January 3, 2017
Military trespass: Luong Son to Binh Sum
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IN Prague, years before the Curtain came down, I had cause to go to a police station. I walked through ever darker streets with a man from the Daily Express. He'd never been to a communist police station, either, and we both found it irresistible.
When I got back, the man who had perfectly illegally rented me one of his rooms asked how I'd got on. I said the place had been closed.
He looked at his watch and laughed.
"Of course," he said. "It's gone five o'clock."
Now I laughed.
"You mean that here under the cruel heel of communist oppression the police stations keep office hours whereas in the liberty-loving west they're open 24 hours a day?"
Exactly that, he said.
I was reminded of that this afternoon. We crossed a range of hills and then for the rest of the morning followed a quiet road that shadowed the coast. Only one town lay along the route and we left it by an ever-narrower road that turned into a sandy track.
We'd gone far enough not to be inclined to turn back when a red wooden sign in Vietnamese and English told us we were entering a restricted area.
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Well, I didn't spend years in the Boy Scouts for nothing. I looked at the sand and saw not tank tracks but the narrow tyre ruts of light motorcycles. Unless that was how the Vietnamese army moved, it had been a while since troops or anything else came this way. If locals took no notice then nor would we.
The path continued to rise and we rode or pushed as appropriate. And then, at the top, the sand gave way to broken tar and what we guessed was an old runway. Nature had reclaimed much of it and the surface would have destroyed even the sturdiest undercarriage. That was the secret Vietnam we weren't supposed to see.
The department that listed abandoned airfields hadn't thought to remove the signs. It just carried on repainting them until further notice. But all the same I wasn't disposed to take a picture of them or the runway for fear that the evidence on my camera would commit me as a spy. So far I could argue that I had been too tired and busy with not falling over that we hadn't seen anything.
Sure enough, the same freshly painted notice was at the other end, pointing the other way. People who lived alongside it showed no surprise at our arrival, pushing through the sand.
The signs reminded me that we had seen no policemen in Vietnam except the smartly-dressed men and occasionally women who vainly directed the traffic. The only soldiers, looking bored and about 14, were so desperately aggressive that they leaned out of their lorries as they passed and beamed and waved and made peace signs.
From America, the land of the free, I'd come home with pictures of so many prisons that many were open to tourists. There were police cars everywhere and so many signs prohibiting quite ordinary behaviour - playing with balls, using rollerskates - that I filled a page of the account of the ride. The world can be a confusing place.
Well, we have dropped back to the sea today, after a solid hour and a half of climbing and then a rolling and sometimes briefly steep main road with no traffic, propelled once more by a glorious tailwind.
We chose tonight's hotel because two cyclists had left their loaded bikes by the door. Matthias and Karin are German and riding north from Cambodia. We're having dinner with them this evening and looking forward to it.
Today's ride: 78 km (48 miles)
Total: 1,507 km (936 miles)
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