D36: Định Hóa to Bắc Kạn

March 11, 2018

Happy Birthday to Me!

As was probably previously noted in this journal, I don't have a terribly good relationship with clocks or calendars. Working freelancish (or at least as a small business owner) in a field where clients can be located in most nearly any time zone means that I haven't had to pay attention to minor concerns like morning or business hours for the past decade and some. This then spills out on to my not noticing that it's a weekday or the weekend. And since I live in the tropics, winter is an accidental destination rather than a specific time of year.

It's already been a month since the first time this year that my best beloved wished me a happy birthday (we also celebrate 3 separate anniversaries of when we met) so I was a little bit surprised to get a VOIP video call from him and my Dad this morning in honor of the fact that it's actually my actual birthday. I knew my birthday had to be coming soon especially when people kept giving me flowers for buying stuff from them or considering to buy stuff from them or merely walking near their shop on International Women's Day, but yeah, when I say I don't operate in a world where days and dates are important (unless they are client deadlines) I really mean it.

The call cut out after about 15 minutes possibly because I'd used up my 10gb of data or possibly because I've now been in Vietnam for exactly one month and I got my Vietnamese SIM on my first day here. In any case, I would need to recharge my phone to keep using it.

I expect that I'll be leaving Vietnam within the week so I didn't want to buy another 10gb for 200,000 dong. I thought I'd made myself clear but considering that the Viettel office lady couldn't wrap her head around the concept that her phone has Google Translate and my phone also has Google Translate but only her phone can type in Vietnamese, it's somewhat questionable what was understood. She sold me 3gb for 90,000 dong and unrefundably deposited the other 110,000 dong on the SIM card's account. I guess I'll be gifting a SIM card to some random person at the border.

Considering that I gave her a 500,000 dong note, I suppose it could have been worse.

Probably because the water jugs come with a built in spigot but this is the first time in Vietnam I've seen a water jug on a dispenser

At this very large tree near this market on March 28, 1945 something important happened.

For first breakfast I got a banh mi sandwich across the street from the Viettel office. I gave him one of my avocados which he scrambled with egg and added to the already sandwiched sliced meat and stuff. It was yummy but not quite enough food so I had second breakfast about 15 minutes later while in the process of finding the turn-off that would take me around the edges of the giant karst looming over the side of the town. Tofu, fried spring rolls, and some random green veg were definitely enough to fuel me until a nice leisurely mid-afternoon lunch (that never came).

My plan was to take the road which Google calls the Tân Thịnh along the the edges of mountains (leaving the narrow valleys for farmland) before meeting up with the QL3. There was another road named but not numbered on the map just north of that which went to Bắc Kạn. Depending on it's condition, I would be able to decide when I got there if I wanted to stay on the main road or take the side road. It was going to be a slow lazy day with somewhere between 55 and 60 kilometers cycled. I've started getting a scratchy throat and I don't want to get sick.

This will change the character of the road somewhat

A village in the process of being oxbowed off from the new straight-through road instead of the old wind-along-the-edges-of-land-not-suitable-for-crops road

First came the part where I failed to notice the existence of a fork in the road. There was construction ongoing and everything was turning left to avoid crossing a bridge that wasn't there. I expected the road was going to turn right again. It seemed like it was planning on doing that. It seemed like I was going to spend all morning on a road which will be all nice flat wide asphalt this time next year. When I got to the point where I could see the other road diverging in the distance, I pulled out my phone and looked at the maps and golly gosh gee whizz I was on a different road. Luckily, it was the road I planned to be on.

You can tell it's Vietnam because, even here, there's rubbish everywhere

Then came the part where I actually missed a turn. This is especially bad since I'd noticed the turn, had in fact taken pictures of a very nice bridge at the turn, but had not made my turn and was completely unaware of it for 3 or 4 kilometers after the fact. I don't like making u-turns merely because of bad decision making on my part so, after careful consideration of the maps and confirmation that even though it was a small road that the road did in fact connect, I kept going.

I probably should have turned around.

A bridge providing a last ditch chance to take the turn I just missed

I went a much shorter distance by taking the route I took but I also went a much lumpier distance with more ups and downs and mountain ranges and logging roads intended for tractors and giant sucking mud puddles of doom caused by slowly leaking rice paddies and all that other stuff I really wasn't prepared for in the slightest on a day when I was trying to be slow and lazy.

At least I got the slow part right.

I had intended to be out on the QL3 (the big yellow orange line)

I'll take "Things That Should Not Be On Google Maps" for 400 Alex

Notice the lack of electric lines running to this clearly occupied house

I found rocks to add to the water puddle so my feet wouldn't get wet

My choices appear to be "bad" and "worse"

Squaddling my way through the rice paddy, my feet still got wet.

It was very nicely paved for most of the distance. I got all the way to this tiny reservoir practically on the border of Thai Nguyen and Bắc Kạn province when the road went dirt. Judging by the satellite view, I was probably about 500 meters away from the change in governments officially overseeing things like roads when it turned dirt on me. Then it went sharply downhill. Then it went sharply uphill. We're talking trails that even without my nominal amount of luggage would have absolutely required legs of steel in combination with the 11x34 super granny I was admiring on the one mountain bike I saw at the Hanoi Bicycle Collective.

If ever there was a day to be grateful for what I'd earlier been thinking of as poor weather, this was it.

Figuring out which dirt trail I was supposed to be on wasn't always the easiest either. Do I take this path which looks so steep that I'm pretty sure I will have trouble walking up it? Or do I take this other path which seems to go downhill into a stream? The stream was the one that Google had marked so I took that and found me some stepping stones and a rice paddy. I was happy about the rice paddy at first, and happier when I even saw a motorcycle! I was less happy when I found that I needed to either backtrack and wade through the stream or wade through the edge of the rice paddy.

Grass roofed buildings just off the road

Modern(ish) roof and plastered straw walls

Concrete only. Some with brightly colored paint.

Wood planks, woven straw, corrugated metal roof... No electric lines

I was so happy to see pavement that I felt the smile stretching my face. The pavement was a horrible dirty lie however and it only lasted some 200 or 300 meters before ending again. There were a few other brief sections of pavement and I suspect that they were all put down in the worst places.

Now, it looked like a dirt farm road. It had the width of a dirt farm road. In theory, one could totally drive a dirt farm road type truck down this road. It was actually a singletrack. You could tell because the many motorcycles that had been down this way had worn a preferred path around the lumps, bumps, rocks, and random holes. I felt so bad ass when people saw me on my bicycle rather than pushing it.

Seeing that someone else had ridden a bike back here made me very very very very happy

It looks like a relatively wide dirt road but the ruts are so deep that it's really a singletrack

Pavement again just before Thanh Mai Commune and then pavement the whole rest of the way to Bắc Kạn Town. Only one big mountain and even without the last big gear on my rear cluster wanting to shift at all (or stay shifted there when I got it to go) I managed to pedal up the whole thing. Got into town, circled a bit before finding an acceptable looking dinner in the form of more banh mi followed by a bunch of randomly ordered sweets that mostly did not resemble what Google Translate thought the menu items should be.

Was just about to head over to the hotel I'd already picked out when two Vietnamese cyclotourists showed up heading over to the hotel I'd already picked out. I don't know if they were why it was so cheap or if it's usually that price but 100,000 dong and a soft bed are perfection in my book.

The hills actually got steeper once I hit pavement

Today's ride: 53 km (33 miles)
Total: 1,805 km (1,121 miles)

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