The ride

I have been meaning to write an update about my trip to ‘nam for a few days, but just havnt found the time to sit down and collate my thoughts into something for the old blog!

Now I have just finished a lunch of sour soup and crab and other yummies and I have some time… actually on the lunch note, the soup was not soured by tamarind (as usual) but by these strange insects that looked like mini wasps… slightly disconcerting to eat at first, but I got used to it…

So the trip to nam… well last I wrote I was sitting in Ho Chi Minh pondering whether the bikes we had picked up would make it back to Phnom Penh… they did indeed do the distance… 298km in 2.5days wasn’t bad going considering the heat and humidity!

Day 1 – the ride from Ho Chi Minh to Bavat (Cambodian boarder town) via some tunnels used by the viet cong during the Vietnam/American war – was pretty adventurous… mostly because the tunnels were not on the main road, and required some navigation through the Vietnamese countryside. We were armed with maps – but these turned out to be slightly dodgy, and anyways we didn’t really meet any Vietnamese who could read maps very well… indeed the Vietnamese we met couldn’t really speak English either which made getting lost an interesting experience… so yes we got lost… alas for all its lovely smooth roads Vietnam hasn’t developed brown signs to major tourist attractions… each time we got lost or in trouble we were helped by some incredibly lovely people, which restored some of my faith in humanity (it has taken a knocking in the bodge with all the corruption and stamping on small people that goes on here….)
The first time we were lost we stopped at a petrol station to ask for help… pointing at the map and gesturing about tunnels… everyone looked confused, but then these two men on a moto with limited English said we should follow them… so they poodled off down the road and we tried to keep up with them for about 5km back the way we came… they stopped at a shop and went and bought us another map and drew a line on it the way we were supposed to go… very very nice of them… so off we went again and all went well until we started thinking that perhaps we were not quite on the road we thought we were on… especially when people kept telling us it was another 20km to the tunnels… hmmm well I think we took a wrong turning or something, but we ended up doing 2 long sides of a triangle rather than one short one… but we did eventually make it to the tunnels… there we watched a promotional video about ‘America and her lacky’s’ and then went around the tunnel system which was pretty amazing, even if it was reconstructed (apparently so the fat westerners could go down the tunnels… Vietcong were very small… hence the Americans couldn’t follow them in the tunnels). We got our photos taken by Vietcong (well dummies dressed up as Vietcong)… my dad got to climb on an American tank that had been partially blown up… and we ate tapioca (as the Vietcong did)… I never realised tapioca was a plant… finally there was the horrible shooting range where my dad fired an AK47 and an M16 I think… guns are evil things, they were so loud and just make me think of all the damage they can do to peoples lives… what is the point?… ho hum.
It then started to thunder which added to the feeling that we had stepped back in time and were about to be bombed by B52s… back at the bikes I discovered that minimiffy (smallsmall toy miffy animal) had fallen off my bag where she was attached… (minimiffy had been keen to learn about the vietcong you see)… this was verging on a minor tragedy, I couldn’t just abandon minimiffy to the Vietnamese jungle… soooo I paid the guide again to take me round the tunnels and forests to find minimiffy (I am sure this amused/confused him highly)… we couldn’t find her in the tunnels and I really was despairing of ever seeing her again when we arrived back at the shooting range and there she was talking to the shooting instructors. It would appear that minimiffy has less compunction about guns than I do… and is possibly now the sharpest toy rabbit shooter in the world?
By the time I returned to my poor dad it was raining monsoon styleee… we waited a bit to see if it would ease off… haha no chance! So we set off in the rain… me feeling very smug at having invested in some gore tex clothes and ortelieb panniers (I can confirm they’re 100% waterproof – we tested them real good)… there were a few small hills on our mission back to find the main road to the boarder and it was just nice to cycle up them and feel my cycling legs again… the roads were good, even in the countryside… although in saying that the drainage on the roads was CRAP, lots of cycling through floods! Also Vietnamese houses were not on stilts like in Cambodia and they had neat gardens with hedges, and at some points, in the rain and with the smooth road, I could imagine myself to be home…
So of course we got lost again… and this time a nice non-English speaking lady drew us a map of how to find the main road… if she hadn’t I think perhaps we still would be cycling round south Vietnam today… back on the main road and it was 5ish… still rainingraining and we were 40km from the boarder and had cycled 80 odd km already… we plodded on, and it got dark… plodded on for a long long time it seemed. Fortunately Vietnam has street lights… so we reached the boarder around 8ish after stopping for a genuine slap up Chinese… we declined the offer of a guesthouse, wanting to hop across the boarder and into a glittering casino we could see across the way… after clearing customs we soon discovered that no casinos wanted 2 mud splattered barangs (foreigners) on bikes to stay, we couldn’t even get past the guards at the entrances… it was past 9pm, the 1 guesthouse was full and I was a leeetle worried cos Cambodge in the dark… at a boarder town full of casinos and prostitutes and probably guns… we were really tired etc… and there was no room at the inn… I managed to get past the guards into the last casino (there followed a comedy moment as I tried to walk through the metal detector and they thought my camelpak drinking system was some sort of gun holster)… so inside the casino I tried to talk my way into the Casino’s hotel… I was looking pretty pathetic and I played up on that and the poor manager (who spoke English) was concerned for me… but we couldn’t stay… anyways pesterpester and he eventually agreed to call another guesthouse 2km down the road and see if there was a space.. there was and he booked us in, and he even came outside (by this time it was only drizzling) to point us in the right direction… seriously if there was no room at that guesthouse we would have been screwed… anyways we slept well that night!

Ok, the final 2 days of cycling in the bodge were less eventful, mostly because we just headed into Phnom Penh on highway number 1… long and mostly flat... varying quality and busy-ness (roads are no way as nice in Cambodia as ‘nam)… it was great just to see and smell the countryside… and interact with people a bit… something you don’t really do looking out of a bus/car window… sometimes kids would come and cycle alongside us for a km or so just to practice their English… we drank lots of sugar cane juice and even more water – wowing people with the camelpaks (why were we pouring bottles of water into our rucksacks??)… we chatted to some monks… watched the world go by… shouted ‘hello’ to the manymanymany children who called out as we cycled past… it was really nice… and hot and sunny… I wrapped a Cambodian scarf or Krama around my cycle helmet to keep the sun off my face, ears and neck… seemed to work, although my colleagues now say I am the same colour as a Cambodian (this is not a compliment and I feel they’re exaggerating the colour of my skin significantly)…

The final mornings ride back to PP involved crossing the Mekong and navigating along a narrow road with potholes the size of elephant’s feet, whilst ridiculous amounts of traffic sped past us, weaving in and out of other traffic, and generally driving in a manner that implied the driver was trying to kill himself, all his passengers and anyone else (including the barang cyclists) who happened to also be in the road… however we didn’t die… and made it into PP in time for lunch and a rest!

It was a really great trip… lots of fun. I am glad I did it…

Now today apparently is the start of the world cup…perhaps I should find out when England’s playing and who they’re playing? Hmm I don’t think football is popular in the bodge… if I didn’t watch the bbc in the morning I would probably be oblivious to the fact that Wayne Roony got injured a while ago… and that the world cup was taking place in Germany…

This is more than enough from me I think
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