Vietnamage

Short Version:

Hey Vietnam, we're done. Time to roll on out of here! (but not on bikes)

Long Version:

We rode our bikes from Chiang Mai in Thailand, across Laos, and then down a decent stretch of the Vietnamese coast.

We've dodged insane driving and dogs, crazy people and geese, and been waved to by too many excited children to count.

We've ridden 2000km, 1150 of those with my mother-in-law, and we've had enough, for now. (of biking, not of Diane. Although it's possible she's had enough of us).

As of this afternoon (last day of February) the bikes have been disassembled and boxed ready for the next leg of the journey, which is Sydney for Diane and back to Thailand for Lovely Wife and I. We're shifting to underwater pursuits for a while. Mmmmmmm... delicious pursuits...

Saigon, where we've been for a couple of nights now, is hot, and holds a lot of people. Many of them are tourists, and many of them are offensive middle-aged Australian men. There are also a lot of Vietnamese people about, and many of them want to sell us stuff, and particularly books, sunglasses, cigarettes/lighters, marijuana, and/or some variant of sex. Many of these stuff-sellers prefer to offer their wares to diners, especially but not exclusively those eating at outdoor tables. This is somewhat irritating. One vendor told me last night that I was very mean. I think. Vietnamese accent + profound deafness (hers, not mine. Although come to think of it, mine probably doesn't help) does not an easily intelligible sentence make.

But I'm getting ahead of myself, because we reached Saigon (also known as Ho Chi Minh City, depending on who you are and/or which bit of the place you're talking about) about 3 weeks after the last comprehensive post finished, with a promise of bus-falling to hook you, the reader, into returning for the next instalment. Did it work?

Dien Bien Phu to Hanoi (330km, on a bus)

Arrived at bus station nice and early, because putting bikes on buses can be time-consuming and can involve bribery and weasel words. In the end, mainly the first two of those, which probably means we overpaid. Not in the mood for haggling though, having slipped and fallen off the bus roof after helping the bus driver's people-wrangler tie our bikes directly onto the roof, there being no under-bus luggage compartment, and no roofrack. Luckily, the fall was not directly onto concrete. Unluckily, that was because the concrete was covered by a layer of wet mud, with an unknown faecal content percentage.

Ouch, and yuk.

The bus journey, we'd been led to believe, would take about 10 hours. In the end, it took 12+ and felt like 15.

The bus we were on turned out to be some kind of tardis, and I don't mean that it was full of tards. We kept stopping, and more and more people got on at every stop (apart from those stops where we collected boxes or bags or vegetation instead). These people made their way (I would say walked, but that would be vastly inaccurate, as the movement was part climbing, part scrambling, all difficult) past my spot just inside the door (the only place with legroom enough for my long, elegant limbs, and, in a nice piece of synergy, right next to the section of windowsill I'd clipped as I fell from the roof. My passage dented it so significantly that we were late leaving DBP because the driver and the driver's assistant and several other Vietnamese chaps were attacking it with bricks and screwdrivers in an attempt to get the window's open/close functionality back) and into the back of the bus. One of these was a hill-tribe guy with a brown leather jacket and a lethal-looking crossbow made from bamboo.

Many people vomited, which explained the handing out of little plastic bags at the start of the trip. Full bags were tied closed, or not, and thrown out the windows. Not AT motorbikes and other fellow road-users, but not NOT AT them either. Similarly, all garbage was tossed from the windows, including, once spotted by the driver's assistant, the small collection I (a good little brainwashed tidy kiwi) had amassed in a little plastic bag.

Spectacular views of mist-wreathed limestone hills. Winding roads. Traffic chaos. Peach and mandarin and yellow-blossom trees everywhere, but mostly on the back of motorbikes. Also on the backs of motorbikes: pigs, in woven baskets; chickens, in what looked like cray-pots; people of all shapes and sizes (except not really any enormously fat people – we're not in the USAnus now, Dr Ropata) and in numbers ranging from 1 to 4. We saw water buffalo. Rice fields. People. Traffic. Chaos. Carnage. Hanoi.

Hanoi! As we pulled into the bus station, people surrounded the bus and started hammering on the bus windows and shouting. We later found out that these were taxi and motorcycle-taxi drivers, and that they were bagsing, or putting dibs on individual passengers. We, as likely carriers and clueless dispensers of Westerner levels of currency, were of particular interest to these not-very-gentlemen. Unfortunately for the ones that won the might-makes-right equivalent of a bidding war, we got off the bus and into the handshakes and hugs of our friends and their friend, Chris and Le and Matt, who'd been waiting more or less patiently for us for several hours, and who waited even longer while we assembled the bikes, and who rode convoy with us through the night-time Hanoi streets to the Old Quarter, and the Camellia #4 Hotel, where we washed from our bodies the grim grime of the bus and our close-quarters fellow travellers, and then set off out into the night to see what we could see.

Which was, as far as I recall, delicious claypot pork.

