Bunnies

Short Version:

Another week of Vietnam, including some long days in the saddle, ruins, damage, pyjamas, puppies, fighting chickens, a Pass, passing, conflicts, collisions, graves, ducks, rabbits, no headstands, no beer, beer, a wedding, balloon v powerline, giant statues, small statues with giant testicles, German Shepherds, Dung Quat, Amerkin atrocities, and a night ride, with collision. And a not-delicious fish.

Long Version:

We've left Koh Tao, which means Turtle Island, which is a mildly appropriate name given that one of us (me) saw a turtle on a night dive. Had to produce the video evidence before Lovely Wife was convinced of the veracity of my claims, despite the swearing on various things and the backing of all the other divers who were there. Suspicious Wife! We also saw many other creatures, and were bitten by more of them than was entirely necessary.

Now in Khao Lak, gateway to [dramatic music] the Similan and Surin Islands, where we are going for a 5-day liveaboard dive trip, on a Swedish boat, leaving this afternoon.

First, though, we have unfinished Vietnamage to relate...

~~~~~~~~wavy lines indicate travelling backward through time~~~~~~~~

Hue (0km)

Not all that long ago, Hue was the capital city of one of the empires that ruled this part of the world. Nowadays it is home to a more-or-less ruined citadel and palace complex, with many bullet-holes, and some temples, without. We saw these places, once we'd collected the only-slightly-damaged bicycles from the train station early in the morning. Also early in the morning, caffeine at a noodle stall across the road from the hotel, alongside many locals and puppies. All the women who worked there – and there were lots of them – were wearing pyjamas. All day. Every day.

Hue to Lang Co (92km)

Ma-in-Law had handled the 72km rides to and from the village with ease, so we decided to try her on a near-100km day. Left Hue nice and early, although neither as nicely or as earlyly as planned. Learned a dog-management trick from some local kids who, lacking air-horns on their feet or bicycles with which to alert meandering canines to their approach, yell “Beep beep!” Worked a treat, on both dogses and people.

Leaving town was a rural riverside ride with many temples towards the coast, where we turned south and rode a narrow, lightly-trafficked road past sea views with boats, rice fields with people and water-buffaloes, and more temples and graveyards than you could shake a stick at, unless you shook a stick at each one, which you could probably do if you were in a car or on foot, or even on a bicycle if you were prepared to take that risk for what would be, really, a pretty shit reward. Probably. Although now that I think of it, I don't actually know what the reward for a successful stick-shaking endeavor might be, and am just assuming it's a “personal satisfaction” sort of thing. In which case, it's a bit shit. If there's some sort of financial, solomonic, or medical benefit, though, it might be worth doing. Someone should do some research.

We shook no sticks, but did wave “hello!” to a lot of children. We played road leapfrog with a wizened old crone on a motorcycle who was moving fowl around; when we first saw her as she passed us she had a cage full of chickens on the back of her bike, with an empty cage perched on top. Next sighting we passed her as she was walking to her bike clutching the legs of maybe eight or ten indignant ducks (we could tell they were indignant by the quacking. Because we speak duck). Then she passed us, ducks still gripped in her meaty, bike-control-manipulating paws. Why not in the spare cage? We'll never know, because we didn't stop to ask when we saw her for the fourth and last time, taking evasive action at a chaotic intersection.

We also saw a much younger woman with a cage full of cute little bunny rabbits on her motorcycle. I chased and caught her, then purchased two rabbits, which we have in our luggage. No, wait, that's not true, apart from the seeing and chasing parts, which are. Never caught her though, which is a shame, because those bunnies sure did look tasty.

We rode the length of a sandy peninsula, then visited the ocean one last time before crossing a bridge to the mainland for some hill fun. The beach was covered in garbage. We stayed just long enough to void our bladders and eat some crazy Vietnamese fruit, then set off again, up and over some smallish hills, through many villages (and almost right over top of one or two of the more obnoxious and/or stupid teenage boys who thought it would be funny to leap out in front of the bike, either not having a clue or not caring that evasive action at high speed on a fully-laden touring bike is no simple matter, and/or that if I DO run into you it's going to hurt. You. A lot.)

