Hà Tĩnh - The sixteenth step ... From Bác Hồ to กรุงเทพมหานคร - CycleBlaze

September 29, 2024

Hà Tĩnh

A late night was had enjoying the final game of The Rugby Championship in which the Springboks gave Los Pumas a good drubbing (48-7) to claim the title.  Five hours after the final whistle my alarm went off.

We tucked into the hotel buffet breakfast and headed out into what was forecast to be the hottest day of this trip so far with maximums reaching 35 degrees  (feels like 42 according to the forecasters).

We stayed off the QL1A for the entire route today.  In its place we had quiet country roads with views of rice paddies and farmland and occasionally the sea. 

Leaving Vinh we passed the Summer Convention Center complete with Roman style columns and statues.
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Crossing the Cà River south of Vinh, the QL1A visible in the background. Google translates cà as tomato. Not sure if that is correct here. However the real reason for this photograph is because, as southern Africans, we're just not used to seeing so much water as we have seen so far in Vietnam.
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Andrea BrownThis is the Cả River, Cả translates to "chief". The rising accent marked word cá means "fish". Fish, tomato, chief, you're whizzing by a bike and trying to make sense of Vietnamese diacritics even though it's actually readable as opposed to Thai/Lao/Khmer/Burmese.
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3 weeks ago
Jean-Marc StrydomTo Andrea BrownThanks for the clarification. My close up vision goes to pot after exercise due to fluctuations in blood pressure so I must have read the accent incorrectly. As you say, at least we can read Vietnamese. The easiest non-Roman character set to learn is Korean Hangul because it is so logical. Leigh spent a lot of time learning the two easier Japanese scripts but it just became too tiresome in the end. I didn't last as long with Arabic although much of that had to do eith not being able to read the subtle differences on my phone screen.
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3 weeks ago
Andrea BrownTo Jean-Marc StrydomOn the map, the closer you got to the screen, the smaller the text got! I did a Google search for "Ca River" (no diacritics) to see what would come up, that was much easier to see.

When we were bringing books to Laos I taught myself to read and write Lao, which wasn't all that difficult, actually. From there I learned Thai, or at least enough to read slowly, like a six-year-old. That has really helped us in rural areas where all the menus and signs and bus schedules are only in Thai. Can I speak and understand Thai? Nope. Bruce sort of can. Between us we have a sliver of comprehension, just enough to be dangerous, really.
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3 weeks ago
Fishing boats at a small tidal lagoon. Being along the coast means we're getting a lot of the fishy smells that seem to permanently hang in the air near the sea and the fish farms.
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At other times it was more of a rural setting.
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At the village of Thạch Đông we cam upon this striking church with a tall steeple, narrow nave and domed alter.
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About fifteen kays before Hà Tĩnh we stopped for an early lunch. A big bowl of bún bò Huế for me and a huge plate of cơm rang thập cẩm for Leigh.
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We got through a lot of liquid during today's ride.  The final run into Hà Tĩnh was the hottest and we even stopped for a cold Revive just two kilometers from the hotel we had earmarked for tonight.

The usual set of bathroom consumables one finds in even the simplest of Vietnamese hotel rooms. A shower cap, toothbrushes, toothpaste, cotton buds, comb and razor amongst the usual soap, shampoo etc. The only item I ever use is the razor although I'm not always sure why because they often so blunt that they seem pre-used and have simply been cleaned up and wrapped in a new airtight wrapper.
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Andrea BrownI'm pretty sure Bruce has a huge stash of those little round wrapped soaps somewhere!
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3 weeks ago

A long day back on the QL1A  awaits us tomorrow. 

Today's ride: 57 km (35 miles)
Total: 485 km (301 miles)

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