D12: Ba Chẽ to Hạ Long

February 15, 2018

New Year's Eve

All I need is a bit of blue sky and I'm set

I woke up relatively early today. I mean, not actually early in terms of earliness like most cycle tourers' idea of early because morning and me just aren't what you'd call the best of friends, but definitely early. It was cold and gray and cold and my bed was something approaching warm. I stayed awake long enough to post to Facebook.

I woke up again around 9:30 or maybe 10. The combination of clouds and a different time zone are not helping at all with my idea of what time it is. I packed very nearly everything in the room and went downstairs to get my passport (I'm not thrilled with hotels in Vietnam insisting on holding on to the passport but I'm not exactly linguistically enabled to complain about it). I say "very nearly everything" because, about 20 kilometers into the day, I would realize that I left the damp bike shorts which were hang drying in the bathroom.

So far this trip I have lost: 1 aux cable for my music player, my bottle of morphine sulfate pills, and a pair of bike shorts. I've also comically ripped to the point of destruction 1 of my 3 pairs of off bike cotton underwear. I'd say that traveling with less stuff apparently doesn't appreciably change the rate with which I lose or forget things but this is actually worse than normal.

Nothing that looked like a place that normally has food for breakfast/brunch/lunch seemed open but there was a drinks cafe on the square near the big market. I got an iced drip coffee with sweetened condensed milk. When they had no food and nowhere nearby looked likely to have anything I could buy and bring back to the table without hassle, I also ordered a glass of passionfruit juice (which they also mixed with sweetened condensed and which was amazing). Taking pity on me, they gave me a cut up sticky rice and meat ball that was sort of like a Chinese zongzi only with less meat and no egg. I'm glad they did as, unless you count 3 packets of crisps as food, it was the only food I'd have for the next 77km.

I appreciate the pre-made coffee speeding up the process of getting ice coffee

Fresh squeezed passionfruit with sweetened condensed milk

On the way out of town, in addition to all the people scrubbing everything clean, a number of people were burning various spirit offerings. I wouldn't have a problem with this except that some of the packets of ghost money or the objects for departed family members (such as model houses or cars) had been plastic wrapped and not everyone saw the need to remove the plastic wrapping from the paper they were burning.

The road from Ba Chẽ south towards Cẩm Phả and the QL18 was gorgeous. Best scenery I've had all trip. From wear and tear and weathering, I'd guess that most of the concrete was poured about 10 years ago but, as with every place else I've seen, there were obvious ongoing road improvements to reduce the grade and just generally make driving easier. With the exception of the bits that were very very much uphill, the road was pretty much downhill and quite a nice fast cycle. It being Tet Eve, I don't know how much traffic it normally gets but, in the 31km to the intersection I saw a grand total of 4 four-wheeled vehicles in motion.

Much of the area I passed through seems to be primarily an ethnic minority of some sort. A number of the older women were wearing traditional clothing of some sort or another. This was very different from the tall red caps made out of cheaply printed Chinese fabric that I'd seen a scant handful of women wearing on the main road from Mong Cai. The buildings were a mix of relatively new but subdued (for Vietnam) concrete, the Vietnamese equivalent of McMansions, and woven straw.

This is probably as good time as any to mention that of the two windows in my hotel room last night - only one of them had glass installed. The other one had wooden shutters.

The first woven straw building someone was obviously living in

The speed at which they ran across the valley to get to the road so they could watch me bike by was really quite impressive

No obvious food to be found when I got to the intersection. I could have (should have) bought fresh fruit but I was so sure that someplace would be open that I biked past the places selling anything edible until I was in the places where everything was shuttered. Out to the QL18, it was now a divided motorway with two lanes in either direction. I would eventually stop and get myself some corn crisps but, by now, it seemed that anything I saw which looked even vaguely open and doing business was a hairdresser or a flower shop.

What I find most interesting about these outdoors barber shops is how many of them seem to be permanently installed

Whenever this was last widened, they also regraded as can be seen by the remnants of road off to the right

Even when I got into the big city of Cẩm Phả which went on and on and on and on, I didn't see food. Now it's possible that since I was biking on what I think is normally the trucking route (but all truck free for Tet) that I needed to go in a street or two to find places but, being as I wasn't finding places, I didn't want to spend my daylight hours looking for places when I could hopefully spend them getting closer to a more touristy and more likely to be open(ish) place.

I very definitely remember the beautiful karsty scenery interspersed with the nasty unpleasant industrial zone near a coal mine from 2006. It was how I spent most of my second morning in Vietnam. It was why, once we confirmed that the nasty industrial stuff was only in Cẩm Phả that my best beloved and I ended up later on taking a package tour to Hạ Long Bay.

I love the frou-frou 18th century French architecture on the recent construction

When I got to Hạ Long I started stopping at likely looking hotels. Closed. Closed. Closed. No one at the counter. Sorry, closed. Closed. Found a very swank looking place that had an English speaking front desk clerk and even though it was more than my last two nights' combined, it didn't take a whole lot of thinking of my part before I just said "why the hell not". Later on, I would do the math and realize that my room with a soft bed and an elevator and breakfast and underground parking was a whopping USD$25. Not exactly breaking the bank...

She gave me directions to where I might maybe be able to find some food and although I didn't exactly find the place she was referring to, I did find the first open noodle shop I'd seen all day. I then managed to somehow order fried rice with two fried eggs on the side. I'm not exactly sure how. Perhaps I looked like I needed fried rice with two fried eggs on the side. All I did was make eating gestures with my hands and point at the frying pan.

Today's ride: 78 km (48 miles)
Total: 504 km (313 miles)

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