Crossing the third and last hill of the day took us to an area where there were roadside stalls selling what was either fish sauce, rice- or corn-wine, and distinctive ugly pottery. Here we witnessed our first crash as a car and a motorcycle came together. No-one dead, unlike something like 37 other incidents every day on Vietnamese roads, which is a scary but unsurprising statistic that we overheard from a conversation between not-very-reputable random strangers.

A large crowd of people near a hut in a field turned out to be watching the lottery being drawn, and then we reached Lang Co, and grabbed rooms at the Lang Co Beach Resort, and got clean and ate delicious foods and went for a walk on the beach and looked at the fishing boats with their bright colors and their pointed and seriously curved bow and stern and then we walked back through the fishing village to a restaurant where the staff attracted patrons by standing roadside and waving a torch around but they didn't have any foods we fancied so we went next door and ate lots of delicious foods while the extended family went about their business all around us and then goodnight

Lang Co to Hoi An (69km)

Started the day riding up and over the Hai Van Pass, which is a bit famous and quite spectacular, and kind of cool, especially given that there is a tunnel underneath through which all trucks and most cars and buses pass, leaving the overhill road for motorcycles, tourist vehicles, and us. Fantastic climb, and I don't say that often. The railroad follows the coast around the headland, and climbing towards the pass looking down the trains far below it looked a bit like a model railway in action. On the road, the facial expression of the oncoming motorcyclists were often priceless, as they took in the sight of a trio of sweaty whiteys crawling up the hill on loaded bicycles. Lots of thumbs-ups and smiles.

We'd originally planned to do headstands and drink beer at the top, but settled for not doing headstands and drinking a can of soft drink each instead, just out of notice-range of the swarm of coffee/hat/stuff vendors that infest the top of the pass, who were anyway occupied with the tour bus passengers who were wandering around, looking at the old French fortifications (built atop the leftovers of older, cooler empires).

The down on the south side of the pass was kind of fun – passed several motorcycles and a car or two, and a solo cycle-tourer riding up the other way – and then caffeination at the Danang harbor waterfront near where we watched some fishing action and marvelled at the round boats and saw a sidewalk fishmarket where all sorts of weird and wonderful and stinky sea-creatures were available for purchase.

Danang is a thriving port town which sits at the base of what the Amerkin occupying forces once called Monkey Mountain, at the northern end of the 20+km stretch of sandy ocean beach which the Yanks, with an unsurprisingly awesome grasp of geography outside the USAnus, referred to as China Beach. Far enough away from the front that they didn't shoot the place to bits, unlike Hue, instead using it as an R&R destination, and a location for a 90s TV show where all the nurses were uber-hot, which is probably exactly how it really was, honest.

In the here and now, business is booming in Danang, and new developments are going up all over the place. There's also an enormous Buddha statue that we rode past before turning onto the coast road for the run down to Hoi An, past the Marble Mountains, which is a cluster of five small mountains made of marble... or was, before the marble quarries ate two of them. As we passed the remaining hillocks, one of which has an elevator-serviced temple built on its peak, and where the road was lined with statuary vendors (Lovely Wife liked the lion, because it had enormous testicles), a bus driver decided to pull up beside us, and then pull over to the side of the road to let some people off. This caused us some issues, as we were occupying a rapidly-shrinking space between bus and roadside drainage ditch. So we stopped, rode around behind the bus and passed it, with some beating on the driver's window with a fist, and some hurling of abuse in his very specific direction. Sneaky suspicion that there may be a next stage in the tale meant putting a little extra distance between me and the so-called ladies, and sure enough, the bus rolled past them, aligned itself with me, matched speed, and started coming my way, forcing me towards the edge of the road. Cue fist-waving, masturbatory gestures, and shouting of dastardly imprecations from me. Cue horn-tooting and further and escalating intimidatory driving from the bus driver. Eventually, he left, without actually running me over. Hooray! Fuckwit.

Hoi An (0km)

Hoi An is famed as a tailor town and as a tourist destination. It has delicious foods, and really nice hotels, including the Thanh Binh 3 Serene Hotel, which has bannisters carved as dragons, and where we stayed for two nights, because it was time for a rest day. Hooray!

