In Russia, it is 1985

Short Version:

I'd rather eat a crocodile than be eaten by one. Not-hookers. Not a delicious fish. Crash. Leprosy. Suspicion. Granite. Cows. Good wind, bad wind. A deluge. Russians. Vomiting. A crazy house. 41km of downhill. Russians. The end, ish.

Long Version:

Back from the boat and heading back to Bangkok via a beach. Lips sealed re: boat trip, for now, except to say something along the lines of: Best Holiday Ever.

For now, I do believe I made some promises last time around, upon which it's high time I delivered.

~~~~~~~~ wavy lines indicate travelling backwards through time ~~~~~~~

Quy Nhon (0km)

Our non-self-propelled pals were in Quy Nhon before us, and we ate delicious and not-so-delicious foods with them more than once, including one noteworthy meal at a seaside seafood restaurant, which dished up the worst French Fried in the world, and where I ate a crocodile while Lovely Wife and Ma-in-Law ingested another ugly, overpriced fish. The evening was of note not so much for that, though, as for the cloud of tiny insects that decided to orbit Chris's head for the evening, refusing to depart even after a roar round the block on the motorised bicycle, and for the getting there and away, which involved six of us on two small motorbikes. As one of the two people on the older, more dilapidated machine, I can attest that the sight of Chris and three women on a motorscooter was vastly amusing, and that allegations of their having the appearance of pimp-with-his-wares was not entirely without substance.

Having been in Quy Nhon for a few days already, the motorbiklists set off on the next stage of their journey the day after we arrived. Unfortunately, they didn't get very far before bus + truck + oil slick = gravel rash. Oh, and some more significant issues, like: broken nose, cracked teeth, broken wrist. So they came back. End of the line for Chris and Le, Matt to carry on.

We got the news when we emerged from the surf at the local leper colony, where we'd gone to swim at the area's best beach (pretty good, albeit with a bit more floating plastic than we're really accustomed to swimming with), check out the many statues and busts depicting great medical pioneers and symbolisms (shackle-breakings and etc, between idols of Pasteur and Paracelces, et al), and wander the village looking at the neat small dwellings, many of which were liberally festooned with tropical vegetation of the flowering variety. Guess maybe the thumbs turn green before they fall off. We saw some of the residents, and waved hello. The responses varied depending on the limb-count of the other party, but were invariably friendly.

Then some non-leper young women in the gift shop wanted their pictures taken with the Puppet, and then a sweaty walk back to town, and some more delicious foods, and an early night, because tomorrow...

Quy Nhon to Tuy Hoa (117km)

By now you know the drill: up early, takeaway breakfast from hotel (later discovered to be inclusive of some dubious elements), on road before sunup to beat the heat and the traffic, people and animals going about their various day-starting activities, morning propaganda, etc

A couple of already-massively-snarled intersections and then onto a side road with monks on motorbikes and temples and the Dong A Granite Company, whose enormous granite plinth and sign proved an entirely comfortable breakfast stop, albeit one where suspicious gate-guard was suspicious.

Riding on, we encountered a new and very welcome phenomenon: a tailwind. If we weren't so busy avoiding herds of cows at 30-50+ km/h on a small, winding road of variable quality, we'd've done a little dance, and maybe sung a little song about how wonderful a tailwind is. As it was, we just carried on not crashing into the surprise cows - unlike one oncoming motorcycle we saw – and waving to the wizened old people and excited children we passed, and getting rained on a little bit, and stopping for delicious coffees and then we crossed AH1 and followed the wild coast south to Tuy Hoa and that really didn't feel like 117km. Yay tailwind!

Lunch at the empty restaurant atop our fancypants but empty hotel. Dinner at Bob's American Cafe, which we found despite Puppet navigation, and where we ate the best burgers and pizza in South East Asia, chatted to Sam the owner, acquired t-shirts of significant yellowness and some more delicious foods for tomorrow, and then set off into the now-really-not-very-nice weather to walk back to the hotel, where all night we slept well in big, comfy beds while outside the storm raged, hopefully to be all blown out by the morning...

