Thirty-Four Tetras: Day 9: Ba Be to Cao Bang

We were treated to pancakes for breakfast again today which we ate with bananas that our guide had hoarded away in the van. The guide and driver had a more traditional meal of fried rice with the host family. I think we got the better deal :-)

The riding started through jungle-covered mountains, which was different scenery to what we had encountered so far. I held a slim hope of seeing some interesting wildlife (monkeys), but no luck. Our guide told us that most of the wild animals have been killed over the years, although apparently there were still elephants and tigers in the central part of the country. Considering how deadly the buffalo mines were, I'd hate to ride through one from an elephant...

We gradually left the mountains behind and emerged into open farmland. Lots of people were out planting rice seedlings. The seedlings were first grown densely in little "nursery" patches, then planted out by hand into neat rows in the water-filled paddies. All the workers were women, and I don't know how they could manage to work bent over like that for hours on end. It was surprising that there weren't more hunch-backed old women around (although we certainly saw a few).

My back hurts just looking at them

Harvesting a "rice nursery" (actually a picture from a different day, but you get the idea)

We stopped for lunch in a small town. Lunch stops were often the only part of the day where I could easily go to the bathroom - stopping by the side of the road was usually challenging because there always seemed to be people working within sight. The lunch stop facilities, however, weren't always very "appealing". Once I was directed to just squat in the open garden at the back of a house. Today I remember the particular challenge of trying to use a squat toilet while wearing tight bike shorts and slippery bike shoes and with protests from aching quads. The boys definitely had an advantage.

Our guide had started the day warning us of the 7km climb we would face after lunch. Even though every climb now felt measly compared the the 20km slog from a few days ago, this one still hurt. Partway up, we encountered the scariest dogs of the trip. Pretty much every household we passed would have a dog, and most were pretty disinterested in us. Some seemed to be able to tell Westerner from local and would have a bit of a bark, but it was rare for us to be the targets of any real aggression. These dogs (about four of them), though, definitely objected to us riding past their house and pursued us with frenzied snarls and barking. Tired legs miraculously found another gear and, luckily, as they reached the imaginary boundary of their turf, they fell away.

It may not be steep, but it definitely goes up (and up, and up...)

We also had to contend with a few big trucks. Most of them were actually slower than us on the climbs as they would literally crawl along. The trick was not to get stuck behind one because passing on the downhill was always fun, but on the uphill? Not so much. It was also not uncommon to have big trucks come up behind us and start madly (and very loudly) honking. To begin with, we thought they were trying to tell us to get out of the way (on narrow roads where there often wasn't any further towards the edge that we could ride) - we soon realized, though, that most of the time they just wanted to say hello and the honking was to incite us to wave. Sigh.

The day ended with a ripper descent. We were faster than every other vehicle on the downhills and it was always fun to zip past a scooter and see the rider's astonished faces as they realized what they'd just been overtaken by. When the roads were a bit more level, we would sometimes keep pace with them and even had a few pseudo-conversations in broken English.

We took to the refuge of the van to negotiate the increasing traffic as we approached the city we were staying in that night. The hotel was relatively luxurious (by the standards of the last few days) - the foyer was tiled in marble and adorned with stuffed animals (the taxidermy kind v's the teenage-girl's-bedroom kind). We were also treated to a "soft" bed. Mattresses in Vietnam were made of either dense foam or compacted cotton and were universally hard (entering a hotel room and flopping gratefully onto the bed would result in a hard thud and possible bruising). We were getting used to it, but it was nice to sleep on something that had a little give for a change.

We filled in the time before dinner by going for a wander through the local market. This one was indoors, and despite being crowded and with narrow walkways, we found ourselves frequently dodging scooters. In fact a lot of business in Vietnam seemed heavily dependent on the ability to serve people on scooters (literally - as in they would ride up and make their purchase from the roadside without getting off). We should have tried it on our mountain bikes...