D18: Hà Nội to Phủ Lý

February 21, 2018

I actually woke up early today!
And stayed awake too!
This was not through any intentional action on my part. Sure, going to sleep before midnight may have had something to do with it, but really, it was the bamboo ladder shop on the other side of the road playing loud techno music at a quarter to 8:00 that gets all the credit for my waking up and staying up. As in China, Vietnam seems to only have two kinds of music: lilting ballads, and loud techno. Based on my experience in China, if I could understand the words, a fair percentage of the loud techno beat songs I'm hearing in Vietnamese are in fact remixes of the soft lilting ballads.

KFC, Popeyes, Burger King and Dunkin Donuts

The guesthouse made me a very nice breakfast of banana pancakes and coffee. I'd paid for my stay with US currency I'd found while packing so we then had to figure out how much change I was owed. I feel like it would be much easier if places just charged in local currency but given the volatility of Vietnamese Dong the last decade and change, I can understand why they might not want to.

When I left, my bike did the strangest thing. I suppose while it was sitting outside in the daylight hours, someone must have messed with the shifters or something but I still can't even think of how this would have happened. The chain doubled up on itself and jammed in the front derailleur locking the rear wheel up solid. Percussive maintenance combined with wiggling the shifters back and forth eventually managed to drop the chain off the granny and let me untangle it.

When I was planning to go to Vietnam last Chinese New Year (before my bag with my passport got stolen and I ended up in visa purgatory) I had contacted a bike shop in Hanoi about possibly renting or buying a bike from them. I figured it wouldn't hurt to stop by their shop so I made that my first call of the day only to be unable to find them.

The advantage of listening to music with a speaker instead of headphones means that I'm likely to hear drumming and know to look out for interesting things

From the bike shop that wasn't there (or at least wasn't where I looked), I continued south on the road along the dyke until it went from divided multi lane motorway to dual carriageway to two lane road to one lane road. It was mostly a nice ride. Very little traffic to speak of and what traffic there was was traffic that expected to be sharing the road with a bike. On the one lane parts, I could have done with some smoother concrete but that was really the only problem.

Getting close to the 30km mark, although the dyke continued to have a road on top of it, the road I was on officially turned off the dyke and entered the small town of Ninh Sở. In looking for lunch I spotted a place with a sign for banh mi. They turned out to still be closed for the holiday but they invited me to join them for lunch. As the jersey I was wearing rather prominently has the Chinese characters 必勝 one of the people at the lunch decided to ask me in halting broken Chinese if I spoke Chinese.

It turned out that he and his wife had met when they were working at a television factory in Taiwan.

That made lunch so much easier.

The amount they carry on bicycles here is amazing

Pretty much all the traffic is two wheeled

One of the many temples I didn't go into because there's no point when I can't read

Every one of these big multicolored flags is a temple I'm not stopping at

I'd been planning on continuing down the dyke to the city of Hưng Yên but, being as I was on a road and that road went somewhere, I decided to stay on it. Speaking in generalities, this wasn't a bad idea. The burning trash pits with their combination of paper, plastic, and rotting vegetable matter which twice managed to make me come to a full stop so I could throw up might just as easily have been found on the other road. It's not like they are a unique phenomenon. (Given my recent medical circumstances, this is not morning sickness. I've always had a generously overactive gag reflex.)

Summer 2016 was the first time I really noticed a conspicuous lack of rubbish in the Chinese countryside but the change has been gradual and ongoing for a number of years

I kept going west until I hit the QL21B where I turned south into a headwind which would stay with me the rest of the afternoon no matter how the road twisted and turned. As I'd pass from one town's jurisdiction into another, even though I couldn't tell much else about the differences between them, the treatment of trash was an obvious one. Some places, despite otherwise being rural and pretty, everything that wasn't actively being used by people had bits and plastic and paper on it. Other places at least had specific dumps and a few must have even had people who went around picking things up. It wasn't that long ago that China was just like this but I'd managed to completely forget how much drifts of random trash ruined an otherwise beautiful bit of countryside.

Somewhere around the time I started to see karst in the distance, I passed through a religious parade and on-street dragon dance. If it's anything at all like in Hainan, the gods from one temple go visiting the neighbors. Of course, since I couldn't talk to anyone, I couldn't really find out.

As you can see by the bus and the motorcycle helmets, all of this is going on without closing the street to traffic

Then headwind, headwind, more headwind, and some intervals of astonishingly ripped up pavement as I made my last 20km or so into Phủ Lý where I stopped at the first food place where I saw other people eating so I could order by pointing at their plates.

Today's ride: 91 km (57 miles)
Total: 843 km (524 miles)

Rate this entry's writing	Heart	2
Comment on this entry	Comment	0