27 July 2007, Pho Chau, Vietnam
 

After a reasonably good breakfast with two hard boiled eggs, bread (rolls), butter and jam (instead of being stone hard from being in the fridge as you so often find, here the butter was melted), and “Thailand” rather than Lao coffee (I think Nescafe), we set out to the border about 32 km away. Nice level ground for most of the way but then the last three km stretch an even grade up to 715 m, which obliged me again to walk and push most of that part.

Somewhere through this area the Ho Chi Minh Trail passed through. You would not notice it today.
 

Border formalities out were routine. It took some time to be processed on the other side, perhaps they were waiting for the “tip”. They could not figure out the entry and exit stamps in my passport. Being a Canadian, why did I spend so much time in Thailand? But in the end they were satisfied and stamped me through.
 

Then the downhill ride from 715 m elevation to the Vietnamese coastal plain at less than 100 m. It was all too short, we had to start pedalling again after some 15 km. By this time it had started thundering, and we had the first rain, and as it turned out the only one, on the trip. We avoided most of it by stopping at an Internet café, but in the end we got wet and dry again after it had stopped. Getting wet in this climate is no problem, and our gear was well protected.
 

What a different country this is compared to Thailand and Laos! No satellite dishes, which were so prevalent just across the border. No little food stalls at every street corner. Where do the Vietnamese eat? At home I guess. Cafes where you can buy beer, yes, but food is a different thing. Perhaps it will be getting better, when we come to more populated centres. What is the same, is the prevalence of mobile phone shops. Again at least four differerent providers are vying for your business. Also the building style has varied drastically just across the border. Looking at the houses one could think one is in China rather than in Southeast Asia. Plenty of churches from the French colonial period are in evidence, reasonably well kept it seems.
 

Today 85 km, total 695
 

28 July 2007, Vienh
 

Supper last night and breakfast this morning were a disaster. Vietnamese, at least in the outlying areas, do not seem to eat out, so there is a real scarcity of decent eating places. This combined with the language problems left most of us without very little, if any, food. I myself had a bowl of some undescribable soup (no lunch) for supper and this morning some biscuits with Vietnamese coffee. Drinking coffee here seems to be more like a social affair rather than the consumption of a beverage. I was given a small cup with a filter arrangement on top and had to pour the boiling water onto it from a thermos jug. The stuff was so thick that only about one drop every 10 seconds passed through, so there was a long wait in which you were supposed to converse with your companion(s)? I got the hang of it though soon enough. I spooned out most of the coffee grounds and stirred the rest and had a cup full at a reasonable strength soon. This, repeated several times, gave me the equivalent of three normal cups of coffee for the price of one. I called it the “endless cup of coffee”.
 

As far as the riding was concerned, we were in flat country already, just the odd small hill. But what we found very disconcerting that all drivers like to lean on their horn in this country. “Here I come!” Also the almost complete lack of directional signs was much of a bother, and trying to get directions from passers-by with the language problem was similarly difficult. The two maps we had were also woefully inadequate, names of towns not the same on the map as in real life, kilometre markers to town names neither on a map nor actually in existence etc. After all, the war has been over for quite a few years, no more need to confuse the Americans! The result for me was that I cycled seven km too far, before I realisedhat I was on the wrong road.
 

And once we hit National Highway # 1, which we shall now follow all the way to Hanoi, the ride became just complete drudgery, hot sun from above, a strong headwind, all the trucks blowing their horns. This, combined with the poor food situation, made me seriously contemplate  to cut the trip short and hop onto the train to Hanoi.
 

But the upside of being on the main highway is that there are more tourists, more hotels and even some of the hotels have Western standard restaurants with English menus. We lunched well that way today, and here we had a good supper. With a full stomach everything looks better.
 

Distance today 64 km, total 760
 

29 July 2007, Dien Chau
 

Today’s travel along National Highway 1 did not turn out to be as bad as expected, at least as far as I am concerned. The ground was dead level, and since I left at 07:00, I avoided most of the heat of the day. Traffic was heavy at times with trucks and buses trying to pass each other, but there were also short intervals with no traffic at all.
 

The others were not as lucky. Just out of town another few spokes broke on Jeff’s tandem, and they lost a couple of hours in getting them replaced. Luckily it happened right across from a bicycle repair shop. Meanwhile, I had gone ahead, had almost reached our objective for the day, and was waiting for them. After a three hour wait, I feared the worst. What could I do. If it was really serious they ought to have called me on my mobile. So I just got on the bike again, and only one km further they were overtaking me.
 

This is a small town , more a village, and there seemed to be only one old hotel here. But one of the guys hanging around the main corner said there was a better place two km off to the East. We took off in that direction, and at the stated distance there was the beach and a brand new huge five-storey hotel without any guests. Actually, there is one other couple staying here besides us. Along the beach there are a bunch of seafood restaurants with beach chairs, a-la Hua Hin, and all of them virutally empty.
 

When we realised we were going to be on the beach, we had imagined something like what the Lonely Planet guide had promised for another nearby place, a beautiful white sand beach. No such thing! Nothing to compare to Phuket’s beaches. Dirty looking brown sand.

