Lost: Ninh Binh to Nga Son

December 12, 2016

Vietnamese coffee is thick and distinctive. It drips through a filter and it's drunk hot or iced with condensed milk

I'VE said this before but you know you're off the tourist trail when the locals take pictures of you rather than the other way round. I'd like to tell you there was something clever about all this but it was, well, not a mistake exactly but...

I'll explain.

Plan A today was to visit a wooden temple, or maybe a church. We were a bit hazy about that. We imagined riding through rice fields on gentle roads where happy children would wave and atmospheric cafés offer coffee. Maybe the occasional toothless old-timer, that sort of thing.

Instead, we got half a lifetime of hooting lorries and screaming two-strokes. When we did get away from it, it quickly emerged that we had little idea where we were. That was nothing new but we pressed on. And when we reached our temple, we looked disappointed at the shell of a redundant church and puzzled how it could be recommended by the tourist people.

It says something of our quick thinking that it was only well into the afternoon that we realised that the temple we wanted had been a hundred metres along a side road.

Well, we rode out of town on a boulevard known to the communist party but not to Google. Every building had a star and a hammer and sickle, often with a lot of yellow lettering on red that ended with an exclamation mark.

There was nothing sinister in it. The road was just too new for our maps. And that set the theme. We bumped around one of the many copious cemeteries - ancestor worship is strong here but doesn't extend to weeding around the graves, a job sometimes left to goats - and then on a series of flat, concrete roads between fields of cropped rice and through hamlets with no name.

We skirt yet another giant cemetery, still not sure where we are

We were now tourist attractions of our own. A woman on a bike laden with baskets stopped to sympathise unintelligibly with Steph.

"Wa ha", she said, or something like that, and pointed first at Steph's bags and then at her own load.

"We women, we suffer in life, don't we?" her expression asked. And then she smiled the smile of the contented martyr and we parted on a short, sharp rise.

Heaven knows where we were. Nowhere the GPS knew about, nor our maps and not Steph's mobile phone. That denied there was any road at all.

Looking for a bridge, we came instead across a man sitting on a boat in a muddy channel to our right. He was our way across the water.

There was no sign. Not even a road. Just a narrow mud path. Our bumping down it attracted his attention and he pulled on the rope that stretched across the river and pulled himself over to us. And then, with our help, he tugged us to the other side.

Nothing mechanised about the ferry: just pull on the rope and drag yourself across

There we were delivered to the delight of three eight-year-olds, boys whose afternoon fun at the water's edge had been enhanced no end by the arrival of two westerners, also on bicycles. They grinned and waved and got on their bikes and rode behind us, chattering, smiling and sometimes shouting to us, on the mud path on the far bank.

We rode over patches of rice stalks laid out to dry. We rode past lazy brown cows and between their steaming brown pats. All the time followed by the boys.

...and pursued by small boys on foot or bike

They, though, knew a better route. Maybe they shouted it to us, but we hadn't understood. Instead, they vanished down a turning and they were up to eight-year-old mischief when we found them ahead of us. We passed them to more cries of delight and a series of hand slaps, and then they were behind us.

Girls cycling home in blue and white school uniforms giggled as they came the other way. When one braved a "hallo", the others joined in, laughing still more. If there is one thing Vietnamese people are good at, it's being happy.

And so came another round of having our photo taken. We stopped at a café that was no more than someone's garage and a refrigerator and sat, as invited, in the garden. Moments later came a call of "Mister... madam... camera!" We were called to our feet for a picture with what we took for the youngest son.

And so in time we realised where we were and rode into a featureless town for a featurless hotel. Steph's wrist has held up, albeit painfully at times, and this evening it's puffy and aching. But she's happy and determined to ride again tomorrow.

Today's ride: 57 km (35 miles)
Total: 447 km (278 miles)

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