How old are you?: Dong Ho to Hue

December 24, 2016

YOU don't get a lot of conversation here unless, quite reasonably, you speak Vietnamese. But that doesn't mean no contact. There's lots.

There are all those giggling shouts of "Hallo!" And we are over and over asked our names and sometimes how we are. We used to answer "Very well, thank you". And then we'd be puzzled by the disappointment. It's taken a long time to realise that the question only sounds like "How are you?" They're actually asking "How old are you?"

Everybody wants to know and there's no social stigma in asking.

As it happens, I'm 69. I began wondering whether I looked so close to my destiny in a glue pot that folk were astonished. Was 69 old for a local? So I looked it up.

Life expectancy here - the actual average of age at death - is 75. It's almost doubled since the communists took over, although that could be correlation rather than cause, of course. Life expectancy has gone up in neighbouring Cambodia as well, although it could hardly have done otherwise. Men in the Khmer Rouge era died on average at 19. And that was the average, remember; for every man who lived longer, one died younger.

We were asked our age again when we stopped at one of the many restaurants that are little more than spaces in which you might otherwise park a tractor. The food is always fresh and clean and kitchen standards seem high. But the surroundings are basic in the extreme and, if the walls are painted, they need to be painted again.

There's always a welcome when we walk in, although there's a brief silence too. Westerners are rare off the main highways and westerners on bicycles more so. And then brief side-of-the-eye examination reveals we're no different from anyone else. Taller, perhaps, and blue-eyed. And expected to be of such ineptitude with chopsticks that someone is sent to fetch a spoon and fork.

Today we were asked not just our age but how many children. None, Steph mimed, then pointed at me and indicated "two" before lowering her fingers to indicate daughters and their own children. Two women sitting together smiled in approval.

Restaurants can be simple like this or little more than garages - but the food is always fresh and clean

Always a welcome, a brief silence and then human warmth

We got to the café in the dry half of the day. Water was a feature all day but never more than when it started raining unhesitatingly.

For much of the day we have been riding long roads with water lapping each side. What wasn't half flooded for rice was completely flooded by rain. It was nothing new. Every few hundred metres, a concrete pole painted red and white stood ready to show how deep a flood might be.

At times the water stretched so far we could have been at sea. I neither measured nor timed it but I felt that for half an hour we were riding a narrow causeway littered with water plants that an earlier inundation had left behind. To our left, we passed two wooden boats, long and thin, in which one woman rowed and the other banged an oar rhythmically across the bow. It would have been lovely to ask why.

The causeway was wet and breezy but a delightful escape

We saw more ducks today than I have seen in my life. White ducks - the sort I know as Aylesburys - bobbed duck-like everywhere. Yellow ducks, too. It's consoling to know that whatever worries, scandals and wars might befall mankind, ducks will just go bobbing along unaware.

The banks were squatted by hundreds of smaller birds, their wings clipped so they couldn't abandon their owners. They rushed into the water as we approached, always a metre in front of us, like a crowd of yellow triathlon swimmers.

The other feature has been Buddhist temples and shrines. Temples and often houses are guarded by a fat, smiling Buddha. They could be shabby or gilded and glittering. Primary colours everywhere were irreligiously reminiscent of fairground rides.

We stopped at one far from anywhere. But a small and densely populated country always has someone who sees and within minutes two men arrived separately on mopeds. One wore working clothes, as though he'd been called away from a job to inspect what was happening.

They smiled and waved and the older one pressed his hands together in dignified greeting. They hadn't seen many westerners and, now that they'd seen some and they didn't look so interesting after all, they looked awkward and then rode away in one direction when we went off in the other.

Well, we are in Hue, a tourist city with a citadel that we fringed this afternoon in pouring rain and creeping darkness. We're taking a couple of days off now. Coincidentally, it will be Christmas. The Christian minority are celebrating their winter festival and church bells in the distance sound incongruously like an English country town.

For Vietnam generally, though, it will be just another day. No day off and no celebration. Just life as normal.

Today's ride: 89 km (55 miles)
Total: 1,170 km (727 miles)

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