Chris, Le and Matt, duplicating our trip except on bikes with motors, were already there and settled when we arrived, so it was a convivial couple of days of eating and drinking a lot, interspersed with a wee bit of shopping for the so-called ladies and a beach mission for me, and with a motorbike-hire run back up the coast to Danang for a closer look at the Buddha statue, and the peaceful park in which it stands. Except that it was the last day of the Tet holiday period, and the place was packed, and far from peaceful. The mildly mutoid statues of Buddha's minions were pretty cool, but there's really no circumstance imaginable where being around that many people is even a little bit pleasant, except maybe at a professional wrestling event. My motorbike ran out of petrol, so we got some more from a roadside stall, and then we went back to Hoi An, and saw a covered bridge that was built to connect the two sides of town where different ethnic groups were housed, and which had its own Buddhist shrine and statues of monkeys, and then we ate delicious foods at the White Marble and then early to bed because big ride day tomorrow!

Hoi An to Quang Ngai (168km)

Early start was earlier than previous earlies, which was good because it meant less traffic as well as potentially arriving at our destination before dark, except we got a wee bit not properly lost but slightly misdirected a couple of times and ended up riding further than originally planned so it took quite a while to get to not the place we were planning to ride to.

Also up early to go places were some arrogant French people, and the drunk Vietnamese guys we'd seen the night before being rude to convenience store staff. This morning the one who awoke first spent quite some time wandering around the hotel yelling for his pal (I assume)... at 0530. If I wasn't already awake and doing stuff I'd've loathed him even more than I did anyway.

First chunk of the day's ride was country lanes and villages, with morning propaganda from the regularly-spaced speaker towers, and then Highway 1 (AH1), which is an arse of a road to cycle on most of the time, but not actually that bad between sunup and 0830, which is when we stopped for coffee. We then set off onto some tiny country lanes, through huge swarms of dragonflies and villages which, judging by the reactions of the villagers, don't get a lot of Westerners-on-bikes traffic.

Reached our AH1-parallelling turnoff, discovered it was a railway line rather than a road, and carried on riding away from our destination for another several km before we hit a canal and canal-side road which took us the right way through some really pretty countryside for a long way and with the occasional floating item of interest to view, including a dead dog and a surprisingly large number of dead roosters, although we eventually passed a roadside cock-fighting ring which may have been the source for the parade of fowl corpses.

A short stint on AH1 with a helium-balloon fail funeral interlude at a crossroads town, and then we hooked off the other way, towards the sea, and the seaside restaurant with the puppies and the kittens and the many songbirds in cages, and the not-delicious massively-expensive fish dish and the spilled bowl of dipping sauce that soaked various Puppet-items, including helmet straps, and let me tell you, riding in the heat of the sun in a cloud of dipping-sauce stench is not particularly pleasant, so please don't knock me off my bike and run over my unarmored head please thanks.

We passed Dung Quat port, and saw signs for Dung Quat beer, which we coveted. The roads were wide and new and smooth and near devoid of traffic, which was good, and there was a series of abandoned resorts, and then the roads got smaller, and then we were on country lanes with raised causeways, off one of which a fat, smiling man on a motorbike forced at least one of us, rebuckling the rear wheel badly enough that a roadside repair session was necessary.

All afternoon we were in the part of Vietnam where the Amerkins covered themselves with some of the most infamous unglory of their visit, murdering several hundred villagers, including children, in case they were enemies. We never actually found the My Son atrocity monument, possibly because we didn't really try, but we also didn't find the place we were planning to stay, and ended up carrying on quite a long way further, arriving at Quang Ngai after dark and after a crazy lady rode her motorbike into the side of Ma-in-Law's bike. Then we didn't know where we were going and ended up crossing the river a couple of times amidst streams of motorbikes and bicycles before we found the hotel we'd been told to seek, which we'd already biked past at least once, and where we showered at length, ate delicious foods at an outdoor table looking over the river, and then slept really really well but not for as long as we could have, which is pretty good going given that we were sleeping in a hotel that Google Maps said was in the middle of the river.