Hanoi (several days, 0km)

Delicious foods, resting, wandering around. Motorbike tour round Hanoi lakes. Eating water buffalo and snails and fighting rooster on a fake boat. Manicure and haircut for Lovely Wife. Streets devoted to a single type of vendor, including fish street, rice cooker street, motorcycle helmet street, aquarium street, shoe street, red-and-gold ornament street, peach-tree street, and ladies' underwear alley (including sellers of padded buttock undies, but nothing in my size). Watched cops who look like soldiers roust the peach-tree sellers. Watched unsuccessful attempts to load an inebriated girl onto the back of a motorbike, and then, more successfully, into a taxi. Saw the flower market, and then got up early and went back to buy lots of flowers, apart from one of us who stayed in bed sleeping because it was too early. Watched middle-aged locals in pyjamas doing calisthenics at lakeside. Saw giant helium balloons tethered in a lake. Bought jandals (Orstralians, you call these thongs. We think thongs are skimpy underwear. This is probably the biggest cultural disconnect between Oz and NZ, and is the best way for others to distinguish which country an Antipodean is actually from, rather than trying to guess, getting it wrong, and causing massive pretended offence). Naps.

Lots of places were closed in the run-up to the Tet holiday, which is kind of NZ antiXmas + New Year's Eve rolled into one. This included the New Day Restaurant, where we'd had the world's most delicious claypot pork on our first night in Hanoi. (Just like I said, up there ^^^). We tried for the rest of our stay in Vietnam to find another as good, but failed.

Lovely Wife's mother Diane arrived, on a plane from Sydney via Ho Chi Minh City, and then Le left to head to her family village to help with Tetprep and then, a day later, it was our turn to brave the roads again (for Lovely Wife and I) or for the first time (Ma-in-Law)...

Hanoi to the Village to Hanoi (144km)

Left Hanoi early morning, same route as taxi to airport when we collected the Ma-in-Law. Some chaos near flower market, but no majors. Separate motor-/pushbike bridge across the Red River was nice, although the motorway wasn't actually that bad – nice wide shoulder and a good surface. Certainly better than the next road, a 2-lane, 2-way highway with pretty much NO shoulder, and with titloads of traffic, all in a hurry, and all with what became a very familiar driver attitude by the end of the Vietnam leg of the trip: complete and utter blinkered self-centeredness.

Highlights of this chunk were a wee stop (that's a stop where urinating occurs, not a small stop) next to a tree-seller who was listening to really loud really bad techno, where Lovely Wife was preparing to void her bladder in the bucket of an earthmoving machine when she noticed that the workmen on their smoko break hadn't actually moved very far from said machine; and a coffee stop, where the coffee tasted sort of eggy, but good, and the owner had had some sort of accident, or a stroke (not that a stroke would be an intentional thing to have) and had a half-frozen face. He liked us, and had his picture taken with us, and stroked the Puppetbeard before we left.

The smaller roads to the village were much nicer, with much less traffic, although there were some sections in fairly serious disrepair. We stopped and bought helium-filled balloons in the shape of various animals, including a vicious carnivorous dinosaur with tiny arms for me and a tiger for Lovely Wife. The tiger made a couple of escape attempts during the final few km of the journey, but was every time recaptured and duly handed over to the rather excited children when we arrived at Le's family home. We did, of course, have to negotiate passage past the angry guard-geese and several puppies and piglets to reach said children, but that was accomplished with relative ease.

Thus began several days of eating too much, getting to know Le's family, learning about Vietnamese customs and tradition, eating too much, a wee bit of exploring, some minor construction, and eating too much. Ma-in-Law visited the family shrine with the other honored elders. We all rode bikes through the idyllic rural vistas and hung out with the kids. We ate too much, and, if they'd've let us help with any chores ever, we'd've felt like part of the family. It was really something.

And then we left, retracing our journey back to Hanoi, albeit with non-eggy coffee where the wees-place was wherever you felt like watering inside the somewhat magnificently decrepit abandoned building next door. And Hanoi was even more deserted than it had been, so we left on a train, eventually and without the bicycles, as there was no luggage compartment on our train. And there was nobody to speak to about the issue. So it was a little fraught. And the less said about the train journey the better, save that it took far longer than forecast and wasn't especially comfortable.

And that's probably enough for one post, especially given that I started writing a week ago and have still only covered a third of the Vietnam experience. Too busy being feasted upon, and breathing underwater.

There is, believe me, more, including some of the most excellent cycle-touring we've done, along with a deluge, up- and downhill action, phenomenal beaches, prawn farms, drunk people, sober people, working people, people selling things, people selling themselves, propaganda, dragonflies, weasels, fish, a wedding, a funeral, collisions, near-collisions, abuse of power, abuse, repairs, refreshments, Russians, leprosy, hammocks, delicious foods, not-so delicious foods, a lottery draw, and here comes the boat so I have to go