau" (Hello) and those "or nots" who chose to ignore me and leave me wondering what they were thinking as I whizzed past. The Children were shy but wonderful as always, and if you could break the ice, which didn't always happen, were very curious and generous with their affection.
China was a wonderful combination of good food, good people and very tough cycling. I hope to return some day for more.

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But wait, where are the leaping tigers?

 

A whistle from above brings us to a halt. We turn to see the old man waving us back, the road we are on isn't right and we must descend the steep zigzag track to the brown, fast flowing river below. Carefully negotiating each corner so as not to loose our bikes down the steep slope, we reach the sandy river bank below. The old man calmly sweeps the area around a small room carved out of the cliff while a small baby in a sling on his back follows us with his eyes. He indicates for us to wait for the ferry to come. Meanwhile on the far bank, a horse is loaded on the rusty boat before pushing off from a safe landing place. The current carries the boat swiftly downstream until the roar of the engine brings it around and back up the where we wait. We load ourselves and the bikes and pull out into the current. The thump thump of the engine is all familiar sound of the standard Chinese engine.
With a scrape and crunch we arrive at the far side, our bike are unloaded onto a rock ledge with a near impossible access way leading to the washed out road above. We portage the bags and bikes in several goes across the boulders before pushing the 2 km up to the road above. Tiny lizards dart here and there as we disturb their peace. The rock strewn track indicates the infrequency with which this crossing is used.
We are now entering the Tiger Leaping Gorge with an incredible 2500 m or more between the peaks of the surrounding mountains and the raging torrents of the river below. After years of work, a road has successfully been blasted into the shear cliffs making for a great days ride along the length of the gorge.
The mountains ease back to rolling hills as terraced farmland takes over. Harvest time is in full swing as we loose altitude, fields are filled with workers harvesting, threshing and winnowing rice to feed the nation. Men run with huge bags to catch the abundant crickets between the fields, women replantthe next crops while men carry huge bundles of rice stalks to the roadside. It is like watching an ant colony from the outside, everyone is highly skilled at the task at hand and teamwork brings the food to the table. It's an incredible sight which stretches for hundreds of kilometers of the ride. I fell small and insignificant as my mind projects this incredible amount of activity to the entire nation where some 800 million farmers feed the soaring population of 1.3 billion in the same way.
After all this I had a relaxing week with old Chinese colleagues that I worked with in Sweden at their research lab at a military hospital in Chongqing. I was treated like royalty during a wonderful week of good food, good company tough table tennis matches.

 

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