30 July 2007, Tinh Gia
 

Another hot day on the plains! As usual, I went ahead, and did not see nor hear anything from the others till about noon. They called me on the mobile, where was I ? It turned out, I was only about four km ahead of them at that time and about ten km from today’s objective. They caught up with me a little while later. We had another rest stop to enquire about hotels, and “poof” the air went out on Jeff’s rear tire again. Seems at the last repair shop they forgot to insert the liner around the wheel, and the replacement one Kirsten had put in had worked itself loose and chafed open the tube. It took us another half hour to fix that.
 

This extended rest was good for Katja though, since she had been complaining about the heat and being close to fainting. She had been a bit dizzy also the afternoon before. Well, it is the same problem again, which all the young girl motorcycle drivers have in Thailand, who refuse to wear helmets. It is not fashionable and messes up their hair. In Katja’s case she does not want to wear a hat, and with the sun straight overhead, you are just asking for trouble. Sunstroke they call it. I gave her my spare hat, but she still would not wear it and her mother wears it now.
 

We cannot complain about the quality, availability and cost of hotels here. They are good, plentiful, reasonably priced and mostly empty. However, the food is the problem. To find something to your taste with the language difficulty is a real problem. Whatever happened to France’s Gift to the World? Have not seen any baguettes or any other kind of bread since we left Laos. Oh, except at the buffet breakfast at the expensive hotel where the others stayed at in Vinh.
 

Today 65 km, total 870
 

31 July 2007, Thanh Hoa
 

Another day on Highway 1. Flat as a pancake, but several hills around. Some clouds in the morning but otherwise hot sun. We are getting into more populated countryside now. Bigger towns, shorter distances apart. No shortages of hotels, how they stay in business, I do not know. Today again we stay at a standard place, new building, rated at 2 stars, single room at 170,000 dong = 380 baht=10 US$, good air-con, hot water, TV and mini-fridge in room. You wonder what more do you get in a place rated at more stars, VAT and service charge added?
 

However, in this place they have only the Vietnamese channels and only one western channel, and it has to be AXN, no doubt pirated from UBC True, as there are Thai subtitles. So tonight we are condemned to watch violence and extremism USA style.
 

For food we went to another hotel, perhaps 3-star. They had black beer, very good, a shame they do not brew it any more in Thailand. I ordered chicken fried five spice, only I could not detect any of the five. Vietnamese, as Lao food, just cannot touch Thai food. But the beer made it palatable.
 

By the way, France’s Gift to the World, baguettes, are available in any larger place, but you got to know where to look for it. What is available at practically every street corner, even in most villages, is Internet cafes and mobile phone shops, and not to forget the many places where you can sit down a drink a “bia hoy”, a low percentage alcohol draft beer.
 

Also I found out the confusion of place names results from the re-naming of some places. There are old and new names, and not all maps show both.
 

Today 44 km, total 914
 

2 August 2007, Hanoi
 

It is done! Day before yesterday we did 64 km to reach Ninh Binh and saw the first Western faces after over a week. This was a place mentioned in the Lonely Planet guide, and drew visitors to the nearby attractions such as the picturesque villages and rice paddies among the Karst pinnacles. Otherwise there was not much to report so no entry in my diary.
 

Yesterday we had meant only to go some 32 km to Phu Ly and to leave the final stretch of 62 to Hanoi for today. However 32 km seemed rather short and 62 rather long and to follow Highway # 1 rather boring, so we decided to make a little detour along Highway 21B and look for accommodation along it at a point at a more even division of the distance between the two places. Well, it did not turn out that way! No accommodation was found, or at least recognised by us as such. There were no hotels but there were guest houses, but they did not carry the name that the Lonely Planet guide said they would. They were called Nha Nghi, as my son later told me, and not Nha Khach as the Lonely Planet claims. Is there a regional difference? So as we went, we kept asking for places to stay, yes there was one just five km up the road. And as we had cycled these, yes just another eight, and so on and on were we suckered up the road until we were within 12 km of Hanoi. So we just kept going, met my son at Hadong, to where he had come out to guide us into Hanoi, and 117 km later, we arrived tired, hot, exhausted and hungry at his house. The last need was answered with plenty of pizza and beer.
 

This day again we were hounded by the inexplicable change of place names. One example: All throughout the day the kilometre markers showed so many km to Bala, then others appeared to Hadong, and this new destination appeared to be just five km behind Bala. Hadong was shown on our map, Bala was not. And then again Bala kept appearing on a regular basis. Then when we arrived at the distance Bala was indicated the sign announcing entrance to the town said “Hadong”! So what happened to Bala? Three km further there was a sign announcing the entrance to “Bala”! So which was which?
 

Talking about hounding. We are getting into dog-eating country. At several places we saw cages with dogs in them, one vehicle with a cage full of dogs, obviously being taken to market. Also one motorcyclist passed with a freshly roasted whole dog, ready for the table, stretched across his back carrier. Good appetite!
 

Another comment about housing. Everywhere you see these narrow “skyscrapers”. Buildings, residences, 4-5 storeys high and only 3-5 m wide, the width of just one room, no windows on each side, only in front (although besides the door there hardly is any room left for windows). This being a “socialist” state, the land supposedly belongs to the “people”. Do they not have enough land to build houses in the normal manner, one, two storeys high, of a normal width to length ratio, and with a normal number of windows? One might be able to understand this in a city where land is scarce (and expenive), but way out in the countryside? With ricefields all around, and the bare walls without windows facing the fields? I cannot remember any country in my travels which is so obsessed with building unattractive residences.