Tuy Hoa to Nha Trang (140km)

...or not. Rain greeted us as we emerged from the hotel, and gusts of wind that made crossing the bridge over the nearby river rather interesting. Sections of not-yet-completed new road were mud-pits. Huge puddles all over the place. Far fewer other road-users than usually the case.

And then onto the coast road, which was almost completely deserted, and was a really neat road to ride, even with the rain and the subsequent no views. We did manage to spy a lighthouse, looking lonely and windswept on an isolated headland, and a bay full of houseboats and fish-farms, which smelled really bad but looked really cool.

The rain and the puddles were so pervasive that we had to stop several times to re-lube drivetrains, and then it started to rain harder.

We were riding up a steepish hill when it really started to bucket down, and pretty soon we were essentially slogging upriver, with generally wheelrim depths (2-4 inches) occasionally reaching rear derailleurs and bottom-of-cycle feet (ie 6+ inches). Getting out of the main stream meant getting into the path of the oil tankers travelling between the refinery at the base of the hill and the junction with AH1 at the top. By the time we reached the junction, we were soaked, completely and utterly, and the locals clustered together beneath flapping tarpaulins did point and laugh and comment at length upon, we assumed, our sanity, although possibly my beauteousness.

AH1 was, depending on which of us was reminiscing later:

• great fun, with sweeping downhill curves and a bunch of halted buses and trucks to pass in a kind of adrenaline-boosting, liable-to-change-at-any-time high-speed maze, or;
• very interesting, and safest riding slightly away from the edge of the over-full drainage ditch at the side of the road, and I think I'm starting to get the hang of this Vietnamese highway traffic, or;
• holy shit, my husband has disappeared at high speed into the storm and the total road chaos and now my mother is riding in the middle of the road and there are sections of road in between the stoppages – which, by the way, are caused by vehicles crashing into each other at sharp corners where there's not much room for them to pass each other, let alone sneak past a person on a bicycle – where the trucks and buses are travelling really fast and not always on their own side of the road, and if we all get through this alive it'll be a miracle

Miracle achieved, we stopped for caffeine and wheel-repairs at Dai Linh, where the puddles were even deeper and even more obviously made of not-very-clean water, and where some of the vehicles passing through passed through at high speed and without puddle-avoidance, and there were some really big sheets of really brown water that were flying about the place, but mostly on the northbound side of the road, where we weren't, which was good.

One more coffee stop, and a discussion that went something like: we're 15km from where we're staying tonight, unless we just carry on through an extra 40km or so to tomorrow night's stop, and avoid dealing with wet ride gear in the morning...

...and lo, that be what we did, and without too much difficulty, except for the bit where Ma-in-Law's bike wasn't working properly, and it was getting more and more difficult to pedal, and so there was a stoppage, and some seeking of the why of the issue, and some not finding it, and some eventual concluding that maybe said increased pedalling difficulty might be related to the uphilling of the roadway, no? Yes.

Nha Trang had public art and puddles, and we got a little bit lost near a pub called the Booze Cruise, which was full of some really unappealling-looking people and then we found the hotel we sought and the woman at the Reception desk looked mildly horrified when she saw us but then we borrowed a garden hose and hosed each other and the bikes down and parked the bikes in the hotel's lobby and showered some more and then went to the highly-rated Brewpub for food and beer and it was full of really weird-looking Russians who were pounding back vodka shots galore with their meals and who were really, really weird-looking, like the 80s never ended, but got more intense instead.

Nha Trang to Dalat (330km, on a bus)

Found bus company office, bought bus tickets. Bikes to travel on two different buses, collect at far end. Not ideal but no other option. Lunch at place that does lots of community work, like feeding orphans. Not why we chose it. Russians there, pounding back vodka with their meals. Dressed like it's 1986. Weird. Many places in town with signage in Vietnamese and Cyrillic. Many weird, 80s-looking people. Nha Trang = Russian vacation hotspot.

