D35: Tuyên Quang to Định Hóa

March 10, 2018

Back in 2012 when I biked from Beijing to Haikou I learned that even though I was still 31 years old, I was already old enough to wake up in the middle of the night every night to go to the toilet. It's questionable whether or not this was only recently true at the time or if it had been true most of my life. I'm very very good at not waking up just because I happen to merely have gotten out of bed and, for most of my life, the bathroom has been in a predictable location. On the 2012 Tour—which started when the weather was still cold enough to produce snow—the toilet (or latrine) was often down the hall, or down the hall and across the courtyard, or down the hall across the courtyard and out the front gate. I had to wake up.

Last night, I had a new and different first with regards to waking up in the middle of the night.
The bed was too comfortable.

Interesting way of carrying a bike on a motorcycle

I suppose I was probably going to be rolling over or changing position or something like. I've been called the "whirling dervish" since before I was in kindergarten and Mike has been threatening for the past 17 or 18 years to video record me sleeping just to try to figure out how it is I end up in the positions I end up in. However, nothing needing moving. There were no pinch points, no squashed limbs, nothing. And the fact that I wasn't moving and didn't need to move and was thoroughly and perfectly comfortable with exactly the right amount of blanket, it was so startlingly unusual that it woke me up.

Multiple times.

I was up for good pretty early (like 5am early) but the room had come with an air conditioner instead of a fan and my shorts weren't quite dry enough to wear yet so I went back to sleep until 8am. On average, when I'm not cycling, I get about 7 hours of sleep a night. Cycling tends to bump it up closer to 9.

Okay, so some of the city walls do remain, just not contiguous with the gates

Nice daylight view of the gate from last night

Went to the cafe where I had the passionfruit smoothie last night. Was going to order another passionfruit smoothie to drink alongside my coffee but they had avocados so I had an avocado smoothie instead. By the time it came, I was about three quarters of the way finished drinking my coffee. The two flavors were complementary so I added all of my coffee to the smoothie and it was so good that I nearly convinced myself not being hungry or thirsty wasn't a sufficient excuse not to order a second round.

Full up with avocado smoothie and sweet Vietnamese coffee, I skipped getting solid food for breakfast. I bought a bunch of various things to eat at rest points including more of yesterday's fried spring rolls, a pineapple, a mango, and three avocados. I'm really glad I did this as none of the food places I saw throughout the day seemed all that much better than what I had with me.

I swear Vietnamese spring rolls are food of the gods.

Near Tuyên Quang the QL2c intersects with the main road. There's a sign pointing to Tân Trào and both my tourist quality paper map and Google seemed to indicate that there was some sites of interest in that town. I don't why exactly but I was figuring temples and was kind of sort of thinking that if I did a good job of keeping my handlebar snacks in my handlebar bag, I could have a nice leisurely late lunch at some temple. That didn't happen.

The road never goes very far up and the mountains themselves aren't very tall but every time the road goes up (or down) it did it at 7% or more. Luckily, it wasn't until well into the afternoon that my rear derailleur munged up and stopped shifting in the largest rear cog. Even if I pull the chain off by hand and put it on the largest rear cog, it won't stay there. I know the theory of the problem and the theory of the solution. As a result, it's going to be like this for the next six or seven hundred kilometers and a large city with a bike shop I can trust that speaks a language in common with me.

Well after I decided there was no way I'd have any kind of time to stop at the probable temples, I passed the probable temples and found them to be nothing more than historic markers. Something interesting happened here in 1945. It happened in Vietnamese. I recognized "Ho Chi Minh" and the year. That was it.

I've internalized some more Vietnamese words:
Cắt Tóc - Haircuts
Cầu - Bridge
Cũ - Old
Fo To Coppy - Photocopy
Lại - Come
Lửa - Fire
Ka Ra O Ke - Karaoke
Massage - Massage
Nhà - Place
Palasma Ti Vi - Plasma Television
Tôi - I
Xe Buýt - Bus

When I turned off on the "something happened here" road, the road quality dropped immediately from the wide traffic free and very nicely paved national road to something a little more rural. If it weren't for the fact that this was shown on my paper maps as a through road, I'd be a little nervous taking it into the mountains in the afternoon. As it was, I had a lovely ride up over a wooded mountain pass and down the other side into a very pleasant tea growing region with, as is everywhere in Vietnam, lots of rice paddies.

I can't put my finger on it exactly but despite the fact that many of the buildings around here were stilt houses and many of them were wooden, or had thatched roofs, or even were made out of woven straw (truly not the sign of a wealthy homeowner), they were all much more nicely put together than the last bit on the day I found the crack in my rim. There's the kind of poor people who just happen not to have money and then there's the kind of poor people who are hillbillies. The ones the other day were very definitely hillbillies.

At Yên Thông the road I was on, which had been counting down to an intersection, hit the intersection. I chose to go north and to Quán Vuông as it was the town I'd been counting down to for the last 15km or so. It also showed on both paper and electronic maps and was shown to have lodging. It wasn't a terribly nice looking bit of town and it was much earlier in the day than I had expected (probably from not having actually stopped for lunch) and I went north another 5 or 6km to Chợ Chu not really because I was intending on going that far but because I just wanted to find someplace that looked like it would have food (instead of drinks) and which already had people eating so I could point at their food instead of having another disastrous episode of ordering something like mozzarella sticks.

Most of the hotels I'd seen along the way all seemed to be places that primarily offered karaoke with lodging as a secondary concern. There was one sign pointing to a hotel that also offered massage (conveniently the same word in both languages) which had the benefit of also being 200m off the main strip according to the sign. This would mean no honking.
I picked that place.

Around 8pm, I decided to go for a massage and, well, I got a massage. It wasn't a very good massage and it wasn't an hour long (by any definition of an hour) but it wasn't a bad massage either. She clearly knew how to give a massage but was simply completely uninterested in actually giving a massage. She also didn't seem to be a hooker. It was weird. I vaguely gather from some of the attempts at communication which were made after I complained that my massage ended at less than 20 minutes that I was supposed to spend part of my massage time in a steam room and part of it a bath tub.

I've had a massage before, in Thailand, where someone bathed me and, other than the part where someone bathed me, it was a nice massage. The being soaped and washed by someone else was just weird and an experience I've not made any effort to repeat.

Seriously not a road I'm super comfortable trusting to actually go somewhere (but it does)

So, I guess part of it being cut short was my not wanting what they were offering but, even so, it wasn't what I was expecting for a massage. All my other half naked massages in Vietnam have involved someone kneading the muscles (though not as deeply as I'd like) and rubbing oil into my skin. This was all thwappa thwappa thwappa thwappa with the flats of the hands, a little bit of pulling and stretching, and then walking on my back. If she'd actually kept up with the walking on my back, it might have been alright. Only she stopped. And when she came back after I complained that this was not an hour she halfheartedly kind of sort of poked at my muscles for another 15 minutes in a "I'm not actually incompetent, I simply don't care" sort of way.

I'll be in China soon enough. Then I can talk to people. That'll be good.

Interesting looking public health billboard

Today's ride: 79 km (49 miles)
Total: 1,752 km (1,088 miles)

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