Out of Vinh, the land became hillier but maybe not for long as intensive quarrying is cutting away the landscape. We stopped at a petrol station to go to the loo and when I came out it seemed like Jon had wandered off - but it turned out that the petrol station attendants had invited him for tea (as you do). We ended up having a lovely conversation (in body language), drank several cups of green tea, guessed each other's dates of birth (a strange game) and exchanged a US dollar for dong to aid one of the guy's foreign currency collection.
All over rural Vietnam we were constantly being cheerily hello-ed and waved at by children, teenagers, grown men and the occasional toothless granny. One instance today was particularly memorable - a boy playing with his friend turned excitedly to shout with perfect timing to get a football to the crotch. The poor kid folded to the ground still trying to wave, and Jon's eyes were still streaming with laughter a few hundred meters later.
We pushed on an extra 20km thanks to a Cu Do sugar rush (a delicious rice cracker-ginger-peanut-toffee snack), and pulled in to Quang Binh village in a golden rice paddy sunset haze.
Day 41 - Quang Binh to Ninh Binh (75km with baby hills)
It was a good job we covered the extra distance the previous day as we slept through the alarm and set off about 2 hours later than planned. Breakfast was in the city of Thanh Hoa, and involved a sort of steamed rice-batter pancake rolled with herbs, pork and crispy bits (bánh cuốn), plus some mini burgers and fish sauce. Another new meal. I'm really going to miss Vietnamese breakfasts.
As well as cuisine changes as we moved further into to northern Vietnam, we noticed the cafés now had special smoking tables for customers, including tea pots in wicker cosies and large, intricately decorated bamboo tobacco pipes. We decided it best not to partake before a strenuous day of cycling however!
The previous day Jon had got a puncture from a pesky shard of glass so we'd changed the innertube. His bike now felt particularly rumbly, and after a bit of fettling we decided it was due to the slightly-incorrect size of the spare. We fixed the first tube and switched it back - drawing an interested crowd, who helpfully poked things and explained stuff in enthusiastically rapid Vietnamese.
We'd bought some pineapple from a cycling pineapple vendor (!) in Thanh Hoa - and ended up having a quiet break on a bridge over a rice paddy irrigation channel, looking like a scene Turner might have painted had he gone on holiday to Vietnam.
Days 42 to 43 - Ninh Binh
In Ninh Binh is a quiet neighbourhood between the bus and train stations which has become a minor hub for backpackers. It's still predominantly Vietnamese - students hang out in cafés and kids play in the street, but everyone is used to confused foreigners.
We went to a restaurant serving goi ca, a meal of fish wrapped in leaves with herbs and dipped in thick sauce, but initially staff tried to direct us to a Western style eatery. They were still wary as we tried to assure them that we weren't after pizza (on this occasion) - however they'd cheered up by the time we were ordering seconds.
One of the main reasons we stopped in Ninh Binh was because of the famous riverine karst formations there - sometimes referred to as 'Ha Long Bay on land'. The area is very popular with domestic tourists, as we discovered on our visit to Trang An grottoes. We cycled out to the entrance, a restaurant -come-harbour complex on a wide green river where we bought our tickets (something of a scrum - there isn't quite the same queueing culture as in the UK) and boarded a tiny boat along with a Vietnamese family. Our captain was a grinning lady who encouraged us to pick up the paddles provided to help her row. The boat was one of what seemed like a hundred, all fully loaded with tourists who seemed almost as interested in the few foreigners as the surrounding, breathtaking cliffs.
The trip was excellent, taking us beneath the mountains through six or seven river caves (or grottoes), many times very low and narrow. We had to duck to avoid hitting our heads on stalactites. In between grottoes we rowed through lush vertically sided valleys.
Day 44 - Ninh Binh to Hanoi (92km pretty much flat)
Our final day of riding. A guy at our hotel had offered to buy the bikes already, saying we could catch a bus to Hanoi, but we explained that having come this far, we kind of wanted to see it through.
The road was flat but busy. We were glad when we peeled off the new noisy dual carriageway onto the old lesser-used road, which passed through several towns and villages and was still busy but minus the big lorries and coaches. After a while there weren't really any gaps between the villages anymore, as they blended into the suburbs of greater Hanoi.
Arriving in the capital at last we were greeted by ferocious traffic, one-way systems and a very carefree attitude towards which side of the road one should drive along. Saigon may have been crazy, but Hanoi's older, narrower streets are on another level. I think our expressions probably looked a little manic by the time we were fighting our way through the hectic Old Quarter, the oldest and most squiggly part and also Hanoi's tourist centre.
Day 45 to 47 - Hanoi
After celebrating the completion of our cycle tour sub-adventure with a lavish mushroom hotpot, we turned to working out what to do with our bikes. We couldn't take them home, so decided we'd have to sell - the problem being our short time remaining in Vietnam. We would have to advertise quickly, but we still wanted to visit a couple more places so wouldn't always be on hand to speak with buyers... Tricky! Thankfully, Hanoi has much more of a bike culture than Ho Chi Minh City, perhaps because cycling around the many lakes is a popular pastime. We decided to take our bikes to a shop called the Hanoi Bicycle Collective to see if they could help out.
The Hanoi Bicycle Collective is part bike shop, part tapas cafe, set up by a Spanish expat to spread his love of electric bikes and cycling in general. The staff were friendly and immediately offered to hold our bikes for us until they were sold, which certainly took the onus off us. All we needed to do was give them a final clean, assemble all the various accessories we would be selling with them and say a teary goodbye!
Being relegated once again to pedestrian status felt pretty strange at first. We distracted ourselves by starting to explore Hanoi's Old Quarter maze of cool little streets and visiting its many cafés. We were only staying there for a couple of days though before heading off to Sapa, a mountain town in the far North. There would be more Hanoian exploration on our return!
Overall, our Vietnam Cycle Tour took us a month and a half, during which we rode over 1700km and saw an amazingly friendly and varied country. Every province had its own local food speciality, products and cultural peculiarities. The landscape went from mega-urban to pine forested mountains, palm-fringed beaches, epic coastal passes and green rice-paddy plains. There were no crashes, only two punctures and on the whole we actually felt safer on the roads here than cycling back in the UK. Plus we saw so much more than we would have stuck on a tourist bus and we enjoyed every day of it. We will definitely be going cycle touring again!
- Kath
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| Elevation profile from Vinh to Hanoi |
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| Elevation profile for the whole journey - Saigon to Hanoi! |
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