D14: Cát Bà to Hải Phòng

February 17, 2018

Got up lazily, packed, and headed for breakfast at the same indoor/outdoor restaurant/cafe facing the plaza where I'd eaten the night before. Sitting with the Australians and actually being able to hold a conversation with someone had truly been the highlight of that place but the fried beef noodles and the smoothies had also been pretty excellent. Either the food was spiced with hunger the night before or someone else was cooking as this morning's coffee, smoothie, and fried seafood noodles were all lackluster at best. The service also left something to be desired.

I get it, it's the first full day of the New Year, it's still holidays, and people are visiting so I shouldn't complain. I should be happy that they were open at all. Be that as it may, it was really super annoying to wave my hand and wave my hand and get someone's attention and have them say something to someone in Vietnamese and then not come over to the table. On one occasion, a man came to the table but even using the bilingual menu to point (a trick that works well enough when it's a monolingual menu I can't read) he didn't take my order.

Sat for a while reading The King's Blood by Daniel Abraham. Had a conversation with a Russian born man who said he once cycled the circuit of Australia in two months on an upright bike with a basket. Hoped in vain for sun. (I've since looked at the climate data on Wikipedia and, in February, although there aren't very many rainy days nor is there very much rain, the percent of possible sunshine hovers at a dismal 12%.)

Even though it's going to be very very flat once I get back onto the Vietnamese mainland, I'm not going to cycle very far today so there is no reason to be in any kind of a rush. Hải Phòng, where I'm heading, is a large city and it has a backpacker's hostel. In Tet season, these two are critical factors in making Hải Phòng my destination. While Hải Dương, which isn't that much farther along, is also a city it's not a large one the way Hải Phòng is and I'm just not interested in risking the chances of no food / no lodging or bad food / expensive lodging.

The road from Cát Bà Town to the ferry is a beautiful twisty windy thing that more or less follows the coastline. A few times a sharp curve or a narrow stretch of 'looks like it is about to fall into the sea' will be visible as I swoop down a long descent at 40 or 50kph. Most of the time, however, the recent roadworks to remove sharp curves or widen the road into something safe are the only road visible. Considering the fairly small permanent population of the island, it's truly amazing just how much blasting through solid limestone formations of karst has taken place. Surely this hasn't all be done for the tourists?

A stretch of not-yet-improved original road

Off the edge of one of the curves, an oxbowed off section of the original road

Very small men at work on very large mountain

Unimproved road through the mangroves and fish farms

This ferry leaves far more often than the other one and, even though I arrive as a ferry is departing, I only have to wait 10 or 15 minutes before the area is packed with motorcycles and buses and cars and pedestrians. The crowd is about 80% Vietnamese / 20% foreigner. By and large the Vietnamese are smartly dressed like they have just gone visiting for the holidays or like they are on their way to go visiting. The foreigners are cookie-cutter individuals on the Southeast Asian banana pancake trail. The same unconventionally long hair or white person dreadlocks worn with the same tie-dye or batik. The same 40L backpacks.

What does one even fit in a 40L backpack? Even at my very worst excesses of overpacking for a non-bike trip, I don't think the two of us got up to 40L worth of stuff. My soda-bottle panniers can fit about 4L each and the lone front pannier which I'm using as a rear pannier theoretically fits 20L though only if you stuffed it very very full. This to carry on-bike wear, off-bike wear, tools, a laptop, chargers, a spare pair of shoes... do these people carry their grubbies around for a week before doing laundry? I just don't understand.

Long bridge and a even longer causeway to get off the little island where the ferry drops us followed by nearly two hours of riding through a completely empty shipping and manufacturing district. It looks like it isn't usually empty and I imagine it must be pretty darn unpleasant when the trucks are there. There is, I suppose, a bright lining to it currently being Tet even if that bright lining is expressed in every single "Com, Bún, Phở" sign being in front of a metal shuttered shop.

Joint effort to get a motorbike on to the empty road from the other side of the crash barrier

I too have often thought that the middle of a bridge is a good place to stop and take photos with my friends

Not that they have a lot of traffic to worry about right now

Off the bridge and on to another empty road

Empty road through what appears to normally be a very unpleasant truck district

It's quite early still when I get to Hải Phòng. I find the hostel without too much effort (my random stopping place turns out to be three streets away) and I also find myself some seafood noodle soup that I don't think is Phở but don't actually know. It's not exactly what I think of when I think "hostel". There's no common room with a map for visitors to put a pushpin in, no foosball, no bar serving authentic cocktails and banana pancakes. In fact, it seems more like a handful of rooms scattered randomly across a bunch of family residences. The bed is soft, the shower hot, and my 180,000 dong ($7.90) comes with a large breakfast.

My not very hostel-y hostel's common room

Old buildings in Hai Phong's historic district

Today's ride: 57 km (35 miles)
Total: 611 km (379 miles)

Rate this entry's writing	Heart	1
Comment on this entry	Comment	0