Quang Ngai to Sa Huynh (68km)

No better way to start the day after a record-length ride than with an attempt to learn how to fix a show-stopper issue on one's bike. Wheel truing is, apparently, really difficult to do even if you have a clue how to do it, and I can attest to the fact that having a crack in front of a sizeable audience of Vietnamese people at 6am does not make it any easier. Eventually, there was no longer any major discernable sideways wobble in the wheel, and off we went... with me bouncing my way across the bridge and through the town, as my no-longer-actually-round wheel made its condition known. Rats.

Almost didn't make it out of our second coffee stop as they had hammocks in the shade, and we were tired, and the day was hot, but we eventuay managed to drag ourselves back on the bikes, and reached Sa Huynh early afternoon. Used the nicely-specific address instructions found on the intertubes to navigate directly to the wrong hotel. Wait, what? Eventually, the confused Westerner cluster attracted the attentions of a helpful gentleman with the world's longest facial-mole-hairs, and we found our resort, which was a) nowhere near where the intertubes said it would be and b) hosting a wedding, which meant there were lots of people in their best going-out clothes, including lots of midde-aged women in very short skirts, most of whom eventually left on motorscooters. There were also some druncles doing some pretty awesome drunk unclery, including abysmal karaoke backed by a live band which played some cool stuff in between the horrific Vietpop the druncles seemed to favor.

Got clean, got fed, sent email to the hotel's management alerting them to the fact that one of their competitors had hijacked their online presence. Fixed wheel again, and this time more properly. Ish. Swimming. Napping. More delicious foods, although not what we really wanted, because that was only in the menu the Vietfolks got to order from, not the stripped-down one we had to use. Dung Quat beer. More swim. Bed. Sleep.

Sa Huynh to Quy Nhon (137km)

Another early start, this time in the mist. Eerie. Atmospheric. Not ridiculously hot. AH1 not stupidly busy. Schoolkids on way to school were entertaining to behold and to interact with but dangerous to be around as the day brightened and the number of trucks and buses on the road increased.

Luckily, we had a non-AH1 road to play on.

Unluckily, it was made of a series of concrete slabs, all tilted at slightly different angles, so riding was not entirely pleasant. We rode on the dirt shoulder instead.

We crossed a bridge beneath which a family were harvesting something from the riverbed, and began to see prawn farms with spinning aerating wheels. These were very interesting and exciting, up until the point where we'd seen so many of them that they became little more than impediments to the views of the glorious surf beaches that ran down pretty much the whole coast.

A couple of short, sharp climbs and flying descents saw us visit and then depart a gorgeous, remote, sparsely-populated bay where one of the few inhabitants tried to sell us some 8-inch freshly-caught fish, and her husband tried to convince us to go swim in the sea, and then they took their two children and left on a motorscooter to go sell their fish in a bigger town except for the one they dropped on the road.

Many of the graves here had small statues of German Shepherd dogs on them.

More prawn farms. Some salt manufacturing facilities. Friendly people with terrible teeth. Friendly people with terrible energy drinks. Friendly people with blocks of ice, meant for our coffees and sodas and terrible energy drinks, but more enjoyable and digestively safer perched atop a sweaty head for maximum cooling effect.

Sugarcane drinks, made to order by running the canes through a motorized mangle.

A deserted 4-lane highway we didn't take, a rolling narrow country lane that we did. Views across a shallow bay to temple towers in the distance, lit by the blazing sun. A whopping great big bridge with a ute full of rowdy celebrants broken down just before the crest, an 8-inch drop from the western end of the span to the causeway linkage, off which at least one of us got air and resultant applause from bridge attendants. A massively busy intersection or three.

Quy Nhon.

The Seagull Hotel.

AC, showers, beer.

~~~~~~~~wavy lines indicate travelling forward through time, to the present~~~~~~~~

It's boat o'clock, again, and I'm still only halfway through Vietnam. So, here's some hooks to get you back for the next instalment:

Crashes, leprosy, ugly fish, false prostitutes, bad chocolate, the Dong A Granite Company, a tailwind, cows, a deluge, Ruskins, Amerkins, delicious foods, more crashes, vomiting, a 34km downhill, weasels, a hosing down, free stuff, and a sunset dip.

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