19 April 2011
Spiceroads Cycling Tour – Day 2
Phu Luong to Lam Son (74 Km)
It must be about 90 degrees (F) out on this straight-as-an-arrow Ho Chi Minh Highway when we decide that enough is enough, time to pull over in the shade and rest for a bit. The morning ride had been pleasant enough, toodling along a narrow, country lane, passing heaps of schoolkids on their bicycles as they shouted their standard Hellos, but the route has taken a turn for the worse. A right turn, that is, onto the highway. This is indeed SpiceRoad’s Ho Chi Minh Trail ride, but the itinerary promised that we would have this highway “virtually all to ourselves.” Apparently “ourselves” includes abundant and ample trucks. For those who have been to Vietnam and understand how the Vietnamese drive, they will know that one of the essential elements of any Vietnamese mode of transport is a well-working horn. And if you’re a big truck, then you are equipped with an even bigger horn. A horn that you blast incessantly as you travel down the highway. In our case, this Ho Chi Minh highway that we now find ourselves pedaling down. But surprisingly, it’s not the trucks that bring us to this standstill in the shade so much as the heat and lack of scenery. After yesterday’s picture postcard day, is it possible that we now face nothing but highway scenery, which actually isn’t scenic at all?
This is the question we are pondering – bitching about, to be more precise – when off in the distance we see our best hope of reprieve – it is none other than Mr. Hau (roughly pronounced “How”) in the sag wagon truck. Hello, Mr. Hau, how happy we are to see you. Speaking essentially no English but smiling from ear-to-ear, he leaps out of the cab, flings open the back doors on the truck, loads up our two bikes, and tucks us into the cab with a water and banana to share. Meet our second favourite person on tour, Mr. Hau.
Thinking that we had to be at least three-quarters of the way to the evening’s guesthouse, we are somewhat perplexed when it seems as though Mr. Hau has been driving us down the highway for quite some distance. Having no means of communicating anything beyond Hello and Thank You, we simply sit in silence, watching the kilometers click past on the odometer. “Do you think he’s taking us to the right hotel?”, asks Gina? “I don’t know”, I reply, to which I add, after another 15 minutes have passed by and a lone hotel driveway has finally appeared, “We’ve gone so far now maybe we’re at tomorrow’s hotel?”. But it’s not, for that one is rated with a few more stars than this one. After killing a few bugs and flooding the bathroom, it’s time for the tally to begin: Nice Accommodation = 1, Super Dumpy Accommodation = 1.
