November 17, 2016
Make peace sign, make peace sign!: Dan Tieng to An Loc
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YOU know you're off the tourist trail when the locals take pictures of you rather than the other way round. It happened lots today, to the point where we took it for granted. We feel like those celebrities you see who pause obligingly and smile for the cameras of people they don't know and then walk on. It's part of the job.
Yesterday there were three sets of pictures at the roadside shack where we stopped for lunch. But today there have been snaps not just in shops and cafés but at random on the road.
One man of about 30, smartly but casually dressed, passed us in a car and got out with a little computer. He held it up, its broad side towards us. I waved for the photo.
"Make peace sign! Make peace sign!" he gestured. The peace sign is strong in Asia and kids in China loved giving it whenever we took their picture.
Make the peace sign, the first two fingers of the hand raised and separated, like the ears of an alert rabbit, and it's returned immediately in Vietnam. There's a thesis to be written on that - who started it, how it spread and just why two fingers should carry any meaning at all.
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Other, local, gestures take longer to learn. If I ask for a bunch of bananas, you look wistful and shake your head sideways if you haven't got any. But not in Vietnam. Instead, the trick is to raise your hand with the fingers spread upwards, as though you were holding a melon, and then to twist your wrist repeatedly backwards and forwards like someone screwing in a light bulb.
It's not obvious what it means, but then gestures rarely are obvious. We take it for granted that nodding the head up and down means "yes" and that sideways means "no". But there's no reason that should be and the case is proved in Bulgaria, where the western "yes" means "no" and shaking your head in a "no" means "yes".
This, if nothing else, explains a lot of misunderstandings between Bulgarian girls and western tourists.
Anyway, so far we have been getting along by putting our palms together by one ear to suggest a hotel. We started making knife and fork gestures and pointing at our mouth to ask for food, but that doesn't work. It's obvious when you think about it, which we eventually did.
People in Vietnam don't use knives and forks. Or not much. They use chopsticks and the correct gesture is to mime scooping food out of a raised bowl with chopsticks.
And gesturing "come in" is tricky, too. Where I live and maybe where you are, we raise our fingers and wave them loosely towards us, flexing our wrists. Not in Vietnam. In Vietnam you do it the other way round, the back of your hand upwards, the fingers down. And then you pull in your fingers over and over as though you're scratching a goat.
To us, of course, it looks like "go away". We read the finger movements the other way round.
Well, we're well away from Saigon now. There's still traffic - that is a characteristic of Vietnam - but it's thinner and tolerant.
We have been riding through plantations of rubber trees, their thin, high trunks in rows, each cut at hip height to reveal diagonal lines of white flesh. Where the cuts merge, a cup like half a coconut waits tied to the trunk with a wire to collect the rubber.
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Most of the cups today have been lying on the ground. I walked among the trees but the cups still on the trunks were empty. If there's a rubber season, and I suppose there must be, then this isn't it. We have occasionally seen men or women in blue overalls walking among the trees but they look, to an outsider, as though they're just counting them, to see if there are as many this morning as there were yesterday night.
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It's still flat here, although often with a faint but wheel-dragging rise as we approach the distant highlands. And once in a while there has been a brief hill just about worthy of the name.
If you look at a map, you'll see we should have ridden less than we did. Our daily distances depend less on what we could manage but where we know we can find a hotel. For once, we're not camping. Too difficult.
At one moment today we stopped for a drink of crushed sugar cane and sat beneath a tree. It was then we spotted kids going through physical jerks in a school yard across the road. We stood opposite them and brought the exercise to a giggling collapse as we copied their movements.
The teacher, a slim man of 30 or so, came over afterwards not to complain but to talk in hesitant English. A while later, one of the girls in the yard came over to our sheltering tree and said proudly "I go to school by bicycle!"
I don't know how old she was. Maybe 10 or so.
"Well, that's very good," we said. "What is your name?"
She told us. Almost every word in Vietnamese is of a single syllable - which is why locals refer to Viet Nam, as separate words - and names follow the same rule.
We realised afterwards that she didn't in fact have a bike with her. Instead, we worked out, she had ridden home on it and then her mother had said she was going to take her back on her moped to practise her English on us.
The mother spoke no English at all and had no idea what her daughter was saying, but she smiled with pride to hear her girl master this strange language to the extent that passing foreigners could understand her.
We had another encounter an hour later when we stood by the roadside, peering at our map.
A round-faced man pulled up alongside and lowered his car window.
"You maybe lost?" he asked.
We said we weren't, that we knew where we were but that it wasn't where we'd wanted to be. It's a sensation familiar to most inept cycle tourists but it was a strange notion to anyone with a GPS in his car.
He got out and began pointing out where we were. We knew that. What we didn't know was how to get to where we were supposed to be.
I pointed at the map and tried to pronounce the name of the town.
He laughed and said it correctly.
"Back, he said. "You go back. And then..." - he crossed his hands to suggest a crossroads - "you go..." and he waved to one side.
"Left?"
"Yes, left."
I don't think either of us stopped smiling.
It's disillusioning to ride 10km down the wrong road and then ride back over the rolling hills we hadn't noticed in the other direction. And it's disastrous to get to the town you'd ridden through long ago to find there's no food beyond a sticky bun and a pizza the size of a saucer.
That was why we were shattered when we got on to a broad, silky highway into the outskirts of An Loc. We didn't care where we stayed or what it cost. We were beyond all that.
We rolled up, sweaty, dusty and sagging, in front of a high palace with, incongruously, several unattached brown cows grazing outside.
We have a room the size of an airport terminal. The bed alone needs a GPS to cross. And it's cost a shade less than €30, breakfast included.
Today's ride: 83 km (52 miles)
Total: 170 km (106 miles)
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