On the bus, most of the vomiting people were discreet.

Not so the woman in front of Ma-in-Law, who was about as noisy a throw-upper as can be imagined. And when she wasn't retching violently into a too-small plastic bag held right up close to the headrest of the seat in front, or writhing in melodramatic distress and threatening to decamp the bus immediately, middle-of-nowhereness be damned, she had her feet up, and jammed into the gap between the window and the aforementioned headrest of the seat in front of her... right next to the head of the poor girl in said seat. We felt almost as bad for that poor girl (the one in front of the vomitosaurus, not the sickie) as we did for one of our friends who spent a flight from Vancouver to Orstralia wedged between two enormously fat people who had deliberately grabbed non-adjoining seats in the hope that no-one would be in the seat between them, into which they could then overflow with impunity, as opposed to doing so anyway, but with a very angry person suffering their flabby personal-space intrusion.

Reached Da Lat, reacquired all bicycles, rode into town, found hotel, ate food, etc etc

Dalat (0km)

You should go on the intertubes and look for the Da Lat Crazy House. Do it now. I'll wait til you come back.

[...]

Cool, huh? We went there. So did many people who looked like they were stuck in the 80s. We also went to a place that made actual espresso coffee, and cupcakes. And we went to the market, and to a vegetarian restaurant. And another restaurant, where the “spegetti bolonase” was sweet, as in had sugar in it. And we saw some concrete animals, but not penguins – those were at Quy Nhon.

Dalat to Mui Ne (195km)

Last ride day of the trip started typically early, and with 7km of really fun, winding downhill through a valley with pine trees that could have been in the USAnus Pacific Northwest, until we reached the bottom, and the separate highway for motorbikes and bicycles, and the schoolkid traffic and the temples and the flower-growing operations with the bodged-together greenhouses, and a man who crashed his motorbike into a dog which ran out in front of him and then ran away and the man just lay on the ground next to his motorbike for ages and then we were past where it happened and maybe he got up and was fine.

We rode some flat, and some rolling, and one proper up, which was just after the large, on-fire rubbish dump. And then we rode downhill, for 34km. Loose stones on the road at enough corners to make one wary, and hard on the hands and forearms being on the brakes for that long. Still fun though. Cheers from the urinating busload of men as we flew past. One flat patch in the middle, with a food-and-drink equipped village where we paid well too much for water that we needed because it was really hot.

And then, at the bottom of the hill, fires in the forest, and then out onto the plains, where stiflingly hot windless areas alternated with still-hot spots where breeze made life tolerable. Dragonfruit orchards. Shoe repairs. And, eventually, fish-sauce production town Phan Thiet at rush hour, which meant we were sharing the roads with thousands and thousands of motorbikes and the occasional car, and then the longest 8km of the whole trip, to beach town Mui Ne, where a sunset swim and a few really well-earned beers led us to a restaurant where the satay sauce was delicious and had chillies but no peanuts involved, and not because they didn't have peanuts, because one of the other dishes we had did have peanuts involved, and where several other tables were occupied by people who looked like they were living in the 1980s and who were chain-smoking and drinking shots of vodka with their meals...

~~~~~~~~ wavy lines indicate travelling forward in time ~~~~~~~~

Three more nights in Thailand and then it's Sydney o'clock. Lovely Wife and Ma-in-Law have been tasked with finishing the Viet Nam chronicles. Lovely Wife dozing as I write this, head cradled by the furry pink traveller's neck-pillow she acquired at Saigon airport. We just passed a sign so badly laid-out that it appeared to be advertising some kind of lingerie display but which, after some closer looking turned out to be for a cobra show. Then some handrails carved like dragons, and a statue of a snarling tiger, whose stone mouth has been filled with garlands of orange flowers. Next to it, a sign pointing the way to Burger King. Welcome to Patong, I guess.